For Charlie From Ferndale 2067

Charlie. 

This is for you when you’re 47.

You were 2 in 2020. 

The number 45 induced passion this year and if you add 45 to your age you get mine. 

47. 

When you’re 47 2020 may be talked in terms 

like 1968, 1917, 1776, or the induced passion around 1619. Or maybe it’s the years to come. 

The singers, bards, and MCs of my era broadcasted

93 to Infinity

3000 and

1999 from the purple prince in Minneapolis, the city you just moved to. 

A historic city in 2020. 

You’re 2 and moved away. I won’t see you learning to ride a bike and go to elementary school. Won’t see you get your driver’s license. Won’t see you become a teen and then a man in this world from the sidewalk in front of our house.

I create this fast forward- to reciprocate through your next 45. 

That you learn the teaching earlier than I, when I was 47. 

The lesson from you. 

The summer of 2020 in the Detroit suburb Ferndale.

We met on my doorstep with you dressed as Winnie the Pooh on a crisp Halloween. Through codes and signifiers your parents felt like we would be friends. 

The pierce of your eyes in the bundled brown and red costume. No shyness, just acknowledgement “I’m looking at you”. Don’t lose that. 

You’re cute Charlie. Cuteness fades in age.

I’d see your mother mostly when I was mowing my lawn and pulling weeds in the spring, especially when the pandemic first hit and the lockdowns started. Yard work feels like one of the more human things I do and connects me to my past. It’s what my father did and what my grandfathers did. 

The smell of grass clippings.

Cleaning up a flower bed by pulling weeds and seeing and feeling the obvious metaphors. 

Taking in psychedelic colors when the flowers finally bloom. 

Your mother and I would make the meek hellos and smiles neighbors did in this era. Smiles and hellos that are different from previous generations. Somewhere, sometime, somehow the human connection changed and I’ll leave that to other formats, other academics, other discourses. I was one of the many ones that did not see

2016

coming. 

Which maybe historians will write as the year the decades long schemes came to a head. In 2016 I saw the year through they eyes of my 14 year old daughter and the words men said. And the way the talking heads talked with toxic tone. 

And the fix. 

The conspiracy. The tension. The division. I saw the surveillance for what it was the first time. I saw manipulation and realized for over a decade I had been only thinking in winner loser monetary mindsets and that we had all been divided by design. 

Alone.

Mowing a lawn. Pulling weeds. More meaning than the conference rooms.

In 2020 conference rooms flipped to home conference calls and virtual laptop meetings. I’d take calls barefoot pulling my weeds contemplating the global tension and the domestic division.

And then came your interrupting inquisitive look from the chariot of your stroller pushed by your Mom and Dad. Interrupting my continuous conference calls from the headphones stuck to my mobile phone. Quickly our families’ smiles and hellos were no longer meek and were filled with understanding, solidarity, uncertainty, vulnerability. 

Authenticity. 

Locked in our rooms and houses, the conversation quickly pivoted to both your parents glued to their corporate screens and conference calls. The babysitting offer for my daughter and wife had presented itself back in that Halloween months before. In May 2020 your folks came over one late afternoon to come in the house, meet the cats, meet the dog, and discuss how it would all work out. The first time you came over and the stroller was left in the driveway and your mother walked back up the sidewalk I learned the teaching of the beloved community. 

In 2020 neighbors formed trust bubbles inward to isolate from the infection spread. And for late spring and summer of 2020 you came over Charlie. When I was 47.

I saw my wife instinctually revert to the nurturing mother she was with my daughter some 15 years before. I saw my daughter begin to realize the significance of her age and her generation. Through seeing your innocence she began to face that hers had begun to fade in 2020 when it first started in 2016.

They began to paint your nails red and purple which you loved and flaunted. I questioned because I wondered what my grandfathers mowing their lawn would have thought. 

We all had unfiltered conversations with neighbors and friends in 2020 and the 8 minute and 46 second violent transition in Minneapolis in May took uncertainty and vulnerability into all our streets. In Ferndale the signs came out and the marches started. Statues 100s of years old came down all over the globe. On our televisions and our doom scrolling mobile phones the division was becoming clearer but everything I saw in Ferndale was that it was coming together. You were the lens. 

Lots of conversations on privilege and bias deep into the night. I’ve heard more people cry than any year in my life.

Out my second floor room where I’d been grounded like a 15 year old on conference calls I’d see you in our backyard with my wife in the decade old duct taped kiddie pool. Pitter patting the water getting in and later shocking your mother that you loved to frolic in the water. 

Other times I’d come down for the late morning coffee and see your big smile when I descended and see the picture books, blocks, paints, mini-basketballs and the trucks. 

Trucks. Garbage day was a special day. The garbage men knew you and that was the most excited I’d seen anyone in 2020. My wife, daughter, and I would wave back at the garbage men. Smiles of authenticity and beloved community. 

Charlie. 

This is for you when you’re 47.