the signs, nobody is honking. The drivers all around seem, at best, indifferent.
One of them, an elderly woman with short white hair and a diaphanous sundress, reminds me of a woman I knew long ago, growing up with my Quaker family, before I met Rick and the whole course of my life changed. Miss Hannah, her name was, and she’d been a nurse in World War II and traveled the world afterward, one of those women who did amazing things back when women were expected to stay home with the kids, and subsequently didn’t understand why women who didn’t face similar barriers would do anything less.
Miss Hannah. I haven’t thought of her in years. She’d taken my hands in hers once and fixed her hard, gray eyes on me and said, “Do something with your life.”
And at the time, I thought I would. I couldn’t even fathom why she’d think I needed the encouragement.
I look a little closer, and of course, it’s not Miss Hannah, who passed away years ago. As I watch, a younger man walks among the group. He wears cargo shorts and a shirt with epaulets that makes him look like a Peace Corps volunteer, and he has a scraggly beard that can’t hide the fact that he’s not much older than twenty-five. He has a drum tucked under his arm and starts beating it in tempo with the demonstrators’ shouting.
This catches Eli’s attention. I turn to find him shaking his head.
“Hippie losers,” he says.
The light changes and we drive through the intersection.
“What did you say?”
The anger comes up on me suddenly, unexpectedly. I stomp the brake, then let up. I stomp it again and twist the wheel. As the car heads back toward the intersection, Eli stares at me, baffled.
“Mom, what’s wrong?”
“That’s what I want to know.”
“I don’t understand.”
And to be honest, neither do I. The VW careens back through the intersection and pulls along the curb across the street from where the demonstrators have gathered. I turn the engine off.
“Come on,” I say.
“I’m not getting out.”
“I’m serious, Eli. We’re going over there.”
“What for?”
Good question. I can’t think of an answer at first.
“Mom, what for?”
“To introduce ourselves.”
He pauses, then smiles. “I get it.”
“What do you get?”
“This is supposed to be a life lesson, right? Because of what I said? I’m supposed to see that they’re not hippie losers, just normal people, and then I’ll apologize?”
“Do you want to apologize?”
He thinks about it. “Are we going to do this or not?”
As we cross the street, I know I’ve lost already. Why did it make me angry? I know he was only joking. I hope he was, anyway. From his older brother, Jed, that line wouldn’t have surprised me, but Eli takes life as he finds it. He doesn’t judge. And besides, you can’t teach life lessons to a kid who’s two steps ahead of you. You can’t teach a boy who’s always willing to call your bluff.
“What am I doing here?”
“What are you doing here?”
Up close, I can see I was wrong about twenty-five. He’s older, probably in his thirties. When we approached, he greeted Eli with some complicated fist-bumping handshake, and the two of them seemed to have an understanding right from the start. But not me. This is the story of my good intentions. I sometimes act on them but always regret it. Standing on the grass among all these strangers, all I want to do is get back in the van and speed away.
“I guess . . . well, we saw you guys out here, and . . . we just wanted to say hello.”
“That’s great,” he says. “I’m surprised you noticed us.”
“It’s kind of hard not to.”
“I don’t know about that.” He smiles sheepishly under his beard. “We’re shouting at the top of our lungs, but nobody in this country is listening.”
The line sounds practiced, something he’s said a hundred times. It elicits a practiced nod from several of the demonstrators.
Eli grins at my discomfort.
“I know this probably seems a little bit out there to people in this neighborhood,” the man is saying, “but you know what I think? Most people go through life disagreeing with the politicians, yelling back at the television set, but they never say anything, not out in the open. The way we’re enculturated, we look down on people who care too much and aren’t afraid to say so.”
“We know this isn’t going to change anything,” one of the others says. “That’s not the point. We’re here so that