Hope for the Future

Tonight I had a really remarkable hour-plus conversation with a relatively new friend of mine, whom I'll call C.

C. and I talked about everything from the current presidential candidates and who we would vote for, to growing crystals in a laboratory setting, to what our favorite number is and why.

C. is seven years old. Seven going on 40.

I know C. because she goes to her mother's nail salon after school. C's mother is Vietnamese, a sweet, quiet woman who gives excellent manicures and massages. For many months, I only knew this woman's name. I had no idea she had a husband or a child. She hardly speaks and when she does, it is a challenge for her and clearly she is not comfortable speaking English. (Sadly, my attempts at speaking Vietnamese only provoke laughter.)

A month or so ago, C. was in the salon when I came in after work. She was doing her homework, being very studious and very shy. After a few visits and some sporadic chatting (The Boy was the first to draw her out of her shell), C. has finally gotten over her initial shyness and today was the day that the dam broke. She started out by helping me and Ms. Wellspring select our nail polish colors, and 1.5 hours later, we had covered a variety of topics that started with what our favorite colors were and ended with a discussion of the difference between horses and ponies.

While C's mother tried to keep her daughter from "bothering" me, I had to explain that this conversation was nothing but pure pleasure for me. What strikes me immediately about this little girl is her incredible intellect. She is very well-spoken and is an excellent conversationalist. Her diction is perfect; her thoughts well-reasoned.

C. and I talked about Abraham Lincoln and his assasination by John Wilkes Booth, Martin Luther King, and all of the museums C. has visited in the past two months. C. told me about how black people used to have separate drinking fountains from white people, and wanted to know if I had heard about that. I told her I did, and then she remarked that white people didn't used to be very nice to black people. I agreed with her and told her that white people didn't used to be nice to a whole lot of people.

C. told me that if she was old enough to vote, she would vote for Barack Obama because he talks about hope and she thinks that is important. To have hope. Her friend would vote for Hilary because she is a woman. I said I just want the person who can do the best job, but what's great about this country is that everyone can have their own opinion about things and it's good to be able to talk about it.

***

My heartstrings tug gently at meeting immigrants like C and her mother. C's mother reminds me, in her quiet, hardworking way, of my paternal grandmother. My father's mother came to the U.S. as a woman barely out of her teens, escaping the bloody revolutions that consumed Russia before the birth of the Soviet Union, before communism crushed the souls of the people who did not or could not leave. My grandmother came to this country traveling in steerage, made the requisite passage through Ellis Island, and then on to New York where she met and married a young tailor who was raised in an orphanage.

My grandmother always spoke with a very strong Russian accent, which embarrassed her, and she never learned to read and write. (I remember trying to teach her to read and we both struggled valiantly. She was my impetus to become an adult literacy tutor years later, and partly why I feel that literacy is crucial to the success of our country.)

But my grandmother raised two sons, one of whom joined the Navy and the other (my dad), who went to a good university and got his degree in history. The contrast between her poor and humble upbringing and our "normal" suburban life was never lost on me. My grandmother's tales of narrowly escaping Cossack raids, eating potatoes in the bowels of the ship that brought her to America, and her remembrance of her first taste of ice cream has always made my heart embrace the spirit of the immigrants that still see this country through wide eyes full of wonder. She used to call America the Land of Milk and Honey, and she meant it every time she said it.

Everything about America was golden to her, and seeing America through her eyes made me so proud. I love the America that embraces all people, welcomes them and gives them opportunities that no other place can. That America may be a myth, but my grandma believed in it and I did too--once.

My grandma has been gone a long time now, and America hasn't felt golden to me for a long time now either, something that makes me terribly sad at times, because I feel so very helpless about the direction our country has been heading. But tonght, little C., with her curiosity, her intellect and her vitality, gives me hope for the future.

I see a little bit of America's tarnish rubbed off and some of the goldenness shine through because of her. It's still there. She gives me more hope than even Barack Obama.