Hopeful Things, June Edition

love comes in lots of shapes

Happy Pride, y’all. Even in my small town in a rural county on the sandy fringe of North America, people are celebrating in ways large and small. The pictures you see here of Pride flags hanging in yards are all to be seen in my town right now, in fact: I snapped them during last night’s dog walk.

Pride month itself is a hopeful thing. It’s one of those moments we humans have created in order to give ourselves a reason not just to acknowledge but to celebrate, out loud and in public, how gloriously human we are in all our vibrant desires for beauty and affection and attraction and attention, sex and love and romance and friendships and families of all sorts and configurations.

Pride Month is one of those many manifestations of the deeply human urge to make joy and fun in the face of oppression and cruelty. It is another one of the astounding bits of evidence of the existence of the thing people like to call the human spirit, that bit of the Great Big ‘I Am’ that lives in each of us. You don’t like us? You think the world would be better without us? Well, I’ve got news for you: we’re here, we’ve always been here, we’re not going anywhere, we throw one hell of a party, and we’re going to enjoy being alive no matter what you think. Just watch.

Here in Mayberry-sur-Mer, there is no Pride parade, but there’ll be a meetup on the beach on Oak Island next weekend, rainbow swimsuits encouraged. I don’t have a rainbow swimsuit, but I do have a fabulous sun hat and may find the means and motive to adorn it lavishly for the occasion. See you there, eh?

Another shape love takes is care, and I am exceptionally fortunate to have a spouse who is a Hero of the (R)Evolution when it comes to that. It may seem strange to list this as a “hopeful thing,” but I recently had reason to be reminded, via a horrific bout of what appears to have been food poisoning, that love manifests as care and care sometimes looks like uncomplainingly cleaning up after someone you love has just vomited spectacularly. Quoth the spouse, “Well, at least you didn’t get any on the ceiling.”

I don’t think cleaning up puke should be featured on a Pride float or anything, you understand. But dang it if love isn’t love. And it does make me hopeful to be reminded of how love gets things done, even some massively unpleasant things. It also is good to be reminded that I not only married well, I also got ridiculously lucky. That is hopeful too: as difficult as relationships and human beings can be, it is also true that this sort of thing does occur and sometimes we really do all live relatively happily ever after.

Photo by Jonathan Lim on Unsplash

Another kind of hope I have been enjoying this month has to do with watching people read things they’re clearly enjoying. It’s also about a kind of love, love of words and language and stories and learning and reading. It’s about a love of the imagination, and a love of sinking into a particular, inimitable kind of intimacy with another person’s thoughts and ideas and perspective.

It’s also about this inherently optimistic, incredibly beautiful human act of believing so much in the value of words and stories and information transfer that we write them down and send them out into the world, into the timestream, into the future, never knowing who will find them or when or what they’ll think when they do. What incredible things for a human being to do.

Living in a tourist town has its annoyances. It also has its pleasures, including the micropleasure of noticing, as I wander down the street with my dog or hang out in either one of our two local coffee places, when people are just sitting and enjoying spending some vacation time with a book. I see a lot of beach reads, chunky romance novels and mysteries and thrillers, plenty of romantasy, a smattering of science fiction and memoirs and nonfiction.

There is one older fellow, eighty-five if he’s a day and with hair like a dandelion. I’ve seen him several times now, out drinking coffee in the morning, so I think he’s a local. He is slowly working his way through The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I’m waiting for him to finish so I can ask him what he thought of it. I want to do this with some frequency, and always want to do it when I see someone reading a book written by someone I know. I don’t, because I don’t like to interrupt people while they’re reading. But I want to.

Some of the people using electronic devices are also clearly reading. You can tell from the pace at which they touch the screens and the amount of time their eyes spend tracking their way down the screen between taps. I like to imagine what they might be reading. I secretly believe that at least some of the golf-visor ladies in Lilly Pulitzer prints and culottes are reading either ultra-spicy paranormal romance or adrienne maree brown. There’s one gent who likes a fancy iced coffee drink whom I am dead certain is doing the same and I think I want him to be my friend.

Seeing that other people are reading gives me hope. I hope they’re having fun. I hope they’re encountering things that excite them and give them good things to think about. I hope that they’re stumbling upon new ideas that may make their lives better. And it gives me hope that they’re reading, that they’re letting other people talk to them in this way, tell them stories, give them information. It gives me hope that people want that, that they seek it out, that they bring it with them on vacation, and that they do it outdoors in public.

Elle, the author of a newsletter called Breakfast for Dinner, recently posted a list of everything she saw people reading on the Tube in London during her commutes for a month. It was charming and I found it hopeful, too.

What I’m reading:

Yangze Choo, The Fox Wife

Tim Parks, The Hero’s Way: Walking with Garibaldi from Rome to Ravenna

This personal and thoughtful article about the history of rhubarb, which is more involved than I’d imagined.

This very satisfying list of the 100 Best Bird Names of All Time (from Bird History), and part of what makes it satisfying is that you won’t agree with all of them and will be supplying your own alternates.

What I’m waiting for at the library / bookstore:

Tom Cox, Everything Will Swallow You

Kyle Lukoff, A World Worth Saving

A couple things I published in the past month that I liked and that other people seemed to like, which always makes me hopeful:

Psychopomp of Clutter at Open Secrets

Do I Have to Write a Trauma Memoir Just Because I’ve Experienced Trauma? at Developmental Edits