A Reaction to Parking Lot Laughter, Playlists and Michelle Obama's Becoming.
I’m on the patio deck. It’s upstairs overlooking the alley between our place, a bank parking lot, and the backside of a restaurant. The sun is setting behind the not-so affordable mixed-use town home complex that went up last year, likely for the singular purpose of stealing the evening sun away from me. My phone is propped up on an overturned milk crate that makes for a fairly effective side table. A can of beer in a coozie is cracked open, and sweating as the weight of the heatwave that has reached even as far west as the coastline just begins to slip off the edge of this land for the evening.
I’m reading “Becoming,” by Michelle Obama. It has been a fun, leisurely read so far. I’ve traveled through the former First Ladies youth, her trajectory through Princeton and first year as a lawyer in downtown Chicago. As the daylight around me begins to fully commit to dusk she meets Barack. The better part of the chapter explains why he was so appealing, but maybe not for her. Until the chapter’s end when they share a kiss out in front of a Baskin-Robbins in Chicago’s Hyde Park.
I know that spot. There is a plaque there to commemorate their kiss. I used to walk passed it down the same sidewalk when living there as my wife worked her way through a graduate school residency at the nearby hospital. I would stop there often, reading the plaque, and appreciate the closeness in space, if not in time, that I was to the then President and First Lady of the United States of America.
Via the Chicago Sun Times
A flicker of vintage-styled patio lights catch the corner of my eye, and loud bursts of laughter cuts through the new tracks on my playlist from Fantastic Negrito, Glass Animals, Orville Peck and Kashena Simpson I’ve been vibing too. The neighborhood restaurant has converted their parking lot, a luxury for a business in the downtown sector of this Village, into an outdoor dining room complete with pop-up tents for each table and potted trees creating walkways. It’s a lovely set up.
Finished with the chapter I skip ahead to glossy photograph pages in the middle of the hardcover book in an effort to delay having to make any other decision during what has turned into a lovely evening. It feels like looking into an old photo album. Michelle Obama with her parents, and photos of extended yet close family. Then she’s in a wedding dress being escorted down the aisle by her brother, and then a photo that feels familiar of her and Barack on a light blue couch in the house they shared above her parents on the South Side of Chicago.
I hear that too-loud laughter floating over from the restaurant along with the clinking of flatware again. The throaty ha-ha’s seem to be so emphatic about enjoying the night, and I’m jealous of the freedom found there, in that laugh. I haven’t been to a restaurant in six months. I turn the page. It is the beginning of the Obama’s as a family, then the campaign, and then the presidency mixed in with behind the scenes moments of their growing family, with the White House staff, with the dogs, and it all seems to be from a world so far in the past it is shocking that it was less than one full presidential term ago.
President Barack Obama and the First Lady Michelle Obama dancing at the "Obama Home States Inaugural Gala via WikiCommons. Click for license & official credits.
I’m sitting on the porch. My feet are up, and the book is open on my lap. There is that laughter again. Now a song from Charley Crockett coming from my phone, and I find that I’m quietly crying. I am overwhelmed by the hope emanating from the photographs at the center of this book, and that laugh, and by the reminder of everything I, and we, have been sacrificing to this damned pandemic. Excuse my language. I’m crying because of every weight, every anxiety inducing announcement, every protest trying to bring change to a politically charged atmosphere that current leaderships seems to sow only to divide.
Right now I can’t remember any one moment from before six months ago that stands out, but I can feel everything that I’ve felt in the six months since all at once. I feel so much, but nothing that I can explain in any words other than that the images in this book reminded me of hope which briefly lifted a weight I didn’t realize I was carrying. The images reminded me that it is okay to be hopeful, and to want persevere, and to appreciate each of these moments even though easy they may not be. Even though a path through to the other side may not be clear. It will take work, but it there is always hope. They are not tears of sadness, but of the complex interweaving of emotions I often find hard to explain.
I wipe my eyes with a pointer finger. My brain immediately transitions into a panicked state. I search my short term memory for the last time I washed my hands. Relief floods in when it registers that the closest I’ve been to the outside world today is that wafting laughter coming from beneath the lights across the way. Sharon Van Etten and Zach Condon serenade the alleyway from the tinny speaker on my phone. “Take my hand and help me not to shake. Say I'm alright, I'm alright…Cause we're alright, we're alright.”