A Reprieve for the Red, White, and Blue
I wondered when the signs would come down, when I’d notice homes more for their trees and blossoms and less for their political insiders. Couldn’t we all just paint our doors with the promise that they would open to each other in a time of need? Could we frame them with the joy of watching a father teach his daughter how to ride a bike and with the laughter of toddlers tumbling on the lawn, small joys to be shared? Could we all applaud when cars slowed to the speed limit and all the trash bins were stored and empty? I was ready for gentler gazes, less buzz, a softening of the sharp edges that the yard signs of an election year had etched into the neighborhood’s comings and goings.
Wouldn’t it be rare and wonderful if our better angels could float around our homes like party balloons? These thoughts levitated around me as I neared the rise to where our home sat sporting two yard signs and the American flag.
The first sign read in a bold array of colors, “We Believe Black Lives Matter, Science is Real, Love is Love, No Human is Illegal, Water is Life, Women’s Rights are Human Rights, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere.’ Martin Luther King.” That sign went up the week after the murder of George Floyd. We placed the second sign more recently. It read “Make America KIND again” and stood centered beneath the American flag that waved from a fence pole.
Our claim the American flag felt part justified and part nanny-nanny-booboo. I’d had enough of the usurpers of the Land of the Free. I thought of the first line of the heart-yanking poem by Langston Hughes: “I, too, sing America.” I had seen the American flag become ever more engorged with fascist ideals and capitalist market shares. The Stars and Stripes had been reduced to a stage prop, a truck-bed fancy, a flapping advertisement for used car lots. I tugged on Mocha’s leash as we stepped onto the bark that surrounded our yard, we are Americans, too.
After the walk, Mocha and I settled on the sofa facing the windows that look onto the street corner, a t-intersection. My eyes adjusted to the soft afternoon light that arrives when the calendar nears November. All was well, I thought, until a muffler-less sports car screamed and caught my angry eye. Slow the f*** down, a**hole, I heard myself saying. Had irritation permeated my soul? As the screeching acceleration faded, I stared at the shadows and light falling through the three elms that buttressed the yard from the street. Something was wrong. Something was gone. The sign! The We Believe sign was gone!
My emotions flipped and flopped from indignation to sorrow and back again. Flashbacks of home invasions, thefts, car wrecks, verbal threats, name-calling, physical abuse from a cactus of memories pierced my peace. You are not immune. You are not special. You are a victim just like everybody else. My spirit plummeted like a boulder hurled into a well. For four days, I couldn’t stand up straight to save my life. I wandered from room to room making attempts at neatness and organization, aware that none of what I was doing mattered. The sign’s disappearance stole something from me. Here we Americans were, five days from an Election Day that we had been desiring and dreading for weeks. The instigation of meanness had begun long before the last election and would continue long after.
I had learned, whether I liked it or not, that the playbook of respectability had been jettisoned for a funky transmutation designed by a group of evil, hapless, gamblers with nothing but money and time. Sucker-punched by the loss of the sign, I was done. I took down the flag, pulled up the second sign, and told Trish that we were too old and defenseless to bandy about beliefs for the public to see. I was ready to leap down the well where my spirit had fallen.
How long would my depression last? How much aimlessness could I stand? Who knew. I could bake a cake and read a good book and take Mocha to the river and play cribbage with Trish and do my best to bury my head in the ever-quickening sand.
Three days later, November dawned after a Blue Moon and a treatless Halloween. COVID had mad sure of that. We had closed the blinds and turned off the porch light in a staged denial of anything that smacked of tradition. Halloween had been a perennial favorite of mine since childhood, but this year, the whimsy seemed like an impossible partner to what else we had been living through. I disassembled the two witchy arrangements I had allowed myself and packed them away in the garage for another year.
Later that afternoon, once twilight was setting in, Mocha barked like she does when we’re getting a delivery. The doorbell rang its three-noted bellow. We all jumped. I turned on the light in the entryway and opened the door to a tall man in a face mask whose eyes looked vaguely familiar. Mocha whimpered at my feet, and I bent to restrain her. From a half-crouch, I looked up to see amused, friendly eyebrows. And there, as I bent holding Mocha from a full-on pounce, I saw what the visitor held in his hand.
“I thought you might want this back. I think it’s yours.” A generous hand slipped the We Believe sign through the crack in the door into my open palm.
“Oh, my goodness.” In a burst of connection, I identified the lean man with the boyish smile and his black dog, the size of Mocha. We had a history of exchanging morning greetings wherever our paths crossed. “I’ve been heartbroken about this. Where was it?” I inched up to a more welcoming stance as Mocha settled.
“A few blocks away, face down on the street. It’s been battered and beaten, I’m sorry to say.” He shrugged his shoulders as if to lighten the news.
“Wow. I smiled and nodded as I flipped the sign to see the damage on one side but not on the other. A pause hung between us as we stood eye to eye. In a non-COVID world, I might have asked him inside to meet Trish, to offer him tea. “Thank you so much.”
“Take care,” the masked man said as he turned to go. He walked slowly down the porch steps and into the flowering night. My spirit sailed!
The next morning, with a strength of purpose I hadn’t felt for several days, I mounted the We Believe sign on a new frame, lifted the flag from its place in the garage, wedged the Kind Again sign under my arm and restored our public messages of the democratic values for which we stood, believing more than ever in the revisioning of the American Way.
(For an earlier version of this piece published in November 2020, see Sharon’s blog.)
