Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Just out of college, I was featured in an article written by the journalist Nicholas Lemann. During the interview, one of the editors of the article at The Atlantic backchanneled to announce he and some friends were starting a new magazine about our age demographic and asked if I would I look over the prospectus. More pointedly, they asked, would I name the magazine? Can you imagine naming a whole generation, or imagine Generation X known by another label?

With all the animus articulated, joked, and memed about between the generations, I’ve abandoned the terms Gen Z, Gen X, Baby Boomers, and Millennials. I know these are primarily marketing categories created to sell products or content. But, like many of the simplistic labels we’ve affixed to humans, they feel grossly reductive and unnecessarily hostile — Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.

Granted, there are differences yoked and amplified by time, but the takedowns and dismissals feel like a blood sport. We are far more nuanced in our actions and beliefs. Who cares if some people prefer texting, others are apolitical, or have an over-inflated sense of their accomplishments? Can any of these characteristics be applied to a whole generation?

These labels hinder the commitments we make to each other. What ultimately defines us is our spirit of interdependence beyond categories of difference.

Today’s poem spotlights a multigenerational family, where the daily demands of domestic and long-term care are challenging enough, but at the center is the familial promise of unconditional love.

The Long Goodbye
by Diana Whitney

My man returns with a canvas bag of salmon,
fresh lettuce, green leaves tipped with red
ripped into the maple bowl and the fat rose filet 
laid out and rubbed with oil. He wants to talk 
about transference and I want to talk
about weather, how April snow falls

and the flowers survive—the daffodils fold up
and shiver through the storm.
If there’s a lesson here in patience
I don’t want to hear it. At my mother’s house
all the rugs are gone so the wheelchair won’t catch.

Her bare floors are cleaner than they’ve ever been.
No more pets or children, no more clutter.
The strange peace of living without language 
or memory, the house ticking as she nods
in the recliner, parting her lips for the spoon 
of ice cream. Her legs are two sticks,
crooked in loose leggings.

And my girls shoot up to five and a half feet.
And my man sears the salmon, feeds the skin
to the dog, serves the pink steaks with salad
in the humming mess of our kitchen.

How can you savor what you have
when it demands so much attention?
Ticks are clinging with two legs to the grasses,
sensing heat and carbon dioxide. They can feel
us coming and seek out our skin. They love
the warm places, armpits and groins,
the crevice behind an ear.

Run your fingers everywhere.
Danger is the size of a sesame seed,
a single brain cell, smaller.
If I could I’d make my mother walk and talk
again, but what do I know of magic
or redemption? Only the long goodbye.
How tired we are of doing our best.

"The Long Goodbye" by Diana Whitney from DARK BEDS. Used by permission of the poet.