Today in Hastings

We came the long way home today, driving six hours to Hastings, my old home town in southwestern Michigan. Once off the freeway, we wound down a couple of two-lane roads, wincing sometimes at the locals’ apparent presidential preference. And then we saw a big Confederate flag, well, actually, a two-sided flag, Confederate flag on one side and United States flag on the other, and I thought, damn, this is what Hastings is like now. Hard to be surprised but still, it was depressing.

We rolled up to an old friend’s house, as in a friend I had when I was a little kid in Hastings and still know even though there was about a fifty year gap in seeing each other. She grew up on a farm outside of town in a tiny village named after her great grandfather. I prayed on the way that there’d be no sign in front of her place and thankfully, there wasn’t. The topic of the election never came up. We ate her freshly made cinnamon rolls and then were given another ten along with a fresh loaf of her bread to take along for the trip back to Milwaukee. This fortified me for what I might see in town.

It is a ritual, after I visit my parents’ graves, to do a quick tour. First, we drove to the house my father built in 1952, the one where he hired a horse and plow to dig the basement. This is the front door of that house. Anything, in particular, strike your eye?

Then we drove down two blocks from my folks’ house and then around the school playground and the stand of oaks that has been part of the school property for a hundred years to pay homage to my beloved grandmother’s house or, as I sometimes think of it, my grandmother’s beloved house. Third house from the corner, there it was, painted the lightest sky blue, and, amazingly, beautifully, astonishingly in my little old home town, flying a pride flag.

The world is full of surprises, is it not?