Clean up, start again

Looking back to go forward

I was always that person who wanted to turn around and get back on the roller coaster immediately after getting off the ride. I felt the same the  one time I went skydiving. Let’s do that again! There’s nothing like an adrenaline rush to make you feel alive. It's not a dissimilar experience when it comes to performing (though it’s usually safer). Preparing for last Friday’s ‘Flight Lessons’ was its own roller coaster. And while I wished I had another date on the calendar the day after the performance, I also felt like I could finally think about something else.

As it was, the next day we had a ticket to another friend’s big event, the Living New Deal 90th Anniversary Celebration at the Maritime Museum. My friend Susan had been working on organizing it for months, including booking Heather Cox Richardson, the popular historian whose Letters from an American newsletter has been a voice of reason over the past four years, to provide the keynote. Conveniently, Richardson was in the Bay Area the same weekend as part of her book tour for Democracy Awakening. A host of San Francisco writers, historians and dignitaries were also on hand to celebrate the New Deal as part of a movement to remind people that a government could work to provide for the welfare of all its citizens.

I didn’t start thinking of the New Deal, whose programs, reforms and public works projects were a hallmark of my parents generation, until I went on a birding trip with Susan earlier this year. While we were in Nebraska, we spent much of the time we weren’t looking at Sandhill Cranes, in search of New Deal projects. A big part of the Living New Deal’s work is mapping New Deal sites. That week, we found a city park, an athletic field, a fair grounds and a hospital. Closer to home, Susan pointed out that my local library was a New Deal site. The Living New Deal has mapped thousands of projects already and it's fun to search your own town for sites (I’ve since learned the scene of the first concert I attended was a New Deal site).

With its careful architecture, mosaics, murals, bathhouse and iconic setting, San Francisco’s Maritime Museum and entire Aquatic Park is an especially striking example of a New Deal project. And it was yet another place I’ve been visiting my entire life, it having been a place we went often with my Dad’s San Franciscan parents when they were still alive.

After a tour of the museum, and its recently restored murals, we sat with some other history nerds to drink champagne and watch the period-appropriate Decobelles dance, before the speakers got going.

There was a quiet flurry when Richardson walked into the room. Several of us debated the awkwardness of asking for a selfie with someone we admire … and ultimately kept our seats. Gary Kamiya, a San Francisco writer, was Richardson’s opener. His talk about the colorful history of Aquatic Park would seem to be a hard act to follow and Richardson said as much. But she closed the evening with an incredibly lucid, detail-rich talk on why the New Deal matters now, speaking as she writes, barely looking at her notes as she name-checked presidents and Supreme Court judges and decisions across the decades, and somehow leaving us with hope that Democracy will prevail and our government can work for us again.

“The past has its own terrible inevitability. But it is never too late to change the future.”
― Heather Cox Richardson