Staying in the microcosm

 

 

We went to the seventh birthday party for the little guy on my son's shoulders. He's the nephew of my son and his wife, which meant we spent the afternoon in New Jersey hanging out with our in laws and their other in laws, all of us having a grand time. There was a couple we were meeting for the first time, who it was whispered were Trump supporters, yet we enjoyed interacting with them as much as everyone else, though of course we didn't venture near politics. Everyone else there was unabashedly liberal, as we are, so the Trump supporters were doing due diligence too, I expect. The wife of the couple mentioned in conversation that their older son had died of an accidental overdose eight years ago, and how do you have anything but an open heart for someone living with that kind of trauma. Their other son, grown and married with two adorable kids of his own, was lovely, too. He and my son are both medics, and get on well. We were a multiracial gathering of chosen family, Jamaican, Antiguan, Irish, Polish, Filipino, and Puerto Rican, and everybody also just American—society as it could be and some people's nightmare, all at the same time. Sometimes, it's okay to block out the larger world and just stay in the possibility of the microcosm.