The proverbial month-of-Sundays
Politics, pumpkins... plus longed-for Queen City homecoming luck!
Happy Equinox and a postcard update.
The 8.18.24 Sunday newShrink previewed the four-day Democratic National Convention, due to begin the next day, with:
🎵 Something's coming...? (There’s a shoot-the-moon vibe around DNC ‘24.)
As it happened “some things, some things good” surely were coming, with short-term impacts on both newShrink and personal fronts.
They still are, and that will likely continue through these weeks until Election Day.
That Sunday and the few days to follow brought one of those rare synchronicities that jolt and delight all at once. It was a triply coincidental, unexpected merging of unrelated events that have great significance for me:
First, the convention launched the high-gear escalation of voter-registration and a host of volunteer efforts, to which I had committed as described in earlier editions. Training and scheduling were already under way for activities in both of the neighboring counties that I increasingly straddle as home.
Here is a good place to note that my enthusiasm for political-activism is high this season, in part because time and less other responsibility than in past years better allow me to do it. Also, with not currently doing the clinical mental-health side of my psychology practice, for the first time in my adult-professional life I am ethically free to do political-advocacy work unrestricted by neutrality requirements of prior roles as a licensed therapist, a corporate-insider media spokesperson, or a newspaper journalist. There’s a bit of pent-up energy and urgency to it right now!
Second, beginning with a phone call that Sunday, came the completely serendipitous, at-last successful contract to buy my Charlotte friend’s Elizabeth/Myers Park condo — for now a second-home getaway and home base for my community work and psychological coaching/life-choices practice. It’s an ideally sized and situated, very (as in years-) early part-time step toward eventual full-time downsizing and relocation there, or nearby. (A couple of years into way-too-early widowhood, my friend found himself needing a bit more space — but also wanting to stay in or near his long-familiar area that’s always in high demand. After five or six unsuccessful offers over the past 10 months, we hadn’t exactly given up hope. Chances of all of these necessary things coming together just seemed less and less likely. (Now with his winning bid this time, his new home happens to be a larger townhome… in what decades ago was my neighborhood of then-new condos, my second home purchased during young single years. (Yes, that long ago — and they’re still standing!)
Also separately that same August DNC convention-week came the final steps involving the sole remaining financial and legal settlement in my late parents’ estates. As a result, and in very different ways, the Queen-city condo is a wry and loving tribute to them both.
The closing, ensuing transitions and condo projects are to begin at the end of the month, and there’ll be a wide array of volunteer commitments in two counties through October until Election Day. I’ll post newShrink items as possible, and meanwhile still follow news and always welcome hearing from and talking with friends and readers about the issues and developments. For now there’s just more limited time and bandwidth for writing about it, too.
The wide, deep range of my often-recommended sources provides full-time day-to-day horserace-coverage and analysis of this year’s campaigns and elections at all levels. After that, in the post-election environment a perhaps recalibrated newShrink will return, with its more reflective signature explorations of conscious and unconscious psychological dimensions and patterns.
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the proverbial month-of-Sundays
Today’s title-image is an affectionate nod to my late great-grandmother Eliza Mauldin Grandy and the lively speech cadences from her native South Carolina. About now in the lapsed time between newShrinks, her greeting to readers would likely be something like,
“Oh, LAW, child, where ya been? I haven’t seen ya in a month of Sundays!”
For fully accurate disclosure, the month-of-Sundays is a Biblical reference to emphasize a long period of time. Technically it’s 30 or 31 weeks, not just 4 consecutive Sundays.
For my Great-mama it worked just fine either way.
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Rallying!
Above are moments captured at the September 12 Kamala Harris rally at the Bojangles Coliseum in Charlotte, her first following a powerful debate performance against Trump that Tuesday. Here’s my description at the time:
Inspiring, energizing all-American afternoon rallying with Kamala Harris in my hometown Charlotte. Packed 10k capacity arena, overflowing parking lots & even traffic jams were good-humored fun. A shot in the arm to stay motivated for canvassing, postcards, phone banking and helping voters register.
(& oh yeah, the hair-effects are not my best look. Had just taken off my new Harris-for-President 2024 ball-cap when clouds covered sun.)
Event was remarkably well-managed and security visible and assuring.
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“Change happens… in rooms that look just like this!”
Impressive N.C. Senate candidate and behavioral psychology pro Kate Barr just about choked me up with this header-quote. Prior to candidate for governor Josh Stein, the current attorney general, Barr was warming-up a diverse midday crowd of Democrats. We were packed into a community center among farms in a Trump-flagged rural Iredell County community east of Statesville.
Barr was speaking with joy and confidence in objection to the view that “Iredell is a hopelessly RED county.”
Barr is running for NC Senate in district 37, to underscore effects of our state’s extreme party gerrymandering by Republicans. It’s the seat effectively removing excellent Senator Natasha Marcus from office by re-drawing much of her blue-leaning district into deep-red Iredell County.
I liked candidate Stein even better after meeting him in person (which isn’t always the case with political figures.) And until that day I hadn’t known of his lawyer-father’s early founding involvement in a Charlotte law firm — a first integrated firm in the state — where I came to know and respect lawyers when covering courts as a newspaper reporter.
Canvassing, registering voters, writing vote-reminder postcards and… merch
At left below are pictures from volunteer stints registering voters with the League of Women Voters. The larger photo is at the Mint Hill public library, the smaller insert at Habitat Re-store of Lake Norman in Cornelius,
Not pictured, I have learned much from canvassing with Indivisible Charlotte for the hotly contested, heavily gerrymandered House District 112 seat currently held by Tricia “The Traitor” Cotham. She’s the long-time Democrat from a family of elected and party-leader Democrats with near-royalty party bona fides. In 2022 she ran and won based on strong Democratic positions, particularly around reproduction rights… then notoriously flipped 3 months later, wooed by Republicans to form their supermajority. A strong candidate, Nicole Sidman, is running for Cotham’s seat.
When canvassing I’ve become familiar with and impressed by the organization, technological tools — eg the nationally used progressive phone app called Minivan — and sophisticated communication training and execution by Democrats (who often have not excelled in these areas.) Canvassers meet in teams before heading out to door-knock in pairs. The smartphone app has addresses and names of registered Democrats and unaffiliated voters who have at times leaned or voted D. There’s a useful, simple script that can be modified and tailored as desired.
The interview questions are “branched.” That is, the answer to one determines what the next question is to be. A near-closing question seeks the key issues and concerns the voter has, and the canvasser reminds of changes in the law such as photo ID requirements. After each stop, the voter’s answers to the questions are entered, and their key issues and concerns are put in. These findings are shared up and down the ballot to help campaigns and candidates with messaging and policy responsive to their voters.
Unlike in 2016 and other years when I have canvassed, this isn’t for registering voters. At least in my experience the lion’s share of that is done, and well, by the League of Women Voters, bound by its nonprofit status to maintain party and candidate neutrality. For the record, registration forms are tightly controlled, accounted for at the end of each shift and returned directly at the end of the last shift of the to a League leader who takes them to the county Board of Elections.
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“The soul should aways stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.” —Emily Dickinson
If maybe not quite ecstatic (yet), I am rather over-the-moon about the condo, and a next chapter-shift to spending more time & life in Charlotte, with the lake more for recreation and enjoyment of Grand Miz E, family and friends as long as it’s valued. Asheville is an easy commute and there will be continued connection there with Miz E, her parents and family, very close friends, and involvement with the OLLI lifelong learning institute and Biltmore.
But Charlotte is home, and that’s more apparent and important with the growing Trump-National culture of this area of the lake near his club.
More powerful are the lures of lifelong friends, their offspring generations and family. The condo is walkable to: the Elizabeth Avenue trolley stop for uptown events and activities; midtown, Trader Joe’s and the greenway; and the very social-justice oriented, racially integrated (which many churches are not) Presbyterian Church where I know and value several people and have wanted to explore. I want to learn more about the innovative actions they’re taking to provide sustainable low-income rental housing on their campus. As it was for my Charlotte-native late maternal grandfather after “urban renewal” wiped out and scattered the Brooklyn community uptown, and my mother too, affordable and equitable housing has long been a prime concern for me. I’ve done family-selection committee work and served on the boards of both Charlotte Habitat and Our Towns (Lake Norman) Habitat, and the two along with Gaston County’s are now a merged single organization based in Charlotte.
More personally (and probably reflecting my rare Charlotte-native-hood) this condo is 3 blocks from the hospital where I was born, my pediatrician’s office building (still there as something else), and happy “firsts” at now-absent Anderson’s restaurant and Leo’s delicatessen; 5 blocks from my early medical social worker workplace; 7 from the weekly-newspaper offices of my first reporter job after UNC journalism school. About 6 blocks in a slightly different direction are my first “single-adult” apartment (still there!); late grandparents’ and parents’ still-standing homes of over 40 years; and about 7 blocks again beyond there is my first purchased house, a now nearly century-old, much-renovated bungalow still standing.
As for longer term, while the hope is that a continuing-care retirement community will never be necessary, being on lists at 2 in Charlotte and 1 in Asheville has that base covered if it does.
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Now in closing…
Pumpkins???
With the current surge of Harris/Walz memes, any kind of blue ones are a thing. But my hand-crafted blown-glass pumpkin, (shown here) by an Asheville artist, is incomparable. It was way ahead of trend, a birthday present three years ago this Friday, from Grand Miz E and her parents Nick and Liz. While in Asheville for some early weekday celebrating I want to visit the glass-blowing shop in the River Arts District with hope of finding one or two more in combinations of blues and yellow.(Each year there’s an all-glass-pumpkin, all possible color combinations show and sale, but I’m not sure when it runs or where.)
Also shown pictured at center and bottom right, another birthday tradition though not an annual one: A pair of soul-soles for good luck and happiness! These Rothy’s carry the additional gravitas and status of true-blue-Kamala-good-luck shoes: They first appeared, unsolicited, on my phone screen as I watched the first night of the Democratic National Convention. Though a brand-new pattern, they were even at a discount price!
Undoubtedly they had my name on them.
And that is all I have !
Talk to you soon, and with more depth after Election Day.
🦋💙 tish
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
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[insert some of this somewhere]
Tuesday is National Voter Registration Day, and I’m working a Tuesday late-afternoon shift with League of Women Voters down at a west Charlotte library site.