I travel to an exclusive summer conference in the West. It is as if the mountains themselves have been strategically parted to contain just the right amount of privilege. Here we will move from one session to another, listening to some of the most prolific minds of our time. An acclaimed historian, a renowned strategist, and a profound poet are among them. I am thrilled to be here. A distinguished author, once exiled, is this year's honoree. I wonder how he will feel, in this highly visible altitude. I walk with one attendee who declines to attend his presentation stating that he doesn't want to contribute to the possibility of another "incident." When I remark that the large audience could be viewed as a universal embrace, he responds with the author's monetary reward as his probable motivation.
"Courage" I say to the speed poet who has been hired to ask for one word and then create a poem on the spot - an added attraction to an already robust experience. The man behind the typewriter quickly types the poem and presents it to me, slipping it into a plastic sleeve. I am grateful for his efforts and eye the long lines behind me, a collective yearning for a shot of inspiration, an encapsulation of cohesion. I stop to converse with a woman I met on the shuttle bus to the hotel and then realizing I am running behind, start taking Fosse strides across the uneven lawn to the next session under a large white tent.
I am here - in a liberal bulls-eye with a huge red conservative ring drawn tightly around it. The majority of attendees are women over 70. They wear perfectly pressed sundresses and have deeply lined skin from the dry climate and what I suspect is the result of continuing on in the face of profound personal loss. They are not erasing their lines like their California neighbors. They are living within them, the valleys in between, marking their unwitting descent and the peak of their folds, like climbing a summit. If parsed out, there are more liberally minded attendees, some with a religious bend. I can see them squirm in their seats when the exiled speaker defines religion as an elemental contrived response to life's important questions like where we came from and how we should live.
There are authors addressing immigration with current case studies that highlight self-deportation as a better alternative than living in America. Throughout the conference each speaker carefully touches on the fascism that is upon us as if they are handling a live hand grenade - just enough to be prescient but not too much to spoil the mood.
The grounds are set up like a New England Summer Camp complete with bug juice containers filled with cucumber infused water, and burgers and hot dogs straight off the grill. I hear some complaints about the food being insensitive to their dietary proclivities but many are quite satisfied. New friends are easily made because for the most part we all speak the same language of manners and means - my means are considerably less but I pass with enough culture and experience, though I am clearly not one of them. The speakers are integrated with the attendees throughout the weekend at dinners and in breakout sessions. Access is a beautiful thing in this rarified air. Some writers look somewhat uncomfortable, the pressure of a performing monkey for the price of admission. But it is a symbiotic relationship between patrons and the talent. Art is never enough. It must be marketed into reality. "He was too political" one says. "That guy's so pompous" another extols, exercising their right to criticize having done far less to deserve it.
My patron and I take an electric cart ride over to the book tent. I stand mortified as she has just informed me that there is a brown stripe stain on the back of my blouse. She inspects it further and after a beat says "Don't worry dear, no one will notice" after she has called it to my attention. As she is stating this, I realize my blouse was damp and stuck to the back of the amphitheater chair in the last session. The thin strap of my bag must have made this indelible mark, now branding me the outsider that I am and will forever be. What must she think I wonder. Perhaps my sweat confirms that I am indeed not a descendant of the Mayflower, but that I hail from a people with pores.
The event ends with the closing from a humorist and veteran newspaper man as he satirically jokes about the holes in the Everglades tents where the immigrants stay captured in cages, trying to rattle the somewhat subdued audience. Will we look back at this time as the time before the time - after Kennedy was shot and the Ed Sullivan show was canceled, and moonshot glasses from the local gas station made us collectively aware of progress and Americanism - before the illness of isms signaled the demise instead of the promise?
It is the last day of the conference and all of the books that I purchased will not fit into my suitcase. I size up my old pair of Italian sandals in the hotel closet and glance over at my books. I love those shoes but they have been refurbished several times during their lifetime and unlike the books, they just won't take me where I need to go. Even if I could squeeze them in, they will soon be soleless again, and I just don't believe they can withstand one more repair. Everything has an expiration date. I stuff the books into my luggage, their corner edges poking at the soft outer case. I make my way to the elevator, through the lobby and outside, casting one more gaze upwards towards the magnificent mountain range, and contemplate this place that was once a new frontier.
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