Maybe I’m being too literal with my poetic metaphors, but with all due respect to Langston Hughes, I’ve never seen an exploding raisin.
A few years back a woman was on NPR, probably All Things Considered, who gave a commentary which, when I have a spare minute I’ll go ahead and look up. She was teaching creative writing to a group of elementary school students, I think but am not positive a group of girls. She handed to the class the Langston Hughes poem about spontaneous raisin combustion. And, naturally the class then all turned in variations of a theme: their dreams encapsulated in the metaphor of baked raisins. Her point was that this was not writing, and that true writing does not come until you get past this imitiative stage — which happened when a student turned in something about dreams being squashed, buried, and dying.
As always, I have a similar anecdote which is both the same and very, very different. I always have that disconnect in comparing similar childhood and adolescent anecdotes, which is all sentiment is thrown out and where she has Langston Hughes, I have a crudity.
Tomorrow we are likely to find one deferred dream explode. I suppose we almsot could get it either way, except that a female vice-president is still one away, and I’d like a better woman, please. So prepare yourself for a hefty load of purple prose, as pundits of various stripes know they need to say something to mark this occasion, but can’t quite come up with anything. Maybe they’ll start yammering on about raisins? Maybe they should start yammering on about raisins.
It is worthwhile to root through the comemnts left at this post. Surely other reposataries of similar sentiment exist, and I’ll leave it to you to wander around and find them, but something needs to be stated. Barack Obama may end up being a major disappointment, unable to fend off the multiple spiraling messes America has right now — previous presidents of relatively competence have found themselves in a state of inertia when confronted with complicated troubles. Or Americans may end up demanding his face be plowed into Mount Rushmore. But whatever thc case, in one important respect, and beyond a merely skin deep level, America will be a fundamentally different and better nation — assuming what we assume is about to happen tomorrow.