Throw Pillows in Motion

Tossing heirlooms as Kamala takes the wheel

The day before Biden quit, I ditched my long-dead grandparents’ throw pillows. There were just the two left, identical cream-colored rectangles with a blue and pink chevron-stripey pattern embroidered on one side. They’d been in storage for eleven years. I’d forgotten they’d even existed. As Jenny and I packed for Shanghai on a sweaty Michigan afternoon in 2013, I guess wasn’t yet ready to let them go, so into the time warp they went.

Now it’s 2024. We live in New Zealand. We’re married now, with throw pillows of our own. Two kids, even. At one point Jenny’s folks generously relocated all our stuff from Michigan to the weird old house in Iowa we bought sight unseen during the pandemic. That was a time, wasn’t it? But we’ve never lived there. We rent the place but keep one bedroom as storage. Books, mostly. Wedding gifts and such. This visit we gave the pile a good thinning. We dropped Ma and Pa’s pillows at the local thrift store, along with a bassinet neither kid slept in and the last scraps of the Halloween costumes we were wearing the first night we kissed. Then we hit the road, heading west.

Biden’s resignation dropped somewhere in southern Minnesota. We surfed the radio scanner, catching bits of NPR’s euphoric live coverage as the rural affiliates fuzzed in and out. Blue curtains of rain clocked around the green horizon. The giant wind turbines and creaky old windmills held still in the muggy air as if straining to listen.

We were thrilled, nervous, over-caffeinated, and hungry, and in my head rang a half-remembered line I’d love from Nobel prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. Soon as we got to my in-laws’ place I went straight to the library and looked it up. Our heroine is watching a river in her hometown in rural Poland:

Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that—in spite of all the risks involved—a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity.

We are in motion again, is the feeling now. Biden finally let go his reach for permanence and did the noble thing. Until Sunday, Trump had the river on his side, just as he did in 2016. Trump 2.0 would be a grim, reactionary thing in motion; the cavemen of Project 2025 would even cancel the damn weather forecast. But the river’s with Harris now. This is no guarantee of victory. But if she does win, it’s a country in motion that will take her there. The river, in her own words: “We are not going back.”

No going back to the thrift store, either

My grandparents and I never did agree on politics. Pa had a National Review subscription since forever, and Fox News had ‘em both by the end. Ma was a big-hearted woman, devout and kind, with twinkle and twang to spare. But she was also a white daughter of oil money from Jim Crow East Texas. The Black women she knew and loved were all paid help. Obama was already too much for her to fathom, I know, though we hardly spoke of him. She was getting dotty by then, and I was mostly in Bolivia.

I like to imagine Ma might’ve at least awarded points for Harris’ glamour. We’re talking Dallas here, after all. Ma was a twice-weekly beauty shop gal who kept her frosted hair the same champagne hue as her Cadillac. But I’m telling myself stories. She’s gone, and stories, nonfiction or otherwise, are all I’ve got. Stories plus Ma’s well-worn Bible, highlighted throughout, its spine wrapped in yellowed packing tape, now resting safely on a shelf in New Zealand.

Hey Ma

How can pillows compete? I’m supposed to tell you that they throbbed with the joy of all those childhood Christmases, or shone with the summer light in that handsome sitting room Ma and Pa had professionally decorated once in 1974 and never changed again. Nope. Nothing but ash. I hurled them pillows right out the door, not because I’d seen a ghost but because I tried and couldn’t. If you want ‘em, the Depot Outlet in Decorah, IA should have them out on the shelves within the week.

The Harris endorsements kept rolling in. After lunch we crossed Interstate 35. Turn left and drive 800 miles south and we’d be a few freeway exits from Ma and Pa’s final resting place, in a tony cemetery with a view of Ma’s beloved NorthPark Mall. She used to show up in my dreams occasionally, uncharacteristically but not unkindly silent, always in those big sunglasses. But it’s been years now. She can’t find me in New Zealand.

Maybe this letter will call her back. I’d tell her where to find me. I’d tell her what I was reading. I’d tell her I’d found that verse she marked telling us not to be afraid.

Sometime later we passed one of those grim small-town Subways. The marquee out front was abandoned or stuck between edits or waving a fist. I flipped around and grabbed my phone. We are, Ma. We are.

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