When I open my eyes in the morning, the first thing I lift my head to see is the clock sitting on the nightstand beside me. If it’s even a minute past six, I’m up and out of bed.

Yes, I’m aware that retirement offers me the luxury of keeping myself attached to the pillow, eyes closed, drifting in and out, without caring to which number of that clock the short hand is crawling. Problem is though, that over the course of fifty years I’ve developed the impossible-to-break habit of getting up early—despite the fact that I no longer have a proverbial timecard to punch. So, sun-up or not, when that hour comes I swing my feet over the side of the bed and onto the floor, stand as noiselessly as my creaking knees will allow, and very quietly—so as not to awaken my still-dreaming wife—navigate down the hall and into what we call the “back bedroom.” There I have access to the two drawers and three feet of closet space not being used for seasonal storage, and which hold a few pairs of well-worn old jeans and a small, folded stack of t-shirts and sweatshirts good for just hanging out.

Look around and you’ll see all the furniture you’d expect to find in what used to be teenage sleeping quarters, occupied at some time or another by one of our two boys, or our youngest, a girl. The headboard is flanked by a pair of bedside tables, each holding a small lamp. There’s a dresser, a juvenile desk with a cushioned stool for a chair, a mirror behind the door… and bookshelves, lots of bookshelves. These, however, were never filled with classical tomes; nope, no Cyrano de Bergerac here. Rather, they were stuffed with cheesy paperbacks, a long line of horrible horror movies on videotape, and rows and rows of grunge-rock CDs.

Unless it was during school hours, or when it was functioning as the bedroom it was intended to be, the space was rarely quiet. Instead, it morphed into an after-class or weekend clubhouse not only for our brood, but their friends from school and the block. They’d be chilling (I guess you’d call it) and playing games, listening to Kurt Cobain-esque music, talking about the kids in their class who were dopes… that kind of stuff. It was a room full of noise, full of life, and full of energy.

Until it wasn’t. Until they all, one at a time, went off to college, or moved to an apartment downtown, or left to take a job in another state. Although still crowded with memories, the room became barren of spirit, the bed went unslept in, the desk held no schoolwork, and the bookshelves? They were empty, too.

But not for long, because an empty shelf begs for attention, and is just too inviting to ignore.

And so it was that slowly at first, then with increasing purpose, the schoolkid inventory began to be replaced by framed photographs, dozens of them, and the room once again found itself filled with people. Some pictures were very new: our children and grandchildren, bright with colors. Others came from a dusty box at the bottom of a dusty basement closet and were a century or more old, no longer even black and white, but faded to light and dark grays—these were our grandparents. Mine, Italian immigrants born in the hills south of Naples, and my wife’s, whose ancestors arrived here generations earlier from Ireland, escaping the potato famine of the 1850s.

Having just finished dressing on a recent Friday morning, I found myself sitting at the foot of the bed and perusing those shelves. I was alternately marveling at the lifelike prints of our four granddaughters, appearing almost three-dimensional in clear-plastic displays, and the smaller, flat, colorless photos of our grandparents, some in hundred-year-old frames. Then, at some point and for no particular reason, my mind began to set aside the changes in camera technology, and drift into the changes between the country those kids may be destined to grow up in, and the one in which our parent’s parents already did. How eerie it seemed that the contemplation of cultural and economic differences on such a scale could be triggered by some ordinary pictures on an ordinary shelf in an ordinary bedroom.

But there it was. I was looking at two Americas. I was forced to face the frightening reality that the stiff-standing subjects in those dark, monochromatic portraits had something, a hundred years ago, that those smiling, twenty-first-century children may not. Freedom. Even though there was nothing to help them survive but their own muscles and their own brains, they were free.

If they failed to find steady work there would be no escaping the tenements. They were not bused-in border-crossers, provided with accommodations in a formerly fine hotel in Times Square, paid for by overburdened taxpayers. No, they lived in blocks and blocks of overpopulated flats; their life’s necessities self-funded, but, with their path upward unencumbered by a bloated bureaucracy, their ambitions were uninhibited.

If the immigrants of the Woodrow Wilson era did not work, they did not eat. Compare this with New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s announcement that illegals would be supplied with reloadable, prepaid credit cards for use in bodegas and supermarkets. It makes me shake my head, thinking about my grandparents consuming so many meatless meals not out of any dietary constraint, or an unrestrainable love of pasta, but because they simply couldn’t afford the meat. There was no government supply of housing, childcare, food, clothing, and cash. They were forced to suffer and struggle to earn those things for themselves and their offspring—and still would rather be nowhere else but in these United States, because here they were free.

There was a play, written by Israel Zangwill and first staged in 1908, called The Melting Pot. In it, a poor Jewish immigrant proclaims:

Understand that America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, your fifty languages, and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries.

But you won’t be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you’ve come to—these are the fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! 

God is making the American!

And so he did.  Emerging from that Crucible were the men and women I was looking at in those hundred-year-old photographs—the men and women that would protect their new country with their lives. Yes, out of that melting pot came new Americans, who continued to make the sacrifices, do the work, and fight the battles needed to keep this nation great.

As I stood up, I realized how afraid I was of the damage that can still be done by those who are running, and bent on ruining, this country from the White House. And who knows who they are? As we saw brutally confirmed the other evening, it is certainly not the man who was inaugurated three years ago. But we are not blind, and we see what they have done. They have opened the gates wide to those who rush in, but who are interested in that Crucible for one reason, and one reason only.

To pour water into it, and to extinguish those fires of God.

Image: Public domain.