I Did Not Get Lost Today

Let us start after Lucky I can Make It From A to B. I made the bus. This was the view from the railroad tracks:

I went to Payless, blew my budget on food, caught the Mall bus, and this was the view on my return:

I ate. I napped. I read. I did nothing as I planned.

I got into reading Vietnamese immigrant writing tonight. Last week I ran down my genealogy through Ancestry.com. All the branches came over before there was  any immigration law or Ellis Island. Some before the Revolution. The last one over was the Hasler line. The founder came over from Switzerland probably not knowing English but being able to speak French and German. I doubt any of my kin can do either. I have a sister, a niece, and a nephew who are Trumpers. Immigrants bother them. They fascinate me. Reading My Sometimes Vietnamese, Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood and Viet Thanh Nguyen on Writing from the Vietnamese Diaspora, and BLUNT-FORCE ETHNIC CREDIBILITY, and the difficulties of identity, personal and cultural, attending immigration and assimilation come to the forefront for me. Never is there any mention of going back. There is bridging, there is mixing, maybe resentment of being dragged back to the old country, but they are Americans. I wonder if this was how the first generations of Haslers felt. I can understand those white folks who think being white identifies one as American for what else can they imagine as anything else as their culture, being cut off the long folk continuities of Europe. Immigrants seem to imagine a bigger, broader, brighter, more complicated America than those who claim the country as their own. I like this kind of thinking. It gives me enough hope to drive away my regrets at still being alive.

I wrote that paragraph while listening to Joe Belock's Fourth of July show.

I finished reading Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt Was the First Satire of Suburban America. Lewis was the first American novelist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I read him in college  - I read Babbitt for a class - and read two of his novels in prison. I cannot put my finger on his style - it is not a graceful style like Hemingway - but it does pull one into the worlds he creates. In the end, he may have been more influential than any other American writer. The article suggests Lewis may still be relevant:

Yet, one hundred years later, Babbitt’s individuality seems less a potential path toward greater awareness than a gate shuttered to protect himself from seeing too clearly the rot of his kind. His moral yearnings look like the definition one Booster Club chum gives of liberal: “wishy-washy.” This final scene can be read, from our current vantage point, with its own kind of cynicism. Because what could be more pathetic, more familiarly asinine, more vexingly American, than Babbitt counting on the next generation to exhibit the courage he did not?

Someone on the other side of the motel set off fireworks. I was outside reading on the phone, so I took some pictures:

 And now it is Sunday morning.

sch