Two more weeks and a birthday

Were he alive, my dad would have turned 101 years old today. When I hold my memories of him up to the light, I see so plainly the ways he tried to make the world better, easier, kinder for those near him or far. He started out as a prosecutor, like the little girl above, before he became a judge and eventually chief justice. Today, honoring his memory with unalloyed hope, I pray we'll be able to say the little girl in the picture, whose own birthday was three days ago, grew up to be not just a prosecutor, a state attorney general, a senator, and a vice president, but also president of the United States. 

Whatever you may think about Kamala Harris's candidacy, she is a far superior option to the felon in orange make-up who is running against her. Vote Harris/Walz, and then vote blue all the way down the ticket, too, because only then will you have a chance to fight like hell for the battles crying out to be fought in the weeks, months, and years ahead. Vote for the other guy—who is really only a feeble and demented propped up Trojan Horse meant to usher in the real Project 2025 implementer Vance—and the centuries old, admittedly imperfect, yet still stubbornly hopeful American democratic project, not to mention Trump's openly threatened "enemies within," will be dead. 

Nicole Wallace said on TV last night that girl dads might be the secret sauce in a Harris/Walz win, that they don't want to see their daughters suffering under the Republicans' outlawing and criminalizing of life-saving reproductive health care that has already caused hundreds of thousands of women and their families untold pain. I hope she's right. I suppose it's too much to extend that hope to the idea that every man or woman who loves a woman or girl will do the right thing at the polls on or before November 5—but whatever, collective thought is a powerful driver, and hope is free.

In celebration of my dad's birthday, here he is in May 1946. He was 23 years old and working as a clerk of the courts in Spanish Town, Jamaica. This photo was taken the year he met a young postmistress who would one day become my mother and three years before they would wed and leave our little island for London, England, so that my dad could study law. Till the day she died in 2015, almost twenty years after my dad left us, my mom kept this photo of him between the tattered pages of her bible.