I wish...

the day before Lauren's birthday...and, as every parent does, I reflect on what I wish for her...there is no need to look at today's news...I know this is not the world I wish for her...but before those of us wax nostalgic...us tail-end boomers born as the fifties traded poodle skirts for bell bottoms...let's not get all choked up over better times of our youth...the sixties...assassination nation...Medgar Evers...John F. Kennedy...Malcom X...Martin Luther King Jr....Robert Kennedy...and Vietnam tossed in for good measure...and civil rights?...black men and white men side by side...floating in the Mekong...the seventies...well they were ushered in with Kent State...but Lauren's generation...Columbine...911...a Middle East war with no end...Sandy Hook...and now...a pandemic...civil unrest demanding change that never seems to come...and a recession...or perhaps worse...this past New Year's Eve...when everyone dressed like flappers to usher the "Roaring Twenties"...they should have cracked a history book...and would have seen a decade that began with the Spanish Flu...and ended with the crash of 1929...maybe not the best theme in retrospect...what I wish...change that creates stronger community...elevation and admiration of our scientists...an economy that benefits and encourages all...respect and tender treatment of this earth we've been entrusted to...and, yes...like Miss America...world peace...but mostly what I wish is that this virus is eradicated...so I can see a beautiful array of smiles in the streets...in the sun...and most especially...our children smiling at us...

waiting to exhale

there is this point...this tipping point...where your brain cannot absorb anymore...this world already leaving your heart broken...you enter a state of inertia...you go through whatever routine you have been left with...or moved back to...you wake up...you get dressed...and you blink, are back in bed...repeat...it is almost summer solstice...the long days of late spring and early summer are upon on us...and the maddening news of the nation is a drum beat constant and steady under the drone of your heartbeat...but there are moments...like during a walk last week...when the delicious aroma of a fresh mowed lawn crept under my cotton mask...and I remembered so far back...working in the city in the summer...walking home from the bus stop on Richmond Avenue...hot and sticky...and the sprinklers on pristine square lawns gently waved hello to me...calling to me with each sweaty step...until I slipped off my heels...and walked across a random lawn...baptized in the cool spray and pungent smell of the earth...and all was right...as I take baby steps into the new normal...a work in constant revision and uncertainty...exhaling my fear into flowered cotton...I'll be thinking of the simple joys...watching a blazing summer sun sink into a starry sapphire sky...