He was waiting for someone, for a business meeting most likely since he was wearing a suit and he had that expectant look in his eye like the bazillions of others of a more ivory skin hue who do the same thing here everyday. I nodded at him and he nodded back. It was all I could do not to approach him, shake his hand, pat him on the back, and ask, Isn't this the greatest day this country has seen since, oh, who the hell knows when?
Good sense got the better of me, though. I thought, What if he's a Republican? What if he'd be insulted that I'd think he'd share my glee over Barack Obama's inauguration today simply because he's black?
Then, when ordering my coffee, I wanted to ask the barista, who was white, Isn't this the greatest day this country has seen since...? But again, I resisted the temptation, not because she was white but, aw I don't know, maybe because I didn't want to embarrass either of us.
Actually, this is the greatest day this country has seen since, well, I don't know when. We're not celebrating a war victory which entails by necessity the preamble of hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed human beings. We're celebrating the first election of a black man by a predominantly white nation in the history of the world. Man!
All my adult life I've thought the single greatest thing would be to witness the Cubs winning the World Series. No lie. I haven't had kids so I don't have the emergence of a Baby Pal to crow over. (In truth, I really wouldn't have minded having a kid or two - as long as they could live elsewhere and would go away whenever I was feeling cranky.) I haven't won the Pulitzer, the Nobel, or the National Book Award. I haven't made love to (in chronological order of my obsession) November 1968 Playmate Paige Young, Shirley (Partridge Family) Jones, Suzanne Vega, Dana Delaney, or Zooey Deschanel. Whatever dreams I had as a kid, save for earning my living in a creative field, have been so far unfulfilled.
So dreaming of the Cubs bursting out of the Wrigley Field dugout on a late October night to celebrate winning the championship of the whole wide world has kept me going despite living through the experiences of George W. Bush, 9/11, debilitating clinical depression, three specific lost loves, the administration of Jim Frey, and other unspeakable horrors.
Yet, today, as I drove to the Starbuck's and listened to NPR reporters breathlessly describe the early morning scene in Washington, DC I realized that a Cubs World Series clincher would rank a distant second. How crazy, how odd, how wild it is - we've fallen headlong into a world financial collapse and people are giddy with optimism!
I don't know what the next year or two will bring but I do know that I've had it up to here with people bragging about their Hummers, their flat screen TVs, their iPhones that allow them to communicate with the people of the Andromeda Galaxy, their sixth new/bigger/better home in the last dozen years, and all the rest of the trappings they've had to sacrifice their mean little souls for. I read the other day that sociologists and the like are astounded because many people are actually looking forward to living more modest lifestyles in the coming years, that this financial apocalypse will force us to become less materialistic and more interdependent. Hooray - the era ushered in by Saint Ronald Reagan is dead!
It's a great day and I'm lucky to be living through it. I can't ask for anything more - oh, alright - just the sight of Sweet Lou, Big Z, D-Lee and the rest spilling out of the Cubs dugout next October to celebrate the championship of the whole wide world.
