Two Kinds of Hope

I tend to reject grand narratives in both art and life, but there are times when events and movements seem to dovetail, and last night was one of those times. A monumental election coincided with a difficult anniversary, and it was hard not to get swept up into a tide of emotion.

The top photo shows a hand-made sign linking Ocean Beach with a specific campaign, and it sprang up in a nearby yard sometime in the early days of the presidential race, when the Clinton machine was still swaggering its way across the media landscape and Mitt Romney was rubbing brylcreem into his gleaming hair. But this little red-white-and-blue patch of hope gave me a small promise of positive directions to come.

The bottom (somewhat fuzzy) photo was taken exactly one year ago at the Naval base here in San Diego, moments before Jane climbed aboard the USS Cleveland for her seven-month deployment to the Middle East and beyond. It was a journey neither of us wished to take - both for the purely personal anguish of losing a companion and a larger moral ambivalence in taking part in a military operation demanded by rulers we did not support or respect. You can see that I've plastered a very false and tentative smile on my face. Jane isn't even bothering to fake it. Immediately afterwards, we said goodbye for the better part of a year, and began figuring out how we were going to cope without the other.

I wouldn't dare to compare our personal story with the larger events unfolding yesterday, but they do remain linked in my mind. Our rapt attention to the returns last night was tempered by bittersweet remembrances of our actions one year earlier. That bittersweetness remains today as we close two chapters in our lives.