Sunset At Springhouse

The cliché is that the new year is a time of renewal, but an ending is on my mind this week. A few months ago I concluded a 12-year run visiting residents of Springhouse of Westwood, an assisted living facility about a five-minute drive from my house.

One of the questions on last month’s Abbott-Ries holiday quiz noted the end of this particular era, and I chronicled in a previous blog post how I came to start spending an hour or two at Springhouse most Mondays nights for more than a decade. Briefly, I’d been looking for a volunteering opportunity. I proposed watching Jeopardy! with whoever was in the TV area at 7:30 and jawing with those “night owls” until 9 pm or so. I ended up forming some nice friendships. I outlasted a few waves of very old women (and a couple of guys). Then, finally, I stopped when the last wave ebbed to permanent high tide.

It was time for me to go, anyway. When I started visiting Springhouse in 2000, assisted living was, as the term suggests, a place for relatively healthy but frail seniors to live somewhat independently, albeit it with the assistance of trained onsite care staff. By the time I left, however, the living was muddled and circumscribed, the assistance intensive. Many if not most residents now are somewhere in the throes of dementia or Alzheimer’s and require the watchful eyes and helpful hands of private aides employed by their families. With the last of my friends now gone, were I to show up at 7:30 on a future Monday night, there might be at most two or three residents snoozing in their wheelchairs in front of the TV. Were they even to wake and exchange greetings with me, back-and-forth conversation would not follow, and they would not remember me the next week.

But, enough background. What I want to do today is devote a paragraph or so to each of my most memorable lost Springhouse friends. I wish you could’ve met them, because they all were enriching in some way. I don’t know what any of them were like in their prime of life. By the time I knew them, their health, memories, and, in most cases, spirits all were on a downward slope. Still, we enjoyed each other’s company, shared some laughs, staved off mortality with banter. That may not be much in the wide scheme of things. But it’s not nothing.

Marianthe Mellonas, who wore her heritage like a queen’s raiment, called herself the Greek Ambassador. She and her late husband had owned a restaurant near Georgetown. (Guess which cuisine.) She was eulogized at St Sophia, the sprawling Greek Orthodox church on Embassy Row, for her tireless fundraising decades earlier that literally had helped get that structure off the ground. She was big-hearted, but she loathed at least two people in the world: then-president George W Bush, who she dismissed as a “big dummy,” and Springhouse’s other alpha female of her era, the sometimes-imperious Augusta Hixon.

Augusta, for her part, generally referred to Mrs Mellonas—it would have bucked diplomatic protocol to have addressed the Greek Ambassador by her first name –as “that woman.” As in, “I don’t understand what that woman’s problem is! I’m always sociable with her!” Well, she wasn’t really. But it’s also true that civility toward Augusta did seem Greek to Mrs Mellonas. Those two were like oil and vinegar. Augusta was a piece of work. She was interesting, opinionated, meticulous about her appearance, loved her family, and seemed determined never to fall into disrepair. Indeed, when her end ultimately came, well into her 90s, it was fast. There was no slide. Just a quick plummet.

Phyllis Lynn and her late husband had raised their three boys in an attractive but not showy house off Massachusetts Avenue, near the District line, and had educated them all at the exclusive St Albans School on the National Cathedral grounds. There was nothing patrician about the woman I knew, though. She told me her friends always had called her “Philly.” Somehow I always could make her laugh, and her laughter was full-throated and joyous. After her memorial service at the St Albans Chapel, one of her middle-aged “boys” told me she’d said more than once, “If I had another son, I’d want him to be just like Eric.” He frankly sounded more threatened than complimentary when he told me, as if he feared I’d be named sole beneficiary in her will. But the tribute warms me to this day, even if though I feel I did little to earn it. Philly didn’t know the half of me. But I’m glad the part she did know pleased her so much.

Jeanne Davis had served as Rachel Carson’s executive assistant when the latter was researching and writing Silent Spring, the 1962 book that is credited by many with having kick-started the modern environmental movement. Jeanne loved poetry and literature and flowers and the vacation home on the St Lawrence River where her family gathered annually. She even invited me there once, but as it turned out she’d made her own last visit by then. Her beloved son Burnie later moved her to a nice facility in Charlottesville after he got a job in administration at the University of Virginia. I visited her there a couple of times. On both occasions she greeted me warmly and treated me as a friend, even though by then she had no recollection I’d actually been one.

Ruth Monk was that rare Springhouser who would join me in talking back to the TV during Jeopardy! “Ruthie is smart!” Mrs Mellonas often exclaimed. And she was. But she scoffed at that notion, characterizing herself as a simple housewife from “Missoura.” Her daughter had been a prominent US Attorney during the Clinton administration whose name often was the news. But when I met her for the first time in a funeral home chapel in northern Virginia, she seemed exactly her unassuming mother’s child. Ruth was 91 when she died, having lived at Springhouse an astounding 13 years and having never, seemingly, had a bad day or complaint in the world.

Ralph Patton was in a wheelchair and greatly debilitated by Parkinson’s disease by the time I met him. Still, he always enjoyed showing me scrapbooks of articles and clipping related to his evasion of German forces during World War II with the help of the French resistance after his Air Force plane was shot down. Ralph gave me a video titled Evade, in which he and other men who had survived similar perils discuss their wartime experiences against a backdrop of historical footage. In the video, Ralph appears as a coal company executive of perhaps 60. I’d asked him once about a rival coal company whose shoddy safety record had provoked a recent mine tragedy. “They always were the worst,” he said, in the same tone I imagined he'd once spit out the word “Nazis.”

I no longer remember Richard’s last name, and I wouldn’t share it here anyway, for a reason that’s about to become obvious. Richard, in a word, was a drunk. A charming drunk—a raconteur and ladies man—but a drunk nonetheless. I heard stories of run-ins with staff and confiscated flasks, but somehow his breath remained the same throughout our acquaintance. Inebriation seemed to agree with him, until his liver, inevitably, gave out. Richard always was in a good mood. I met his daughter during his final hospital stay, at Sibley in DC. She spoke of him in a shrugging, “What’re ya gonna do?” way as he lay there sleeping. She said he’d been a good dad on balance. Even if his balance often was unsteady.

I knew two Goldes at Springhouse. Both were Jewish, as the name suggests, but Golde Mullen had been married to an Irish-American who’d played in the National Basketball Association way back when it was as white as it is black today. She missed San Francisco, her longtime home where she’d feasted on a steady diet of adult education at a school to which I later would send a memorial donation. She was determined to keep her mind active, but she bemoaned all the New Yorker articles she’d just read and already couldn’t recount. Golde Kaufman, meanwhile, loved recalling her married life in rural Pennsylvania. She was warmed by visits from her husband, Morris, who lived independently nearby and still drove. I ran into him a few times at Golde’s last residence, a nursing home where I also got to know one of her neighbors—a very chatty legless woman.

My triumvirate of friends in the final Springhouse years were Sylvia Friedman, Mildred Levin and Helen Shaffer. Sylvia was quite feeble and could barely see or hear, but her hearty appetite impressed even the dyspeptic Mildred, who wasn’t impressed by much. Strangely, the near-blind Sylvia always knew when I was picking the scab on my leg, and told me to knock it off. Besides food, she loved hearing about our pets. Her son Frank used to call her from Philadelphia every evening, and her daughter Esther, who lived locally, doted on her. Like Phyllis Lynn, Sylvia really liked to laugh, and the cornier my jokes, the better. Lynn and I very much enjoyed talking with Esther at Springhouse holiday gatherings. I never met Frank, but he sounded like a very kind man when I occasionally picked up his mother’s ringing telephone.

Mildred and Helen were best buddies, perhaps because they complemented each other in their utter dissimilarity. Helen was as sunny as Mildred was cloudy. Helen’s eyes lit up when she ate chocolate, reminisced about learning to dance at Arthur Murray with her late husband, or so much as thought about corn on the cob. As a young, not-yet-married woman, she’d played country music on local radio in her family’s band. Seventy years later, she still spoke with pride and awe about the fact that she’d once signed autographs for bona fide fans.

While Helen might at some point have sung the tune “Keep on the Sunny Side,” Mildred’s outlook was antithetical to that sentiment. In Mildred’s world, most everything about today stunk. Yesterday always had looked better. Except, of course, that if you’d have caught her yesterday, that would’ve been the offending day (week, year, decade). She’d never married and seemed to have no friends besides Helen and Helen’s daughter Carolyn. The farthest Mildred ever had traveled was to California, but she hadn’t liked it much. Ditto Florida. She’d had an office job in Philadelphia that was OK, but everything since retirement had been pretty awful. Springhouse was the worst. Her doctors were useless. I couldn’t even start to talk about our cats without Mildred blurting, “I don’t like cats.” Her sister had lived up the hall at Springhouse, but predeceased her. Mildred couldn’t for the life of her understand why her niece wasn’t getting Springhouse shut down for a litany of alleged infractions.

In the early days of our friendship, I made the mistake of trying to cheer up Mildred, which was useless, and sometimes defending her targets, which was pointless. But once I realized that my optimal role was simply to commiserate—to tsk, sigh and resignedly shake my head at all the right times—my value to Mildred soared. She never exactly seemed glad to see me when I first arrived in the evening, but by the time we parted each Monday night she unfailingly thanked me for coming, wished me a good week, and asked to give Lynn her regards. Sometimes the greatest kindness you can pay someone, Mildred taught me, is to be his or her ally in bleakness. For some people, it turns out that, misery genuinely does love company.

The last time I saw Mildred was the millionth time she’d complained bitterly, “This place is going downhill.” I nodded grimly, dutifully. Maybe so, but as it happened, Mildred went downhill, and bottomed out, even faster.

I’ve left out a few noteworthy bit players in my Springhouse saga—such as the one-time beauty queen who often danced on roller skates back in the '40s and had a photo to prove it, and the dementia-afflicted widow who directed me to transform a smattering of old newspaper clipping into a detailed biography of her late husband. But the individuals I’ve written about today were the Springhousers I'l remember most. I called them “enriching” at the outset of this post. That might seem an overstatement in some cases, but it’s not. Trust me, it’s not.

 

From Babe to Bushmaster

My thoughts are all over the place as Christmas 2012 nears and the new year beckons—filled with everything from holiday music to legal marijuana to the “fiscal cliff” to gun violence.

This week I’ve been telling everyone I know about a wonderful Christmas song that’s five years old but that was news to me until just a few days ago. It’s titled, “Joseph, Who Understood,” and it’s performed by the (mostly) Canadian indie-rock band the New Pornographers—a group I’ve mentioned in this space before who have nothing to do with pornography except some cheeky British Columbians’ sense of irony.

It isn’t often (perhaps never) that you get the story of the Immaculate Conception from the perspective of Jesus’s stepdad, but that’s what this song delivers. Two recurrent lines are “You’re asking me to believe in too many things” and “Mary, is he mine?” But this is no gag song calculated to make the mystical seem prosaic. Rather, it’s a lovely, sweet melody, showcasing the band’s trademark harmonies, in which a confused young husband achieves, in the span of three minutes, acceptance that “some things are bigger than we know” and concludes, “Mary, He is mine.”

It’s a song you needn’t be religious to find deeply moving. My reaction certainly proves that. To me, it’s kind of the musical version of Linus’s speech in a certain animated holiday classic, when he relates the same birth story in the words of the Bible, then says, “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.” We all need, on some level, to believe in wondrous things that are much bigger than ourselves and all the things that weigh us down. For a few transcendent moments in this season of stress, I urge you to go to YouTube and give “Joseph, Who Understood” a listen.

With that, I’ll segue sharply and jarringly to something I personally never will quite understand, and that’s why America is so completely firearms-crazy that even after the slaughter of 20 children and seven adults in Connecticut, it’s already looking like the best we can hope for from our gun nut-cowed politicians is the possible reinstatement of the assault weapons ban. Which, even if that were to happen, would be to true gun control as a single family’s dedicated recycling efforts are to mending the ozone layer. A shaken President Obama says he wants to get serious about keeping our kids safe, but for whatever reasons—our cowboy culture, our odd distrust of our democratically elected government, our chronic macho-bullshit leanings, you name it—America as a whole remains manifestly unserious about keeping the citizenry safe from gun violence. That “discussion,” insofar as there ever is one, always is about tinkering at the outermost edges of anything approaching meaningful action, and never is about revisiting the Second Amendment and conceding that in all but rare and specific circumstances, private citizens simply don’t need to possess guns. Just as they do not in a number of more-civilized countries around the world, at least on this issue, within whose borders gun violence is rare.

It may be that the images of all those pint-sized coffins in Newtown, and the anguished eulogies for six-year-olds, will succeed in ever-so-slightly loosening the National Rifle Association’s vice grip on the trigger of public policy, but it’s instructive and sobering, if far from surprising, to note that one of today’s headlines in the Washington Post is “After School Shooting, a Run on Bushmaster Rifle.”  Also, I still think the bumper sticker should read “Virginia is for Lovers of Idiotic Reasoning,” given the fact that some state legislators there have argued in the past week that the best antidote to gun violence is to arm everybody, everywhere. That, of course, was their stance after the Virginia Tech massacre, too.

Another headline in this morning’s paper is “Boehner Drops Effort to Avoid the ‘Fiscal Cliff,’” which is all about how Republican members of Congress refuse to raise taxes even on millionaires in an effort to avert the $500 billion package of automatic tax increases and spending cuts that otherwise will take effect on January 1 in order to address the nation’s gaping budget deficit.

Now, when it comes to understanding economic theory and fiscal policy, I frankly am a moron, but I read and listen to enough analysts and commentators to know that the world won’t end if America goes off the “cliff.” (Nor did the world end today, by the way—leaving the ancient Mayans with Tabasco-tinged egg on their faces.) I also know that even if those tax increases and spending cuts—typically described as “draconian”—were to be imposed, so deep is our deficit hole that the impact would be like tossing a few shovels-full of dirt into the Grand Canyon.

Still, because doing nothing about the budget deficit is not a viable or responsible option, and  because in an ideal world the media would pronounce the House Majority Leader’s name “Boner,” since that would be both humiliating and immaturely hilarious, it really would be nice to see a deal on this before the end of the year. It looks right now like Congress will go home for Christmas without having resolved anything, but as if they’ll return next week to see if they can pop the champagne on this by “Auld Lang Syne” time. So, here’s my two cents: Republicans, tax the rich—including those well below the millionaire level. Democrats, make some concessions on entitlements.

Hey, are you guys listening to me? I didn’t think so.

What else did I imply I’d be addressing in my opening paragraph of this post? Oh yeah, legal marijuana. So, I blogged after the November elections about how voters in Washington state and Colorado passed ballot initiatives to permit recreational marijuana use. I opined that this is a bad idea, because the dopey giggling of stoners is annoying and, more importantly, because these new laws open the door to more impaired driving. I conceded, too, that I might be slightly bitter because I never learned how to inhale. Anyway, toward the end of my take on the marijuana votes, I suggested that the Obama administration might step in to stop these initiatives, given that recreational use of marijuana remains a federal crime.

Well, apparently not. It now looks like the feds don’t plan to act, meaning that if you travel to Washington or Colorado in the new year, you can be stoned in Seattle or buzzed in Boulder without the threat of a jack-booted Uncle Sam breaking down your door to harsh your mellow. This not only figures to boost Grateful Dead and Phish sales on iTunes, but it has the editors of Rolling Stone magazine creaming in their hippie-era jeans. They’ve already stockpiled mountains of munchies and have breathlessly reported on the next states likely to follow Washington’s and Colorado’s lead, on the way to creating an eventual United States of Cannabis, ideally led by President Woody Harrelson.

So, how is it that we are a country laid back enough to be legalizing recreational marijuana, yet angry and insecure enough to reject even the slightest gun control laws? That, too, I can’t quite make sense of. Still, as I replay “Joseph, Who Understood” for the umpteenth time this week, I’m trying my best to retain, heading into 2013, at least a little faith in the possibility of wondrous things.

 

Unbirdened

So, a Spiritualist, a serialist and a literalist walk into a bar.

Except, they didn’t. And two of those three descriptions are inexact at best—fashioned in service to the opening line of what promises to be a joke but actually was our Thanksgiving.

The trio in question didn’t walk into a bar, but, rather, into our house. (Although wine was served, I should note.) The Spiritualist is Kathy, who in addition to being our longtime friend, computer fixer and cat-sitter is a member of the Center for Spiritual Enlightenment in Falls Church, Virginia, which is affiliated with the National Spiritualist Association of Churches. The serialist is Joanne, a veterinary technician and Florence Nightingale to animals who, though slightly north of 40, is in pop-cultural terms one of the older teenagers around—a self-described geek about the Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games and Lord of the Rings franchises who proclaims, to her husband’s helpless acceptance, that she would so “do” Joss Whedon, creator of the long-running television series Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, should events ever conspire to facilitate such intimacy. The literalist is Trudy, an accountant by day who’s all about numbers on the job but off the clock is all about friendship and compassion and a matchless brand of charm that is awkwardly and uniquely her own.

Kathy, Joanne and Trudy were our guests Thursday for a turkey-less Thanksgiving dinner (Trudy, Lynn and Joanne being vegans, and Kathy and I vegetarians). It was pretty untraditional in menu, guest list and conversation, but it met the holiday’s highest ideals in terms of gratitude, warmth and community.

The afternoon kicked off with Kathy and I conversing in the sunroom while the others convened in the kitchen. Kathy’s quest for meaning and belonging in the world brought her home a few years ago to a local church community led by an internationally known and recognized Spiritualist medium. Communication with the corporeal dead is commonplace within Kathy’s congregation, and the amazing, spot-on details of those interactions cannot easily be explained away. On Thanksgiving, Kathy shared with me Spirtualists’ belief not only in our eternal existence, but in constant learning and growth beyond this life. She said Spiritualists believe that each of us retains his or her individual identity after passing over, and that such earthly pleasures as self-improvement, eating and sex continue in some form. (This leads me to question whether our deeming a sinfully delicious dessert or particularly memorable orgasm “other-worldly” isn’t, in fact, somewhat premature.)

During dinner, but fortunately after most of the eating was done, a spirited roundtable conversation centered on the subject of anal licking and cleaning among cats and dogs. Trudy started it off by noting (appropriate of what, I can’t recall; Trudy tends not always to require segues) that she lately has been wiping the ass that her hefty foster cat is prevented by girth from reaching. Joanne—whose small Loudon County home makes Noah’s Ark look like a near-empty rowboat by dint of its accumulation of permanent and foster dogs, cats, chinchillas, rabbits, lizards, etc—chipped in by noting that her own substantial kitty, Oreo, has a personal dispenser of Redi Wipes in the form of Annie the Chihuahua’s tongue. (Which you therefore, Joanne further noted, don’t really want licking your face despite the diminutive dog’s abundant adorableness.) Kathy closed that particular discussion by toasting a collective comfort level with the gross that made our focus on the feline anus not only acceptable but enjoyable. (Damn, though, if Lynn and I didn’t fail to mention our constant need, years ago, to yank hardened crumbs of shit off the ass of our dim but heartrendingly sweet Manx, Franki. Next Thanksgiving, maybe.)

Then, after dinner, it was Kathy’s turn to marvel, on our PC, at the aforementioned Joss Whedon’s astoundingly articulate and well-reasoned, not to mention hilarious, YouTube video, posted days before the presidential election and delivered deadpan, in favor of a Mitt Romney presidency. His argument? That the resulting poverty, chaos and class warfare would hasten the purifying zombie apocalypse that each of us in his or her macabre heart of hearts (if not in our soon-to-be-eaten brains) really would like to see. Weeks ago, Joanne had shared this video with me, and I in turn had shared it with Lynn and several other ideological fellow travelers. Kathy, who given further Spiritualist training may one day be able to foresee and announce to the rest of us the approach of an actual zombie apocalypse, nevertheless enjoyed Whedon’s frighteningly plausible outline for the recent unrealized one.

During our multi-hour gathering, there were no combustible family dynamics for us to gingerly negotiate, no roiling political discussions to upset our digestive tracts, no rancorous social-policy debates, no after-dinner self-segregation into football and non-football camps. (Although I’ll concede that I did surreptitiously check the scores a couple of times.) Granted, there was one friendly debate about whether or not it’s stupid to spend $225 a ticket to see the ancient band The Who perform the 1973 rock opera Quadrophenia at the Verizon Center, with Lynn being squarely in the “yes” camp and Joanne and I, who recently had attended that totally awesome show, begging vociferously to differ. But given that any Thanksgiving table potentially harbors a cornucopia of acrimony, that lone jibe scarcely amounted to a gourd in the centerpiece. 

Not that there’s anything wrong with spending the Thanksgiving holiday with one’s for-real blood/legal relatives. And not that each of us at the table on Thursday doesn’t love his or her own mother and father and other relations, living and dead. They certainly were in our thoughts. (And at times in our fond conversation, as when Lynn and I told Trudy and Kathy how Joanne’s father once spent a good 15 or 20 minutes relating to us “cute”— read “horribly embarrassing”—stories of Joanne’s youth when she wasn’t there to shush him. Joanne’s face was roughly the hue of the table’s cranberry sauce as we recounted that conversation.) At any rate, we soon will again be in our respective families’ company, with the approach of Christmas.

But what it comes down to is that there are many different types of families. Lynn and I derived great joy from hosting three key members of our family of cherished friends this Thanksgiving. We were sorry only that Joanne’s husband Eric, a teacher, artist and author, couldn’t be with us because he literally was taking care of business at a workshop in Canada—a nation that peevishly refuses to align its own Thanksgiving Day with our own. Still, we felt deeply enriched by a communal experience that was devoid of discomfort, abundant with laughter, and unblemished by the dismembered presence of a bird slain for our supper.

And that, readers, is no joke.

Good Night for POTUS, Pot, Santa

For the past few days I’ve been pondering what to write about Election Day 2012. Not that the blogosphere exactly has been clamoring for my take. (Or, frankly, knows I exist.) But presidential elections are big deals, and there were many other interesting races and issues on local and state ballots this past Tuesday, as well, about which I have thoughts.

Initially, I had pegged my approach to this post to today's debut in selected theaters of Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln. I envisioned brilliantly and insightfully writing about all that I’d found good and bad, hopeful and troubling, new and old in Tuesday’s results, and then comparing and contrasting all that with What Abe Would’ve Done—Could’ve Done, Might Do—were we to have a leader of his vision, savvy and integrity on our national stage today.

That approach seemed workable until I woke up his morning and realized it was trite, lame and obvious. (Lame and obvious may be redundant.) Then, too, my idea of ending this post by informing you, the reader, that I was temporarily tabling my cynicism and responding to the better angels of my nature by going out to catch Abe at the local bijou was thwarted by the logistic fact that the film currently is playing at only a single local theater that’s a bitch for parking. (“Fourscore and seven minutes ago I began circling the lot in forlorn hope of a finding a spot.” Ha ha ha.)

So, I’ll spare you the overarching theme, or any strained attempt to weave a sociopolitical, historical tapestry, and simply run through my list.

The White House. Obviously I’m happy the president was reelected, and that he won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, with the claim to legitimacy that this "bifecta" entails. I frankly thought that was the way it would go, but one never knows. Much has been said and written in the past few days about America’s changing demographics, and how the Republicans no longer can win elections by nailing the Grandpa Simpson and Jerry Falwell votes, given the facts that tomorrow’s seniors are today’s moderate baby boomers, that Jerry Falwell is dead and America’s religiosity is turning fuzzier, and that those damn minorities not only aren’t going away, but are growing in number—and voting, to boot.

While I do find those trends encouraging from a presidential-election standpoint, I also have no doubt that the GOP eventually will come up with some brilliant strategy, resplendent in spin and obfuscation, to win voters back without radically changing the substance of their policies. Maybe they’ll nominate Florida Senator Marco Rubio in 2016 and he’ll somehow make more-nuanced immigrant-bashing cool, since he’s Latino himself. Or, this whole changing-demographics thing will take a breather for one election cycle, as voters drool over themselves and their Big Macs in rapture over the fact that Republican nominee Chris Christie, in his button-popping glory, literally Looks Like America.

(One quick aside, because I love this joke and shamelessly urge you to applaud me for it. It had been my contention, in the calamitous aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, that the floodwaters that devastated vast swaths of New York City, New Jersey and Long Island might have been stopped, had only the Garden State’s massive governor been positioned in precisely the right places at the right times. This may be one case in which my steadfast refusal to engage Twitter denied me satisfaction. As it was, I was reduced to sharing my observation in a few e-mails and then being disappointed that the recipients did not respond by nominating me for the Mark Twain Prize and Kennedy Center honors.)

Anyway. What I took from the presidential election was that yes, the result was a reflection of changing demographics—with minority populations rising and younger voters looking at things differently than do their elders—but also that, while the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has badly tilted the playing field, it hasn’t quite succeeded in turning it upside-down. I’m always glad when Republicans don’t win presidential elections, as much because they can't install foxes in all the regulatory henhouses as because of the higher-profile damage they can do. But that’s not to say that I’m a huge Obama fan. I’m hoping, now that he’s a four-year lame duck, that he’ll turn bolder, less conciliatory and more candid as he seeks both to address the huge issues now being discussed—the “fiscal cliff” being tops among them—and the many dormant issues that demand action, such as global warming and gun control.

Congress. I’m thrilled that the Democrats retained the Senate, and I’m particularly grateful, as are all Democrats, to Tea Party voters for nominating as Republican nominees such knuckle-draggers as Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana. Still, it’s sobering to note that both of those throwbacks to the Paleolithic Age weren’t thrown back at the polls by so thumpingly much, still having secured 39 and 44% of the vote, respectively.

It’s cool, too, that the chamber now has its first openly lesbian senator-elect in Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin. (It’s not too early, however, to anticipate conservative bloggers’ snickering speculation as to whether this will embolden Hillary Clinton to finally come out, or whether she’ll maintain her business-arrangement marriage to Bill as she prepares to step down from the State Department and weigh a presidential bid in 2016.)

The House remained solidly in Republican hands, maintaining divided government and ensuring continued gridlock on most issues. Gridlock that, by the way, could be greatly lessened if states would put an end to politically drawn redistricting that results in tortuously gerrymandered safe havens for extremists on both sides of the aisle. But alas, the prospects for that are dim. And even removing the issue from the politicians’ purview isn’t necessarily the pathway to reform. Which brings me to …

Maryland. In my state, the lone disappointing election result Tuesday was the decisive defeat of a ballot question that would have forced state leaders to redraw a convoluted 6th congressional district map—described by one district court judge as a “Rorschach-like eyesore”—that had been crafted by the ruling state Democratic Party specifically to defeat longtime Republican Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (and which on Election Day succeeded in doing so). While I believe that most voters, regardless of political party, favor fairness and nonpartisanship in the drawing of district lines, the matter was dwarfed on the Maryland ballot by such glitzy, ad-fueled issues as gay marriage, casino gambling and the Dream Act. Also, Marylanders were of a collective mindset Tuesday to vote “for”—for legalization of same-sex marriage, for expanded casino gambling, for facilitating in-state college tuition to children of noncitizens. In the case of that abhorrent 6th District map, a vote “for” affirmed the status quo—the contorted geographic contours already in place.

The same-sex marriage vote, however, was historic. Maryland, Maine and Washington on Tuesday became the first states to affirm gay marriage by statewide referendum, ending a string of some 30 defeats nationwide. This surely was due in part to changing societal attitudes that will ensure future statewide victories, but Maryland long has been a progressive state. I’m particularly proud of the fact that populous Montgomery County, where Lynn and I live, powered the narrow statewide victory on this issue, with 65% of its voters casting ballots in favor.

The vote on the Dream Act was similarly groundbreaking and affirming, if more widely anticipated. Expanding casino gambling in the state, meanwhile, was hardly a moral victory, but it does promise to bring jobs to Prince George’s County and to pump money into state coffers that otherwise simply would be spent in neighboring states.

The nation. Last Sunday, the Washington Post published a special section that took a state-by-state look at the presidential race, Senate and House elections, and ballot issues. Two of the more offbeat items that caught my attention at that time were the fact that Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell was favored for reelection in Washington state over Michael Baumgartner, who’d earned the nickname “F-Baum” for encouraging a taunting blogger to go fuck himself, and that Republican Kerry Bentivolio, a reindeer farmer and Santa Claus impersonator, was seeking an open House seat in Michigan’s 11th District. My immediate thoughts on those races were that F-Baum might yet win by emphasizing (ideally without obscenity) the “can’t” in “Cantwell,” but that Michigan voters might be wary of a candidate who’d built his career playing God with “naughty” and “nice” declarations and threats of coal-filled stockings on Christmas morning.

In fact, however, Cantwell cruised to reelection, and it was Bentivolio rather than his Democratic challenger who was issuing hearty ho-ho-hos on Tuesday night. This despite the fact that the erstwhile Jolly Old Elf, a Tea Party favorite, had been condemned by his own brother as “mentally unbalanced” just five days before the vote, as I belatedly discovered upon Googling his name earlier today. Phillip Bentivolio had called his brother “conniving” and “dishonest,” and said that he’d undergone electroshock therapy as a child and was a glue-sniffer as a teenager. Also, there was this today, from Huffpost Detroit: “According to Politico, in old court documents Bentivolio was quoted as saying he had “a problem figuring out which one I really am, Santa Claus or Kerry Bentivolio.” (Of course, as the film Miracle on 34th Street documents, it’s not so easy to prove that a claimant isn’t, in fact, Kris Kringle.)

On a serious note, I was saddened but not surprised by the defeat of Proposition 34 in California, which would have repealed that state’s death penalty. I’m simply not in favor of governments executing their citizenry. I see it as being morally wrong, too subject to error, without deterrent value, and on balance, even more economically costly (totaling the legal costs) than imprisonment without parole. The 53-47 vote was, however, a vast change from the 70% favorable margin in 1978 that had placed the law on the California books in the first place.

Finally, there were the successful ballot initiatives Tuesday in Washington state and Colorado to legalize marijuana for recreational use. As victory had been forecast in both states, I wasn’t surprised. But, as I outlined in my August 6 post headlined “Rolling Stone Blows Smoke,” I’m neither enthusiastic about the prospect of state-sanctioned stoners, whatever the potential tax benefits, nor convinced that these votes ultimately will mean anything, given the federal ban on recreational marijuana use. It remains to be seen what the federal response will be. Sure, Barry Obama liked to toke during his Hawaiian youth, but he’s the Man now, and he’s gone from laidback hoopster to unapologetic launcher of unmanned death drones. “Don’t make me sic my jackbooted thugs on your dopily giggling asses!,” I can hear POTUS exclaiming, as law-and-order Republicans nod in grudging respect and, somewhere, Willie Nelson reassesses his relocation plans.