Brigid Gardner Matthews ☮

Mom, feminist, first generation American (mom Eng & Irish, dad Serbian,) FOODIE, animal lover. She/her.

[Charlotte Clymer 🇺🇦 @cmclymer]

For the first half of my kindergarten year, my family lived in a shitty little apartment complex somewhere in Central Texas.

I forget where. I think Waco? Copperas Cove? We moved around a lot. If memory serves correctly, I attended three different schools that year.

The apartment complex was right off I-35. We’d fall asleep at night to the muffled rumble of 18-wheelers passing by. The building itself was dingy and sparsely lit. The walls were thin, which meant we’d hear our neighbors’ business, and they definitely heard ours.

The best thing about the property was a flagpole in the middle of the parking lot. It shot up out of a small, circular, grassy island. The metallic shaft was immaculate—shiny and nary a scratch—and the tiny greensward beneath it was surprisingly lush.

I’m not sure when and where I saw it first—probably during that last pre-kindergarten summer during a Nick-at-Nite marathon, episodes of “Hogan’s Heroes” maybe—but at some point, I saw a flag-raising ceremony on television, and it left a big impression.

I don’t remember anything about my first day of school, but I vividly recall the first time I walked outside to wait for the bus and saw Mr. Ramirez go through the process of unfolding the American flag, fastening its eyelets to the snap hooks of the halyard and then calmly raising it to the top of the pole.

I didn’t know a lot about Mr. Ramirez, and I never did find out much about him. He was probably the property manager or handyman. I’d see him around the complex with his tools, and he always had a smile and a brief, kind word for me — “Hey, kiddo” or something like that.

One morning, during that first month of kindergarten, I walked out to wait for the bus and saw Mr. Ramirez getting ready to hoist the flag. Having now seen this many times on television and now seeing it a few times in-person, I did what my growing brain thought was appropriate: I rendered a salute, my little hand popping up to just above my brow.

He had begun raising the flag when he noticed me standing there—my paw held steady in respect—and cracked the biggest smile and chuckled. You haven’t seen a happier property manager than in that moment. He finished hoisting the flag, secured the halyard, stood at attention, and joined me in saluting it himself.

For the five months or so I lived there, that became our ritual every school morning, even on some weekends. I’d come outside, Mr. Ramirez would show up with the flag, and we’d do our thing. I don’t think I grasped it at the time, but in retrospect, he got a huge kick out of this. He loved it. I did, too.

A few weeks into this, my mother and I ran into him one afternoon, and he mentioned it to her.

“Your kiddo loves saluting the flag.”

She had no idea what he was talking about. He explained what we did every morning, and she still seemed confused. My mother didn’t give much care to these things. Hers was not the life of respect and discipline. Quite the opposite. It’d have been a rare moment for her to ask if I’d done my homework or bathed.

But Mr. Ramirez did care. On several mornings when I was running a few minutes late, he wouldn’t start without me. I’d dash outside to find him waiting, flag properly fastened, an easy smile to greet me.

“Ready?”

I’d nod, and up the flag went, my salute coming up and then his and the halyard was properly secured and we’d both go about our day.

We never talked outside of this ritual. Mr. Ramirez didn’t know my mother that well, and he probably thought it inappropriate to chat with me beyond our daily ceremony.

Yet even just the fact that a grown adult showed this kind of care meant a lot to me at the time in a way I wouldn’t fully appreciate until much later in life.

With all the trouble at home, all the chaos and uncertainty, all the abuse—things which would take many years to process and contextualize—I knew that every morning, Mr. Ramirez would be there waiting for me.

I’ve thought about him periodically throughout my life — when I was on flag detail during basic training and during NCO school and most times when I see the flag being carried up away from the earth, all those mornings with Mr. Ramirez will briefly revisit me.

It’s very easy to be cynical these days, and it’s especially easy to be cynical about our country. It’s understandable. Every sunrise in America right now brings fresh anxieties about our future. There’s a lot to keep us afraid and tempted into fatalism.

I’m not about to tell y’all that everything is gonna be fine. That would be a lie. We’re in for a lot of pain for the foreseeable future.

And thus, y’all may have complicated feelings about today, and I get that.

Our country is in a rough moment. Perhaps one of the roughest moments.

I’m celebrating today because I love this country. I don’t need pageantry and flags and mythology to love my country. I love my country on its own merits.

I love America because there are people I’ll never meet in our country who would bend over backwards to care for me, advocate for me, fight for me.

And I for them.

Teachers. Nurses. Physicians. Social workers. Soldiers. Sanitation workers. DMV clerks. Public interest attorneys. And on and on and on.

Property managers at dingy apartment complexes in Central Texas who take the time to build an early ritual of pride and community with a kid they don’t know.

You don’t need a parade or fireworks or overwrought language to feel proud to be an American.

Trump can never steal that from us. It is a choice we all make.

We can wake up every day and be grateful for the America that exists and the America we want.

It’s not about exceptionalism. It’s about pride. It’s about grit. It’s about faith in each other. It’s about community.

Don’t let that narcissistic clown take that away from you.

Patriotism is a choice. Believing in our potential is a choice. Believing we can be better and inspire each other to do better is a choice.

Refusing to give up on progress is a choice.

But the only way we’re going to get through this painful era is remembering that the best moments in our country are when we look out for each other. It’s when we build community. It’s when we don’t leave others behind.

In the only way he could, Mr. Ramirez showed up for me every morning, reminding me that there were adults who cared about me.

I’m thinking about him today. I hope he’d be proud of me. I hope my sense of citizenship has lived up to his.

Happy Fourth.

----
Link to full essay available here for easier sharing: https://t.co/FKUJNjtsTo

[Brigid Gardner Matthews ☮ @BrigidGMatthews]

@arirangcore 💜💜💜💜

[Brigid Gardner Matthews ☮ @BrigidGMatthews]

@colin_goldmund Intensely interesting! Is it tomorrow yet?

[Teen Vogue @TeenVogue]

The Grammys 2027 Best Asian Pop Music Category Is Just Another Form of Segregation https://t.co/9nR4SBYvmm

[Sarah Ironside 💙 @SarahIronside6]

For anyone who is confused, the United States was founded on religious freedom, not Christianity.

[超時空移動食堂Okamoto Kitchen @OkamotoKitchen]

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🎰 Flavor Engine available daily 8–10AM
Play & win free food before the con madness begins.

[Rev. Benjamin Cremer @Brcremer]

Imagine taking a few Bible verses on human sexuality as literal divine commands from God for all society, but minimizing 2,000+ verses calling for the care of immigrants, the marginalized, the oppressed, and the poor to be a personal choice.

[Brigid Gardner Matthews ☮ @BrigidGMatthews]

@Mimiiben1 1

[The Husky @Mr_Husky1]

In May of 1965, a 28-year-old teacher walked into a fourth-grade classroom in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston and did something that would change the course of his life — and eventually, the lives of millions.
His name was Jonathan Kozol. He had graduated from Harvard with highest honors. He had studied at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. He could have chosen almost any path. Instead, he chose a crumbling public school in one of Boston's poorest neighborhoods, where the textbooks were two decades old, the heating system didn't work through winter, and a new student walked out the door — or simply disappeared — almost every single week.
That morning, he read his class of African-American nine-year-olds a poem by Langston Hughes. It was called The Ballad of the Landlord — a poem about a Black tenant standing up to a white landlord over an apartment falling apart at the seams, and what happened to him when he dared to speak up. It was not on the Boston Public Schools' approved reading list.
The next morning, Kozol was handed a dismissal letter.
The official reason: he had read material that wasn't in the approved curriculum, without permission from a superior. There had also been complaints from parents who had heard about the poem.
He had been teaching for seven months.
Another man might have accepted the verdict and walked away. Kozol did the opposite. He sat down and wrote. He documented everything — the broken heaters, the outdated books, the overcrowded rooms, the letter that ended his career over a poem about justice. He called the book Death at an Early Age.
Houghton Mifflin published it in October of 1967. Five months later, it won the National Book Award. Over the following decades, it sold more than two million copies.
But Kozol didn't stop there. He spent the next sixty years going back — back to the classrooms, back to the neighborhoods, back to the families that the system kept failing. He wrote about homeless children sleeping in welfare hotels. He wrote about the staggering gap between what wealthy school districts spent on each child and what poor ones could afford. He wrote about the Bronx, about segregation, about the America that existed just a few miles from the America most people saw.
He turned 89 in September of 2025. He is still writing.
All of it began on a May morning in 1965, when a young teacher decided that nine-year-olds in a cold, underfunded classroom deserved to hear a poem about what it felt like when the world wasn't fair.
He read it to them. And they fired him for it.
He made sure the whole world heard it anyway.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

In September 2011, Maurice Sendak sat down at a microphone in his Connecticut studio and told the truth for the last time.
He was 83 years old.

He had spent nearly six decades writing books for children books that did not lie to them.
Books that said: your anger is real, your fear is real, the wildness inside you is real, and none of it will destroy you.
Forty-eight pages.
That was all it took.
Where the Wild Things Are published in 1963, pulled from library shelves by nervous adults, loved immediately and completely by every child who ever felt something too large for their body had become one of the most read picture books in American history.
He had done what almost no one does.
He had told children the truth.
And the world had eventually forgiven him for it.

But by the fall of 2011, the world around Sendak had grown quieter.
His parents were gone. His brother Jack was gone. His sister Natalie was gone.
His partner of fifty years Eugene Glynn, a psychiatrist who had loved him without condition had died of cancer in their Connecticut home in 2007.
In those last months of Eugene's life, Sendak had sat at his bedside and written a book called Bumble-Ardy.
"I did it to save myself," he said later. "I did not want to die with him."
He survived.
But surviving was not the same as whole.

The interview that September was with Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air.
They had spoken many times across thirty years.
She had a quality he recognized a stillness, a way of asking that made people want to say the real thing instead of the safe thing.
He sat down.
And he simply said what was true.
He talked about the maple trees outside his studio window. Hundreds of years old. There before he arrived. There after he would leave.
He said he had fallen in love with the world.
Then he said the thing that stopped people mid-drive, mid-walk, mid-sentence.
"I have nothing now but praise for my life. I'm not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more."
Across the country, people listening in their cars reached over and turned up the volume.

He cried nearly every day by then.
Not in collapse. Not in despair.
He cried the way you cry when something is so full it spills.
He had loved so many people across eighty-three years and they had left one by one, the way everyone leaves, and the love had stayed behind.
It had nowhere to go.
That was the wound.
Not that he had lost them.
That the love remained.

Near the end of the interview, he said something to Terry Gross that she has described as one of the most moving things anyone has ever said to her directly.
He thanked her for her gift the particular quality that made people want to say the things they usually locked away.
Then, quietly and plainly, he said:
"Almost certainly, I'll go before you go so I won't have to miss you."
He was not performing.
He was telling her the arithmetic of love when you have already outlived most of the people who knew you first.

Then he left three words for everyone listening.
Not three different things.
The same thing, said three times because once was not enough, and twice was not enough, and maybe it would never be enough for what he meant.
"Live your life. Live your life. Live your life."

Eight months later, on May 8, 2012, Maurice Sendak died in Danbury, Connecticut.
He was 83 years old.
His books still live in libraries. Children still follow Max into the wild rumpus.
Parents still sit on the edge of beds and read those words aloud.
Sometimes, without quite knowing why, their voices catch.

The Fresh Air interview from September 2011 is still there.
Archived. Available.
You can hear him cry.
You can hear him say he has nothing now but praise.
You can hear him leave those three words in the silence at the end quietly, like setting something down that was too heavy to carry and too precious to release.
He cried every day because he loved them.
And every person who has ever held love in their chest for someone who is no longer there to receive it — with nowhere to put it, with no instructions for what you do when the love outlasts the person already knows exactly what he was talking about.
They always did.

[Football on TNT Sports @footballontnt]

Japan manager Hajime Moriyasu was in tears listening to their national anthem at the World Cup. One of our favourite photos from the tournament so far ❤️

[Brigid Gardner Matthews ☮ @BrigidGMatthews]

@JaieAvila #fact

[FIFA @FIFAcom]

The reason Japan fans clean the stadium after each game. Respect. 🤝🇯🇵

[Juez Central @Juezcentral]

La FIFA preguntó a una japonesa que por qué recogen la basura en todos los estadios a los que asisten.

Ella lo explicó: "Es nuestra cultura. Pero también es una señal de respeto hacia el país y estadio que nos acoge y hacia nuestros jugadores. Para nosotros es un honor que nos reciban aquí y no podríamos dejar todo hecho un desastre".

Japoneses TQM 🫶

[Dan Clark @DanClarkSports]

Japanese fans cleaning up their section of the stadium after Japan's opening World Cup group game.

The people of Japan continue to set a global benchmark for respect, kindness and decency. Such a wonderful country with incredible people!

[The Standard @theLDNstandard]

The Royal Opera Chorus stopped everyone in their tracks at Covent Garden today with an unannounced performance of Nessun Dorma to mark the start of the World Cup 2026

#london #londonmusic #football #worldcup #soccer

[Christiane Amanpour @amanpour]

After a close on-court rivalry and friendship, @ChrissieEvert & @Martina Navratilova found themselves bonded even closer when they were both diagnosed with cancer. We discussed the importance of listening to your own body – and the blanket I sent to Chris when she was diagnosed…

[Brigid Gardner Matthews ☮ @BrigidGMatthews]

@OkamotoKitchen Pork belly fries ... OMG
😋😋😋

[超時空移動食堂Okamoto Kitchen @OkamotoKitchen]

Pork Chashu Stack & Japanese Pork Belly Fries. This month only.

[Brigid Gardner Matthews ☮ @BrigidGMatthews]

Worth the listen. Seventeen minutes of pure genius.

[Classical Music and Movies @Axaxiaa]

George Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue - Leonard Bernstein, New York Philharmonic (1976)