PrettyFakes

There is a time of day on Magazine Street in New Orleans during the winter when the sun shines just so, and it gleams through a bit of cut steel and it draws on a wall the image of a telephone, of a little piece of metal and plastic we use to touch each other when we’re too far away to holler. The phone only lasts for ten minutes, at best—barely long enough to notice, to try and stream some of that light through a little hole and by doing so mash some chemicals down on sticky paper so you can remember.

Yesterday everything changed, or at least I hope it did, and I think it did, and it shuddered through me like a slow and quiet lightning, like a memory of something amazing I never did do before, a daydream déjà vu. I watched it twice: once alone, as it happened, strange magick signals shot down into a block of metal and plastic in Jackson, Mississippi of a scene hundreds of miles away; then later, on a machine that saves the signals and sprays them out when you want it to, surrounded by mothers and fathers and babies and beer.

You know, there’s this little stumble, where one of the men knows the words to the song and the other one has heard it before but hasn’t had it ringing in his head, sneaking up on him, hounding him and playing tricks on him for years like some magic imp come to visit from a fifth dimension. Then a smile, this quick and face-wrinkling thing that is kind and warm even though it’s twenty-five degrees, not a smirk but a smile, one you’ve seen on the face of that one good teacher you had in high school, that one time you went to church out in Georgia with your aunt, the one on the face of the man changing the tire for the grandmother on the side of the road.

Then there is this woman splashing words all over the world, protect us by Thy might, Great God our King, she’s done it before but this was different—and she wasn’t singing at a funeral this time, she was singing at a birthday party. “Obama Day,” wags were calling it, but I know that wasn’t right, because it felt like my day, our day, Everything Is Right Day, Yes We Can Day, It’s Finally Over Day, a Quinceañera we’ve been waiting on, we’ve been needing, since I was born.

And so we continue to struggle with what we’re given, what we have, that which we thought was broken, or cracked—and over time, we will wake and realize that this little bottom of heaven can become rich and lovely, trees draped low with fruit, so much we will have to run out in the yard to try and get the squirrels off them. And on that day we will shake our heads, as if to clear our minds from a passing dream, and we will realize that it can be real, it will be real, we can make it real, that this fleeting bit of glory can be the way we live our lives, draped about our shoulders like a cloak, keeping the wind from our neck, keeping us warm when we need it most, keeping us safe when times are darkest.

Fueled, as all Americans are, by popcorn and Jack Daniels and Fritos and dreams and the God-blessed glory of Rock and Roll, I’ll stoke the fires of hubris and be the first to cry GOLDEN AGE because I will mold the bricks myself, scrape my hands against the mortar as I stir it in the wheelbarrow, and call you over and we’ll start building, to where or what we don’t even know yet, but we’ll do it together, and it’s going to be better than anything you ever saw.

Depending on your reckoning, America is 232, or 219, or 54, but I say burn all the history books and start over: because listen, Once We Walked on the Moon, and listen: we jammed ourselves into a closet’s worth of metal and plastic strapped on top of 6,699,000 pounds of screaming fire, liquid oxygen and hydrogen spitting across America, ripping through clouds and gravity and imagination.

And listen: we were just babies then.

Tags: Barack Hussein Obama, Jack Dan'l's, the Bottom of Heaven, The Saturn V Was Better Than Your Pyramids, the Vitality and Resurgence of America

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 8:54 am and is filed under Gorjus, In Mississippi, In the Nation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.