Clutching Pearls By Jamie Kirkpatrick

My friend the Professor recently ran an idea up the flag pole of his social media that included the phrase “clutching their pearls.” I hadn’t heard that phrase in years—“limousine liberals” yes, but nothing about “clutching their pearls.” It got me thinking…

When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, my Aunt Addie lived with us in the big house in Squirrel Hill. She wasn’t really my aunt; I think she was my mother’s great aunt which means (I guess) she was my great, great aunt. I think she originally came from New Jersey and was the last of her family’s line, Her full name was Addie McClaus and by the time she came to live with us, she was well into her 90s. She always dressed in widow’s black and always wore a string of pearls. It must have been quite a shock to her system to come into our household in her waning days, but that was how things were done back in the 1950s. I remember the day she died. My mother found her in bed one morning and called for an ambulance, but Aunt Addie was already gone. I ran upstairs to tell my big brother Aunt Addie was dead, but he didn’t believe me until he saw her being carried down the stairs and out the front door. I’d like to think she was wearing her pearls when she was called to heaven.

Anyway, that’s what my friend’s flagpole post brought to mind when I read it. The child in me remembered Aunt Addie; the grown-up thought about what it means to be clutching one’s pearls. In case you don’t know the expression, it means to be excessively or naively shocked, dismayed, or appalled, as in “everyone at the film festival was clutching their pearls over all the explicit sex scenes in the director’s new film.” Of course, that was not the reference in the professor’s post. I bet you can imagine the scene to which he was referring, you know, the recent one that occurred in the Oval Office…

Be that as it may, the image of someone clutching her pearls (I imagine it was a woman who was doing the clutching, but maybe not), perfectly captured my sentiments as I watched that horrific tableau unfold. If I had been wearing pearls at the time, I would have been clutching them so hard they would have turned into diamonds. It was that bad.

I am still aghast at what transpired. A brave man who had been leading his country in a fight for its life was being berated and bullied by two individuals who seemed to be having temper tantrums that would send a two-year old to his room for a timeout. Even members of the hand-picked press that were present got involved in the melee by asking our guest why we didn’t wear a suit to the Oval Office. I bet no one thought to ask Winston Churchill that question when he appeared in the Oval Office wearing his wartime siren suit. Be that’s where we are, God help us.

I apologize. As you know, I don’t usually wade into political waters, but I’m still clutching my pearls about what I saw. And it wasn’t even a film. It really was that bad.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. His most recent novel, “The Tales of Bismuth; Dispatches from Palestine, 1945-1948” explores the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is available on Amazon and in local bookstores.