On hope and optimism

and taking in the moment

It’s Monday morning, long before the start of the workday, and I’ve convinced my spouse Janyce to scrap her morning routine. We’re the only two people sitting out on the brick patio and I can hear the commuter rail train pulling out from the station in the background.

“I’m thinking about a memory from a long time ago now,” I say.

“Oh yeah?” says Janyce, repositioning herself on the metal chair. Swirls has finished lapping up water from the dog bowl and now lies flat, resting her chin on the ground.

“Don’t you remember the days when we would walk from Back Bay together and pine away, wishing we could sit in a cafe and drink coffee leisurely in the morning before the workday?” I say.

She nods, taking a bite out of her half of our shared sourdough bacon and egg sandwich.

“Well, here we are doing it,” I say, looking to my left at the sun resting on the tops of the bushes. “Let’s enjoy the moment.” We both munch away silently as a few people start to enter the front doors and line up beside the pastry case, laptops tucked under their arms.

It’s a beautiful summer morning in our suburban town and in a few minutes we’ll be tossing out our paper coffee cups in the trash bin and heading back home, walking the one mile of our old commuting trek along tree-lined streets, passing by colorful Victorian-style painted houses. We’ll pause and let the dog sniff the grasses and chew on a few long blades while we discuss which front porch we admire most, the one with the leaded glass and oversize windows? or the one with with the rockers? And then we’ll notice a friend from our train days sitting out on his own rocking chair, smiling at us from across the street as we walk our dog on the sidewalk.

We’ll smile back and wave and tell him his house is still the best one on the street. And we’ll do it in all honesty, with a lightness of heart and a neighborly generosity because we’re feeling pretty good right now, and this is another one of those moments worth taking in.

This morning a friend of mine sent me a text wishing me a beautiful day and sending me a picture of the rose bush we gave the two of them as a bereavement gift when her partner’s mother died. They named the rose bush the “Peggy” because it flowered profusely that year in the spring, in a riot of orangey pink and yellow, climbing higher and higher up the trellis. My friend’s mom’s funeral colors were that same orange pink, but we didn’t know it when we bought the colorless bush—mostly comprised of sticks and thorns, albeit with generous greenery and the promise of surviving a long Massachusetts winter. We had it delivered to the house with a card and our condolences.

“The Peggy rose is blooming again this season. From our garden to yours, enjoy!” read my friend’s text and I detected hope and optimism in her typed words. I wasn’t surprised by the serendipity of the rose’s color when it bloomed that first spring, reminding my friend of her mother. And I’m also not surprised now to see it blooming again, the morning after the news, bursting open in showy, haughty defiance of the fact that it already bloomed once this year and who says it can’t bloom again?

Alejandro Escudé

KAMALA HARRIS: U.S. SENATOR

My divorce mitigator
had an office across the street
from a Bed Bath & Beyond;
it was a huge store, and I thought of going there
the way one thinks of going
somewhere one happens to pass by
and never does because I needed to park
underneath a twenty story building
to meet my ex wife and this other woman
who we hired to file the divorce paperwork
and to suggest how we might split
amicably—and I remember, quite distinctly,
the way one remembers something
that was part curiosity and part pain,
my ex-wife pointing out the sign on the office
next door to the mitigator: Kamala Harris,
US Senator. It was such a plain
looking door, brown, as the floor was brown,
brown my feeling as my ex-wife noticed this.
I remember thinking how interesting
it was that she pointed it out, both of us
starstruck by a stupid brown door
with a name on it, the name of the woman
who had just faced down Joe Biden,
a woman who rented an office
on the seventh floor of this nondescript building
on Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles
where I was meeting with a mitigator
and the woman I was married to
for seventeen years, who I had
two kids with, and who was now divorcing me
while simultaneously pointing out
the name on a door: Kamala Harris,
and the electric blue Tarantino sky
behind it all, and the bathroom
that was across the same hallway
for which you needed to ask for the key
and how I asked once and went in
and felt a tightness in my chest,
I thought I was having a heart attack
though I wasn’t, it was more an existential thing,
as in where am I and what is happening?
I needed to take a break from negotiating
the way politicians negotiate,
the way they bicker on bright stages
that are just stages and nothing more.


—from Poets Respond, Rattle 
August 18, 2020

__________

Alejandro Escudé: “Life is surreal. There are these moments of divine yet absolutely useless premonition. Harris showed up in the tapestry of my life the way the poem describes. I’m cynical, so I think it means nothing. Will she become Vice President? I don’t know. But I do know that this incident occurred, and I remembered it when Biden chose Harris as his running mate.”