Last weekend, my husband and I showed up at a bustling city pool to watch our 9-year-old granddaughter’s swim meet. She wanted us to be low-key in our fandom, so no marching band.
This was the first time our Jackie would be competing in her new swim cap, and she greeted us with an animated story about the amount of effort it took to wrangle it over her head. I love this age. Everything is an adventure.
Before her event, a group of younger children competed in the butterfly stroke. This was fun to watch until the smallest girl started to fall farther and farther behind. After everyone else had finished, she was still not even mid-lane.
Oh, God.
I was sitting between our son-in-law, Matt, who is an excellent swimmer, and Sherrod, who swims. I am not an accomplished swimmer. Let me clarify: The first time I saw the Titanic movie I started wheezing and this was long before the band played. All that water, and there was fun-loving Jack convincing Rose to perch on the high rung of the bow and hold out her arms like a sea gull. That whispery soundtrack? My friends heard it and swooned. I heard ghosts calling from the depths of the sea.
And now there was that little girl in the chlorine pool, all alone and refusing to give up. She was wearing a swim cap and goggles, which makes humans look amphibious. Her head bobbed up and down, up and down, as she slowly made her way toward us.
Shortly after she hit the midway point, someone yelled, “Go, Leah!”
We had a name! Our diverse group of adults, children and staff rose to our feet and joined in. “Go, Leah! Go, Leah!”
As a community, we were invested. It didn’t matter if we knew her. Except for the infants, we’ve all been Leah at some point in our lives. We wanted our hope to lift her over the finish line. We wanted to be those people.
She made it. She hopped out of the pool to the roar of the crowd, smiling like an Olympic gold medalist.
America, I sure needed that.
When I was trying to figure out what to call my little acre of Substack, I initially thought I would borrow from the subtitle of my first book: “Unavoidable Truths.”
“Try harder,” a friend in publishing said. So many people are pitching their version of the truth these days, hitched to the certainty that they’re right. I respect the endeavor, but it’s not the soundtrack in my head.
How do I sum up what’s on my mind?
Hope, I realize. Virtually all my life, I’ve been thinking and writing about hope.
I don’t mean cheerfulness, although I’m often accused of having that affliction. I think it’s because I’m outgoing by training. I was raised by a former cheerleader and homecoming queen. Bouncy and Bright was the family business, on my mother’s side. (Miss you, Mom.)
When I was in my early 30s, a passage from Gail Godwin’s novel The Finishing School hit me so hard I wrote it down on a tiny piece of pink paper and carried it in my wallet for years. In it, an older woman is warning a 14-year-old girl to avoid a common affliction.
“There are two kinds of people,” the woman tells her. “One kind, you can tell just by looking at them at what point they congealed into their final selves. It might be a very nice self, but you know you can expect no more surprises from it. Whereas, the other kind keep moving, changing. With these people, you can never say, ‘X stops here,’ or, ‘Now I know all there is to know about Y.’ That doesn’t mean they’re unstable. Ah, no, far from it. They are fluid. They keep moving forward and making new trysts with life, and the motion of it keeps them young. In my opinion, they are the only people who are still alive.”
This is my new tryst with life, my forward motion. Starting today, on my 66th birthday. As I explain in the About section, I’ve been writing for news organizations for four decades, but it’s time to pivot. I’m a little nervous but as I always tell my students, if you’re never scared, you’ve stopped growing. Also, I have now lived four years longer than my mother. I know how much she missed. Why would I waste a day of what she never got?
In my orbit, hope is a fact. I’ve lived long enough to know that some will insist this means I am failing to live in the real world. As a journalist married to a senator, I think I’ve got that covered. There’s no ignoring the suffering all around us, which is why in my kitchen, you will always find a smiley sponge perched over the sink, face forward and grin up. If you think that’s ridiculous, you’ve just made my day.
I want to tell you about the photo at the top of this column. Twelve-year-old Camille Dunlap lost her father, Lewis Dunlap, to Covid three days after Thanksgiving in 2020. He did everything he could to avoid the virus until he could be vaccinated, and he died anyway. He was 51. Ten months later, I wrote about Camille, her older sister, Mallory, and their mom, Julie Wallace, for USA Today. Some stories stay with you forever. Stories like this one.
It has been a long, hard year-and-a-half for this family. Lewis was a deeply involved husband and father, and had coached his daughters in softball. And then he was gone. Mallory went off to college, where she has been determined to thrive. Camille had to decide if she still wanted to play fast-pitch ball without her dad.
Julie shared this photo of Camille romping last week on the shore of Bethany Beach. She was between games for her traveling softball team, Lady Dukes Bragg 12u, which had made it to the 2023 USSSA Eastern National Championships. They came in seventh. “Not a single error,” her mother said.
Look at that child’s joy.
Does that mean she’s never sad? Of course not. She’s just doing the hard work of finding hope wherever she can.
Thank you for this thread of kindness. I am reading every single one.
Happy birthday! You are a bright light in my life. Excited to see your new venture.