I wonder when the signs will come down, when I’ll notice homes more for their trees and blossoms and less for their political insiders. If we could all just paint our doors with the promise that they will open to each other in a time of need, if we could paint 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, all the welcomings to be shared. If we could all applaud together when cars slow to the speed limit and all the trash bins are stored and empty. I’m ready for gentler gazes, less buzz, a softening of the sharp edges that the yard signs have etched into comings and goings these days.
Wouldn’t it be rare and wonderful for these streets to become known as emblems of neighborliness, our best intentions floating around our homes like party balloons.
Wouldn’t it be rare and wonderful for these streets to become known as emblems of neighborliness, our best intentions floating around our homes like party balloons. I’m thinking these thoughts as I near the rise that leads to the corner where our home sits and sports two signs and the American flag. The first sign reads 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 over four months ago, the week after the murder of George Floyd. We placed the second sign more recently. It reads “Make America KIND again” which I amended by adding “and DECENT” to complete the intention. It stands centered beneath the American flag.
I liked the double-take that the red,white, and blue sign caused. “Trump or Biden?” a man on a recumbent bicycle asked his female companion as I peered through an open window. The woman stepped to our side of the street and investigated. “Neither. Make America Kind Again,” she parroted. ‘Humphhh” the male replied as he pedaled away.
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.” In the months and years since the last election, I had seen the American flag become even 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. Yes, I thought to myself as I tugged on Mocha’s leash as we touched on the bark that surrounded our yard, we get to be Americans who display a flag, too.
After the walk, Mocha and I settled on the sofa facing the windows that look onto the front yard, the corner, its “T” intersection. My eyes adjusted to the soft afternoon light that arrives when the calendar nears November. All was well, I thought, until a mufflerless sports car screamed up the street and caught my angry eye. Slow the fuck down, asshole, I heard myself saying. As the screeching acceleration faded, I stared at the shadows and light falling through the three elms that buttressed the corner of the yard. Something was wrong. Something was gone. The sign! The We Believe sign was AWOL. When the hell did that happen?
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 enough 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 Pat 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 Pat and do my best to bury my head in the sand.
Three days later, November 1st dawned after a Blue Moon and a treatless Halloween. We had closed the blinds and turned off the porchlight in a staged denial of anything that smacked of tradition. Halloween had been a perennial favorite of mine since childhood, but this year, the whimsey and ghoulishness seemed like impossible partners to what else we had been living through. I disassembled the two small 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 entry way ad opened the door to a tall man in a face mask whose eyes looked vaguely familiar. Mocha whimpered at my feet, and I had to bend to restrain her. From a half-crouch,I looked up at the amused eyesbrows. 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.” He slipped the We Believe sign into my free hand through the crack in the door.
“Oh, my goodness.” In a burst of connection, I identified the lean man with the friendly smile and his black dog, the size of Mocha. We had exchanged morning greetings for weeks whenever our paths crossed. He was new in the neighborhood. “I’ve been heartbroken this week. Where was it?” I inched up to a more welcoming stance as Mocha settled.
“A few blocks away, on the street. It’s been battered, I’m sorry to say.” He shrugged his shoulders as if to lighten the news.
“Wow. Thank you so much.” 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 Pat, to offer him tea.
“Take care,” the masked man said as he turned to go. He walked slowly down the porch and the steps and into the flowering night. Immediately, my spirit rose from the well and filled the vast place in my heart where hope resides.
The next morning, with a strength of purpose I hadn’t felt for several days, I mounted the sign on a new frame, pulled the flag out of its stand in the garage, wedged the Kind Again sign under my arm and restored our front yard to contain symbols of our democratic values for social justice as the American Way.