Who is in the House?

Another free-flowing, quasi-political, quasi-poetic meditation.

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Photo by Amy Chen on Unsplash

My dog barks at the creaking kitchen chair when I shift, trying to find just the right angle for my aging-sore back, rushes to the door, barks some more, and then some more, saving me from whatever that unfamiliar sound was.

Crazy days. To awaken into a world where one man’s selflessness changes so much, where the familiar sounds of talking heads change into something new and still a little frightening but thrilling all at once. Here I am listening carefully, alert as a half-sleeping setter, to the steady hum of political speculatio.

Here on the edge of so many unknowns, still I’m wondering if we can be rescued from hate and fear, dishonesty, mindless rage, good old fashioned rudeness, a world where nearly half of us are convinced of blunt falsehoods, barking at noises that don’t exist in the peace and quiet of an otherwise still morning.

I feel a small slice of something that had been weighing me down slide away, fall to the floor. Still, they march on—the many millions of cultic minions of the deposed mad king now setting out to be more invincible still if he re-gains the parapets, ascends to his new, dark throne.

Nick Cave’s “God is in the House” comes on my playlist as if conjured from the shadows. In that deep-groaning-Nick-Cave-whispering growl he calls out how fear drives piety, envisioning a little town “with a pretty little square” and “no crime” and no “homos roaming the streets at night” a place where

we’ve bred all our kittens white
So that we can see them in the night
And at night we’re on our knees
As quiet as a mouse…
There’s no fear about
If we all hold hands and very quietly shout
Hallelujah
God is in the house
Oh I wish He would come out
God is in the house.

My house is “quiet as a mouse,” but I doubt that God is hiding somewhere, ready to step forth and set everything right, steering one head away from a speeding bullet, granting him alone the ability to return us to “greatness,” back to those times when white men with God at their side could count on holding the reigns of power while anyone not fitting the mold cowered silently in the shadows of America’s house, not coming out. I’m old enough now to remember those times when America was “great,” driving in a black man stand-in father’s Caddy, my white mom in the passenger seat, my white dad having split, too filled with bravado and selfishness and raw-pure power to stick around, all the white heads turning to stare at stoplights—me wondering which God turned those heads.

The refrigerator hums to life, the dog shifts in her crate, letting out a contented sigh, a wind chime is chiming where it hangs on my back deck. Everything is quiet and still here in this little town with “a woman for a mayor” where I await the shifting tides of history, God-if-you’re-there-willing, to take us to a better place.

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