DEAR FRIENDS WHO READ

I got this lovely and powerful letter yesterday from my fellow-traveler, Martha Bergland, a writer from Milwaukee we've known for a long time. Her words moved me deeply. Martha has given me permission to share it here, with you.

DEAR FRIENDS WHO READ
by Martha Bergland

Dear Friends,

As I drink my coffee this sunny fall morning, I watch the chickadees and the cardinals jockey for space at the bird feeder. They are wary because of the recent activities of a Cooper's hawk, but still they go about their precarious lives. Today, after I read the newspaper, I will water my house plants and do the week's wash, pick up my prescriptions at Walgreen's, wrap a birthday present for my niece, cook supper for my husband and I. He is at the hardware store buying hooks to hang up the two new pans he bought yesterday. This is a good life, but it is not the only life I can see. I imagine other real lives - as does anyone who reads novels, anyone who reads.

I know that there is a woman in this country for whom the sun this morning is no consolation. The sun has come up on a day when she knows that her husband will never come home from Iraq. Everywhere she looks in her house is the unfinished, a cruel mockery of domestic life. The storm windows are still in the basement. He will never put them up again. They will not have ever again that day they had last year when, on a brisk fall Saturday, in their jeans and sweatshirts, they washed the windows together and then put up the storm windows, their hands and noses cold, both of them pressed against the house by the scratchy junipers they agreed to prune in the spring. And then they went back in the house and blew their noses and made a pot of coffee and there was a little smile between them, a quiet moment of domestic happiness that will never come again. The sun will come up again and again and again on days that he will not be in. She will never see him again, feel the comfort of his warm body in the night. Her life in her house is destroyed.

You can imagine this because you read. You feel what other people feel. George Bush can't imagine this. George Bush doesn't read - even the briefings prepared for him.

I am folding clothes but I see in my mind's eye a woman in Iraq in the glare of the sun picking through the rubble of her house. She doesn't know where to put her feet; it's hard to keep her balance because this is a place no woman ever thinks she will have to walk-in the rubble of her life. She is dizzy with disbelief. She pulls a piece of blue cotton from under a smashed chair and she shakes the dust from it and folds it carefully. It is the cover of her table and on it are stains of the meal she had just called her children to. She thinks, "I will wash this so the stains don't set." But then she says to herself - she doesn't realize she says it out loud-"And where will you wash it? And on what table will you shake this both next time?" She is lucky. Her children and her husband were late for dinner and they survived. But her neighbor is not so lucky. The woman hears the wailing begin where the house next door used to be. So they found the little girl, the sweet little dark-eyed girl, who liked to run, who liked to eat oranges. The woman picks her way out of the rubble to go to her neighbor.

You can imagine the pain of grief. You read to know what the wide world is like. You are curious. George Bush does not want to hear anyone's cries of grief. He has not been to a single funeral for an American lost in Iraq. He does not imagine a woman's grief. George Bush does not read.

I wrap a birthday package for my niece. She loves to bake, so I have bought her a few things she can have fun with in the coming holiday season-cookie cutters, pretty gift boxes, other little things a baker would like. I am lucky. I have a pension from the teaching job I retired from and so does my husband. I can afford to give little gifts to the ones I love. I can imagine what might please her, and I can afford to buy it, wrap it, and mail it. But I know there is a woman right here in this city - a lot of women - who is driving a school bus twice a day, working the lunch shift at a diner, and on the weekends she is the hostess in a steak restaurant. She also is taking a class at the community college. She loves her literature class because she loves to read. She is in school to make a better life for herself and her two children. She reads to them. On her way home from work she picks up her sleeping children at her mother's house. She tucks them into bed and sits beside them and, as they do every night, all three of them fall asleep over the latest Harry Potter story. She doesn't have the money for gifts for her children because the little one has asthma and the medication is expensive. She can't even think of gifts for her nieces. And both of her sweet sweaty little children need haircuts.

You can imagine this woman's fatigue. You can imagine the anger she feels. You can imagine that sometimes her anger is misdirected at her girls, at her mother. But you know she should be angry at a man who gives tax breaks to the corporations who send the good jobs overseas. She should be angry at the man who doesn't want to raise the minimum wage. She has to have three jobs and they aren't enough. You know what kinds of jobs are out there for women who don't have college degrees. You know what it would be like to not have health insurance for the little ones who are in your care. You know what it would be like to hate the holidays because you can't afford them.

You can read and imagine the lives around you. Not just the lives of people like you, but the lives of women in the whole glorious terrible world. You know who to vote for. Vote - and you must vote - for John Kerry, a thoughtful man who reads, who seeks out facts, who imagines, who listens, who can speak in several languages, who does not shut himself off from the world and the people in need around him. The quiet domestic lives of millions of people depend on the United States not having a shallow, self-blinded, arrogant leader.

You read. You are not swayed by a slogan and a swagger.

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Martha Bergland is the author of two novels from Graywolf Press, A Farm Under a Lake and Idle Curiosity.

Comments

[dave]

Thanks for sharing this, Tom - and thanks to Ms. Bergland for taking the time to write it. I just published a link, along with a brief quote. This deserves much more exposure. One can read the political blogs for months and not come across anything this powerful.

[Tom Montag]

Dave--I agree, this should have much wider exposure. Thanks for your help in that regard. I think Martha touches on issues that get lost in the current rah-rah. It is good for us to reflect on these, though they are unlikely to become part of the national discourse.