yes, virginia...or the story of hope and courage

who would’ve thought it /life is finding a way through this wasteland of cynics, concrete and pain /there’s a man down here / somewhere between the Saturday cartoons and the dirty magazines /he’s raising the dead in the graveyard where we’ve laid down our dreams

there’s a man down here /not worried or afraid that some politician forgot all the promises he made /and he’s raising the dead in the graveyard where we’ve laid down our dreams /his name is hope

j.m. mcmillan


I have a good friend who has had a hard time this year. Actually, it started in 2006, when her roommate was one of two people to die in a flash flood and her good friends Scott and Sarah had a baby Thomas, who got cancer. Also, she told a guy she liked him and he didn’t reciprocate. (You might not think this is on the same level as cancer, and mostly I agree with you, but still, this is not the most pleasant thing to happen.) I moved back in with my parents and couldn’t find a job, and we played the Weepies’ "This is Not Your Year" an awful lot over the phone.

2007 was supposed to be better, and we even picked words of the year to suggest this: Mine was courage, and Kait’s was hope. (More on words-of-the-year in future posts.) Hope and courage, it turns out, actually live a lot together. I needed courage to start life again in a new-old place where things and people were the same but not. And Kait needed hope - hope to stay in the same place and build community with people, to learn how to love people who need love when life sucks, and just to be able to maintain the Dallas scene in general. (Let's be honest.) Also, her mission in life is to feed kids, and this is something you need hope for, because hunger is a problem of monumental proportions.

Anyway, this whole year, Kait’s been looking for hope and miracles. In the first part of the year, she was my hope when I was crazily depressed and didn’t know what I was going to do with life and didn’t want to talk to anyone in the world. Then we had some craigslist adventures that lightened the mood and our hearts for a while. She did an amazing job with her summer job, which she has tended to hate, and it was better this year…I got a good job. She thought about coming back home. Then this fall Thomas’ cancer came back, and it’s not treatable. And Kait’s been asking for miracles again.

What she got was a q drum.

I don’t know if you read the ny times article I posted recently, but apparently a q drum is one of the best inventions ever, used in Africa to help get water to people who need it. It helps people in a practical way. You put water in it, and it’s roll-able, so even a kid can transport it. Kait thought this was cool… she e-mailed the contact person to tell them so. They started exchanging e-mails, and what do you know? He tells her he thinks she needs a q drum and he's going to send her one. She thinks, alright. Three days ago, she gets a q drum in the mail. All the way from South Africa. Not even in a box, no cardboard, no wrapping, nothing. just the drum.

She picked it up, wrapped it, and put it in her trunk. She called me to say it was rolling around in her trunk making her happy. She took it to Scott and Sarah’s, and Thomas played with it. He jumped on it and rolled it around and made crazy lovely faces for the camera. It was good.

I think this might be a miracle, that in the week before Christmas from somewhere halfway around the world, this guy she's never met gives my friend – who so badly needs to hope for something good to come out of such wretchedly difficult things – a reminder that in the midst of death, we are in life…And it is amazing.