Washington, DC: A Memoir, Part 2- Ronald Reagan, my grandma, and memories of a lifetime
Ronald Reagan died while I lived in DC, just a few months before my paternal grandmother died, a week before her 100th birthday. She was an immigrant at age 6 — a long forgotten journey across the ocean on a boat from Sicily with an older cousin to re-meet her parents, who left her with her grandma at age 2. I’m not sure if she ever saw her grandma again, I don’t think so. She came through Ellis Island and refused to visit it with us in later years. I can only assume because the memories were too painful, though I didn’t understand at the time. When she died it felt like the end of an era for my dad’s family because she was the oldest of her siblings and brought with her a sensibility of the old country. Reagan’s time in office is now called an era, but I beg to differ that eight years make an era — his life maybe, but not his oval office stay.
The riderless horse, with its backward boots in the stirrups, and the vehicle that brought Reagan’s casket to the Capitol building paraded very near my work, so I went down to see it — a once in a lifetime event. People were respectful and watchful. One of my coworkers refused to go. A gay man who is old enough to remember the Aids Crisis, his usually very warm and caring demeanor turned stony as he spoke about Reagan’s inability to acknowledge an entire population of our nation who was under attack from a disease that cruelly left so many people in despair. No protection for those people who were under suspicion for who they were and who they loved.
1980s Memories
Reagan’s time in office is romanticized now in some circles, but like every administration, there were highs and lows. I clearly remember Mikhail Gorbachev and the Berlin Wall coming down, trickle down economics (ugh), Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, the Oliver North scandal (what was it about, again?), and the space shuttle Challenger exploding in the sky. All of these things happened during Reagan’s stay in office and they began to show the cultural upheaval of that time as well. Of course this time is different because there are different players, different rules (or maybe no rules), and a different playing field, or cultural environment. The only constant is change, as the saying goes, so let’s move our conscious minds away from the fear of the moment because that is something we have control over, not what’s happening in another state or another state of mind.
Reagan suffered from Alzheimer’s disease in his later years — a suffering in the brain that releases people from the precious memories of a lifetime. No longer allowed to remember the good or the bad times, Alzheimer’s keeps people from enjoying their past in the present moment. My maternal great-grandfather also had it and though I was young, I have clear memories of visiting him in the nursing home and my grandma in tears because he didn’t know who she was. It was the past that was gone, even though he saw her standing right before him. So Reagan’s past was also gone — did he not want to remember it? Was it too difficult? Did something switch on or off in his mind or limbic system that told him life is too difficult and now is the time to let it go, as if living in the moment is the only thing left? Our point of power is in the present moment, but the memories of a lifetime should not be ignored during seasons of change and transformation because they align us with who we are.
Soup to Nuts: Beginnings and Endings
I miss the mixed soup of characters that happen in large cultural centers like DC. The many people that come from different backgrounds, stories and beliefs make me feel alive. I love hearing their accents, what they have to say, how they say it, or how we connect through a simple touch like a pat on the back or handshake. While our entire country is a mixed soup, it’s in the large city centers where people come together to form a tight-knit collective.
The people that work for the Smithsonian are vast — in numbers and in cultural backgrounds. As a young designer, I loved it. (And I’m sure as a retired designer, I would love it more.) It was a privilege for me to walk through the museums and institution that had such an impact on me as a child. The museum stores I was in charge of were at the Air and Space Museum, the Castle, and the Hirshorn. I was also part of a special project that took the Smithsonian brand to Newark International Airport, putting me in charge of the redesign of the Smithsonian store at Reagan National Airport, too. It was during that project that I was made to leave DC through the institution of marriage, a personal upheaval for me. I thought I had to support my then husband in his desire to return to his hometown to get a masters degree, which he never completed; it felt like a bait and switch to get me to move.
I felt trapped and still do in some ways, but I choose to look at it from a different perspective now. I choose to see the grounded reality that I am not meant to live in DC or my hometown any more; I am meant to be here in Upstate New York near the lakes, enacting my homegrown ability to adapt to the environment that I am in. I love the lakes and always have, but until recently, never took the opportunity to see them for what they really are — centers of healing. It was my healer, Ann, who found my story of me being a healer, though I didn’t know it at the time. She told me, I wrote it down, but I didn’t fully understand until this very moment as I write in a stream of consciousness style. Healing is a two-way ticket; a belief that we are all one, that we belong to each other across space and time, and that an unending love connects all of us.
As the collective stream of consciousness moves on, we will all learn to understand who we are as individuals, and as individuals we are part of a collective here on Earth — and nowhere else — that belongs to each other in love.