It's Possible

Yesterday I started reading a book called The Maid, by Nita Prose. The main character is a 25-year-old, Regency Grand Hotel maid named Molly Gray who loves her job. She’s odd. She’s naïve. She’s a goody-goody who follows the rules, and nothing makes her happier than to “clean her rooms to perfection.” In one scene, she vacuums up the dust from a guest’s coffee table, only to learn that the dust is cocaine. I did that very thing on my first professional recording gig in New York City. The studio’s kitchen table had sugar all over it. When we took a break for lunch, I wiped it down thinking it would be less sticky for all of us to sit around. I was never hired there again.

I was enough rattled by my similarities to Molly that I asked my friends at dinner last night if they thought of me as odd. The answer was, yes, but in a good way. These are people I love and trust, so we all laughed. Later, one of those friends told me that my naivete and overall goody-goody-ness makes her wonder how I could have been involved in the music business. I assured her I’d understood that from the beginning.

On Thursday, late in the afternoon, I took my usual walk across Oregon State University’s campus to the farmland on the far side. On my way, I saw women playing rugby, men playing badminton, half-a-dozen large groups of students rehearsing dance steps for an upcoming event (lots of laughter, cheering, singing, throwing each other over their backs and landing on their feet in time for the next sequence). There were young men in skirts, gym shorts, sport coats and ties, women in stilettos, Birkenstocks, Converse, and Nikes, and over 200 protestors singing and chanting while campus police drank coffee nearby.

On other days, I’ve seen groups of students for Trump, for Jesus, for the Green Party, for Biden, for Independents. There have been gatherings of Asian American students, Indigenous students, LGBTQ+ students, Muslim students, Black and Brown students, and several weeks ago, an outdoor event for the President of the University (Jayathi Murthy, an Indian American) offering cuts of Chocolate or Banana Cream Pie to students who came to meet her. I’ve never seen so many pies!

There is so much going on that’s good at Oregon State. The campus is exploding with life of the human variety, but also rhododendron, azaleas, chestnuts, magnolia, and dogwood. All I could think to myself was: It’s possible. There’s proof, right here, all around me, that people of all kinds can live together peacefully, doing what they love even when the person next to them is doing something entirely different that they love. It’s a remarkable, hopeful, thing to witness. Before I got home, I texted myself two lines to remind myself of the goodness I saw, and maybe this is where I’m a little like Molly:

Flowers bloom as rain keeps falling
Sunsets start then mornings follow

Pink everywhere in a courtyard behind a classroom building at OSU.

thank you!