Lourdes In Bethesda - Miracles, Magic, And Two Old Virgin Marys Preach Righteousness To Suburbia

Adalina Perez and Paula Oleander were old ladies of worth - or at least that was what had been ordained from them early on in their lives.  Adalina, a Dominican, showed light and promise as a young child growing up in the Bronx, a girl of simple faith and devotion, a pert, curly-haired little girl who was often seen on 116th Street selling fresh empanadas made by her mother Luisa who worked for a wealthy Jewish family downtown but found enough time to to make her special, savory, delicious treats. 

Adalina did well at school but never near the top of her class.  She was rewarded more for punctuality and attendance than any academic promise, but unlike many of her classmates who dropped out early, she graduated and somehow - some said it was thanks to her sexual precocity and friendship with Alonzo Rodriguez,  Alderman from the Bronx who took a shine to the young girl and secured her a place at City College. 

It was there that the young Adalina became aware of her heritage. The times were long before the identity/diversity movement of today, and rather than being included for her difference, was marginalized because of it. She was indeed far less bright and talented as the majority Jewish students, many of whom were later to become well known jurists and Hollywood producers, but she had enough piss and vinegar to resent, revolt, and object.  She became known as 'that wiry-haired cunt from uptown' who was never given the time of day, and who spent a dreary four years making her way but little more. 

She became a school teacher in a white East Side school - she had tamed her hair, lightened her skin, and lifted all Bronx Latino-isms from her speech. She was a good, if ordinary teacher, and without much fanfare collected her paycheck, prepared her lessons, and returned home to the Bronx at night. 

It was on the Lexington Avenue line that she met Luis Rodriguez, a Bronx Hispanic of Puerto Rican and Dominican parents who, like her, had made his way downtown with the same providential political friendships but without the sexual allure of Julia, and his admission to Columbia despite his ordinary academic record and test scores, was secured; and when he met Julia he was on his way to law school, admission again politically engineered, for he had neither the ability or legal penchant for normal acceptance. 

 

In any case, they were a good match, one thing led to another, and they were married in the Church of Santa Maria on a sunny May morning. 

Their move to Adams Morgan, then a solidly Hispanic neighborhood of Washington DC, was the perfect nurturing environment for their transformation into progressive activists.  There, among thousands of Latinos, most illegally in the country but trying their best to survive if not prosper, the Rodriguez couple were converted from white wannabees to Latin movers.  Everything Hispanic was right and proper, from street slang to enchiladas, tacos, and black beans. 

Luis joined a Latin advocacy non-profit and Adalina became a member of the Hispanic Teachers Alliance, a subsidiary of the teachers union and one committed to the promotion of Latino educators and the promotion of Hispanic culture within the school system.  The two had become wedded to a cause, and had dedicated their lives to preserving the dignity of the Hispanic. 

All this would have been well and good, but along with their Hispanic focus came necessary allegiance to the emerging progressive canon of the times, and before long were as fully participant in all measures of liberal enterprise as any.  In time, progressivism became more than a means to an end but the end in itself.

 

Although welcomed by their progressive colleagues, they were never accepted by their more conservative peers. In fact, they both had become rather fervid and tightly wound as they got older, refused any dialogue with 'the uninitiated' and were wholly and unremittingly cancel-minded when it came to outsiders.

Adalina became insufferable, and she became hyper-sensitive to perceived insults and ethnic innuendoes.  Everything to her ears was a slur, a deliberate attempt to demean, derogate, and dismiss her.  Of course the current debate on illegal immigration inflamed her and drove her over the top.  She became a whirling dervish of anti-ICE and anti-Trump hatred, a vixenish, ugly, demented harridan. She and her husband built impenetrable walls around themselves and no one but the politically saved were let in.  Acquaintances with even a trace of circumspection let alone conservative sympathies were cancelled. 

Personality, character, humor, faith, intellect, irony, and creativity went out the window. Political philosophy was the only measure of faith and reliability.  The two of them had become insufferable, narrow, hectoring, inmates of a horrifically crazed institution. 

Paula Oleander was born and raised in Bogota by wealthy middle class parents, had come to America as many of her cohorts had, to study, and graduated from a respectable eastern university - not Harvard or Yale but by no means at the bottom of the list. There she majored in Hispanic studies with a minor in South American literature - a rather obscure area of study since the continent, other than for a few fantasists of Magical Realism, had produced little of note.  Yet she went at her studies like a feral dog and managed to graduate with acceptance to another third-tier university for graduate studies.  There, as she had as an undergraduate, pursued Hispanic studies and culture. 

Well-educated, well-bred, and moderately-schooled, she became drawn to progressivism via academics. Most eastern universities at that time, as now, were solidly liberal, and soon she was drawn as a poster child for Hispanic identity and as a living example of diversity, equity, and inclusivity.  In fact she subsumed her by now quite white, traditionalist American persona into this political nexus, and like Adalina became a committed progressive. 

Paula, however, unlike Adalina became a moderately wealthy suburbanite and somewhat of a Gertrude Stein.  She held gatherings, social seances, poetry readings, book clubs, and ladies teas all in the interest of 'culture' but always with strong progressive undercurrents.  Most recently she organized a celebration of a minor Maryland artist whose paintings of Keane-like wide-eyed black children displayed the kind of inter-racial sensitivity and empathy that Americans needed. 

She had the good breeding and good taste to keep her passionate progressivism in check and moderately expressed, but at heart she was no different from Adalina in her commitment to social justice. While temperate and quiet, her offerings were as pedestrian, uninspired, and lacking in any thought or insight as her counterpart. 

As fate or serendipity would have it, the two by now old women met each other in Bethesda where Adalina and her husband had moved - their only capitulation to capitalism ever - to the suburbs and were virtual neighbors of Paula.  It was only a matter of time that the two met at one of Paula's seances. 

While never good friends - their backgrounds and education were simply too far apart - they were the progressive bookends of Bethesda, both committed to the same idealistic progressivism, but each going about it in different ways.  They were called a bit harshly but not unfairly by some as 'The Old Virgins Of Bethesda'.

They rarely saw each other but were aware of each other's doings, respectful at a distance, but dogs from different packs.  The flapped away and banged on in their own ways about diversity, equity, and inclusion, shook their heads at the anti-Hispanic Gestapo-like roundups of their ethnic soulmates, but by now were too old to demonstrate. 

They both faded into obscurity once the Trump revolution had become endemic and universal.  All the shibboleths of progressivism were being toppled one by one, and the two old ladies didn't know what to do with themselves.  The stuffy basement gatherings of alte kockers who fell asleep at the throbbing pedantry of Paula's events became fewer and fewer; and Adalina and Luis eventually moved to Florida where they both had Hispanic family roots. 

And so it was across the nation, or at least up and down the coasts - liberal women like Adalina and Paula faded into the woodwork, took up crochet and gardening, and retired quietly.