Don't Want White Things

Lowes, I’m back.  I lived for all of my life without a Lowes.  Throughout adulthood I never thought to go to Lowes.  It didn’t come up in conversation in Beijing.  Now I visit Lowes every week.  Lowes-less life now seems jarring. 

I recognize the checkout guy.  I don’t believe he recognizes me and there is something, at least to be said for that.  “Hey, where can I get a stake about this high, that I could use for tomatoes or straightening a tree?”  I don’t want to grow any tomatoes but figure ‘tree-straightening-sticks' wouldn’t have made any sense. “You’ll find everything you need, plastic and wooden, everything right there.”   I walk around the necessarily long queue of six-foot-spacers and over toward the cabinet he’d pointed to and found some green plastic poles about two meters long that seemed just about right.  They even had plastic clips right there as they knew I’d be wanting to attach something to these things.

Nice enough.  But it is unclear if these will cut it with my wife, who as accompanied me today to provide her executive clearance on any such line of sticks that are going to be placed in her yard.  I beckon her over and to my pleasant surprise the sticks are not met with immediate rejection.  She pulls one toward her face with furrowed-brow skepticism but they are not rejected and now a purchase can be made.  “Make sure you plant the part with the plastic into the ground, not sticking up in the air!  I don’t want white things.”

I haven’t spoken with my sister in a long while.  She’s been down in Brooklyn.  she suggested as many as twenty-percent of the city test positive now.   We talked about health and family and commiserated with each other over how challenging work was just now, while conceding the great fortune that we each had of relative stability when others were completely upended.  I told her I was frightened for U.S- China relations just now, during the election cycle. Things would get worse now, before they’d get better.  Before we got off the phone we shared in the tribal catharsis of outrage, humor and despair as it concerns Donald Trump.  Half-full, and fully embracing the error of my earlier presidential predication concerning this man, I took the cheerleaders role of insisting, ‘we were gonna do it.’  This nation will vote Donald Trump out of office in November, 2020.

Monday, 5/25/20