living on…

This last weekend my Beauty and I jetted to Boston and Baltimore to get another jolt of ‘maybe’ as she finalizes her college decisions..

….and her blue eyes scanned the cities  and the students,the memories I could barely hold back from the jumble of my own past, the bookstores and weather, the black faces, the white ones and the possible Beauty’s she might become..

I had the privilege of watching her compute the future in  her third eye,

….the feel of the weather, the intellect of the possible roommates, the laughter in the security guards versus the serious demeanor of the guys in the downtown bodega’s. Everything was in the hopper, the cab ride and the sunshine, the brilliance of the spring Sunday pouring thru the gate at Johns Hopkins and the way the smell of beer lingered over the burgers at the Turtle Cafe.

And i saw her measure herself against herself as the prospect of herself in the future started to take shape.

There is no greater privilege than that of witnessing a child become a woman.

Her eyes did not see the Common and the Garden full of Viet Nam protesters, or stoned boyfriends walking through snowflakes, or couples rolling in each others strange arms on the banks of the Charles River.

She did not smell the panic of the test I took in a Baltimore house full of radical lesbians when I realized I was pregnant for the first time and needed to feel a  man’s arms–her fathers arms– around me to cut the richness of all that estrogen.

She did not see me in those cities.

She saw herself and who she will become

and that is the way the world washes itself and gives us hope.

my god. how much more glorious can this journey be?