I was fixing a sprinkler last weekend and Ess jumped in to help: running all over the yard with me as we watched the water flow so I could flush just the right amount of water through the new connection.
This made things in the hole a bit muddy, but Ess was still excited to help me put the earth back in the hole — we got her set up with Mykala’s gardening gloves to do it. And as we were walking to the backyard, she exclaimed: “Oh good! Now that we’re both wearing gloves, I can hold your hand!”
When I work in downtown Minneapolis, I drive home past a boarded up store spray painted with: “REST IN POWER, GEORGE FLOYD.” Invariably, I read it aloud to myself, alone in the car, and it gives me some hope. After the inhuman, brutal, cruel murder of Floyd in May, I was so relieved to see a national and then international series of protests. Judging by their duration, intensity, and organization, this could be what it looks like when the baton from the Civil Rights movement is taken up again to continue and escalate the fight against the inextricably intertwined institutions of United States racism and United States policing.
There’s a time in your life when you’ll be striving, reaching, seeking. Every new subject, every new interest, every new person will crackle with the possibility of sparking and bringing alive a part of you that you didn’t know existed. It’s the kind of ride you’ll know you’re on when you’re on it. It needs no label. And what’s more: by definition, you’ll enjoy it. It feeds the ego. For most, it occurs in late teens, early twenties. For some, it’s delayed by loss but ignites later in life, when there is time and space. For still others, tragically, it never happens.
“Essie, I’m going out to vacuum the gutters, and I want you to have your jams on when I come in.”
And I have never sounded more… ADULT… in my life.
Honestly, if you had told me seven years ago I’d be talking about pajamas and gutter vacuuming, I’d have said — whose pajamas, and I don’t have any gutters NOR any interest in gutters. Life moves pretty fast.
I have no wise words to offer during a time such as this. I never dreamed of such a scenario in my life; I always imagined the more mundane disasters: hospitals, accidents, bankruptcy. I’ve had a brush with none, and yet here I am, with all humanity, in this disaster.
Have I, this whole life, been picking my way through a labyrinth, each choice sending me down another corridor of choices? Or was I launched from a canon, my trajectory unknowable, and yet fixed? Am I the latter, thinking I am the former? Do I write silly questions, straw men in dual, false dichotomies, the truth an ineffable middle-place?
*The opening montage of Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron begins playing*
I just HAVE to run at this part, Dada! I have to run when the horses are running!
*Essie runs many laps around the first floor of the house.*
