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The Old Ones Just Keep Going

On a day of celebration, we decided to just keep riding

On the day the election is called we mount our bikes and climb the hill near what used to be my mother‘s Flatbush apartment. The hill seems endless but today I am also endless. I stand and push, suddenly aware of how much power lives stored in the thickness of my thighs. Power enough to defy gravity, power enough to propel myself through the morass of time. The hill seems to go on forever. My breath is short but longer than it used to be. It has been nearly three weeks since I quit smoking for probably the 75th time in my adulthood. This quitting felt different: I had a birthday, I’m talking about it in therapy, I’ve noticed an overall drop off in self-destructive impulses, my mother died of this very thing. All of these factors make me feel like this quitting is different. But then again I often have the feeling that “this quitting is different.” The last 74 or so times, it has not been.

Nevertheless….

I am biking around a Brooklyn that is celebrating an election win, or maybe more accurately, they are celebrating an election loss. They are celebrating a vote count suggesting that there are more American voters who don’t want an obviously cruel racist authoritarian in the White House than do. A low bar, but a bar nonetheless. It is nice, the dancing and horn honking and firework setting, the public parties, DJ’s in the streets, spontaneous chants. It is nice the woman bouncing down a Bed-Stuy block alone, smiling wide, cigarette in her mouth, “Can You Feel A Brand New Day” playing from her phone. The song is from The Wiz, a 1978 black all-star take on the Wizard of Oz staring Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Richard Pryor, Nipsey Russell with music by Quincy Jones. It was sung after the Wicked Witch had been finally defeated. I know somehow that this woman has been planning on playing this song on this day for the past four years, I know because it’s the kind of thing I would plan, it’s the kind of thing my mother would have planned. Probably even the same song, since watching The Wiz was a family tradition and its songbook a part of our lexicon. Can you feel a brand new day? I don’t know if I ever could, or if any Black American person truly can. Collectively, in our shared history, our generational memory, our epigenetics, we have been experiencing America, experiencing whiteness for hundreds of years. After all this time it is much easier to sing about a…