When it stops on Saturday evening, it’s given birth to a different world.  Everyone is helpless, everyone is kind.  The streets are deserted and blank.  The only way to get around is ingenuity and desperation.  It feels like I’m back in Africa.

But we have such important lives!  So many things to do!

Walking to the coffeeshop is like crossing a mindfield.  You dance from clear path to clear path, dodge random vehicles that come barreling down the half-plowed lane, hope you don’t step in something that can swallow your leg.

At midnight, after some sporting event that seems ridiculously self-important and anti-climatic, I take Otis for a walk.  The drifts are higher than his head and he constantly jumps up on two feet to get his bearings.  Four girls pass singing “Who Dat?  Who Dat?”  — they’ve got a snow day coming, tonight they’re out late.

And it hits me, standing there in the unexpected wonderland, cold and white.  This is real.  So where has reality gone?  My life is staring at screens.  The information they spit out lodges in my brain and demands obsequiousness.  Will the bill pass?  Will it fail?  Did you see the plastic surgery that young woman got?  And that woman — eight babies at once! And ho, what a speech, what a speech, everything’s changed, nothing’s changed, they’ll save us all, they’ll put a hold on that, and five dollar footlongs! And LeBron dunked like so, check this reverse angle and the crowd’s reaction…and here’s video of dogs dancing salsa, dogs eating salsa, and I swear, the treasury secretary must resign! Greenland’s still melting! kids today, kids today, the things they listen to, I tell you, ya betcha, let’s start the next war, let’s restart the old one, and this new phone – my god, you can call the future with it! everyone’s got one, you got one? everyone’s got one, it can dictate time!  it can play every song that’s ever been written or even thought of — at once! and the beat goes like this: zoom, zoom, de zoom, zoom…

I shake my head to clear it.  Otis is looking at me.  Yo, his look says, where you spacing at?   Stay in the moment, bro.  Let’s go play in that field.

Ten more inches coming tomorrow.

She shook me hard.  I looked up at her face.

“What?” I asked.

“People are screaming,” she said.

We dressed and went outside.  A cluster of women stood beneath a maple, holding their hands to their mouths and pointing at the sky over Manhattan.  We followed their arms to where a tower was billowing smoke.

“A plane hit it,” one of the women said.  “It must have gotten lost somehow.”

“It couldn’t have been lost,” another said.  “It’s so clear out.”

“Maybe the pilot was drunk.”

“Maybe he had a stroke.”

“Just because your husband had another stroke, doesn’t mean everyone has them.  He was lost.”

And then the second plane hit and it became clear what was happening and that nothing was ever going to be the same.

“No,” you said.  “No.”

If I could go back and make it right…

We watched the buildings burn.  Other people joined us, bearing names we’d never heard before – Bin Laden.  Al Qaeda.  But nobody said revenge.  Nobody said who is to blame for not forseeing this?  As we watched the fire, our hearts thirsted only for mercy.

The towers fell.  The magnificent smoke cloud blew directly over our heads.  Ash rained down over us; we had to shut the windows night and day to keep it out.  Watching that cloud, you couldn’t help but be aware of the fragments of lives it carried.

Later, I would hold a man who was supposed to clean bathrooms in the towers that morning but had traded his shift.

Later, a parade of workers passed on the avenue near us, walking home, dyed various colors by the ash.

Later, it hit everyone that the firefighters at the station down the block hadn’t come back.  We gathered in the road to wait.  Street corners became places of meeting, not passage.  Nobody was in a hurry.  Candles were distributed and held overhead.  The smoke blotted out the stars.

We looked each other in the eyes and forgave each other everything, even the worst thing.

But one day not too far off, our pain would soar to the other side of the world and fire missiles into mountains, into deserts, into cities.  This would create other pains that rose up and veiled the future so that we became more and more afraid.  But before all that there was this feeling when we were standing there on the street, watching the towers, waiting for the firefighters.  This feeling was whole.

It was not maintained.  But I wanted to mention it.

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote of so many years ago: to tame the savageness of men and make gentle the life of this world.

Bobby Kennedy, the night of MLK’s death.

That is, the worry you feel is shared by every flower and tree you pass and by that dog panting on the porch across the street that just said goodbye to its master and now waits for him as you wait for the future — full of agony and anxiety, but forever hopeful that he/it will arrive safe.

The numbers are not in your favor. Temperatures rise, bank account balances fall, the roads are dangerous. The course of love begins somewhere and so inevitably, in accordance with the laws of energy, must end. But as the dog stays hopeful, occasionally falling into twitchy, groaning daydreams of pursuit and capture and belly rubs and steaks that melt like butter, so you also stay hopeful and continue onward.

Today the reflecting truth is this: the deaf university and the community around it must change or it dies. The larger reflection: the human experiment shapes up or shuts down.

Now here’s the thing. The odds are not good. But that actually is irrelevant. Whether we get to that change or not, the school or the society, is a story for someone not yet born to write. But what is important, what is the work, is just to hold that hopeful heart, that space that’s never been hurt, that’s never been disappointed, that knows the light is just around the corner. That is holy work! Just like that dog.

And then: when the master comes home – you dance!

My housemate brought home a dog from the shelter this afternoon. A beagle mutt, Oscar had been relegated, by his previous owners, to a cage for twenty hours a day. Understandably, this new cage free world is enormous and frightening for him. There are people everywhere. There are trees that reach higher than a dog can imagine. There is the litter of yesterday’s community fireworks extravaganza; piles of cardboard with angry scorched rims.

We walk past the elementary school. The moon, wreathed in a cloud, is full as all of June.

This is too much, too much Oscar says.
Otis nudges him with his shoulder. Ah, don’t think that, brother.
But what is this? What is this? Oscar points.
A shadow.
And this? Ive never seen this.
A chicken bone. Better leave that for me.
Are you sure this is ok? This is as it should be?
Yes, brother. It’s ok.

They walk a little further, turning onto the main avenue. Across the street the campus, emptied by summer and lit up by spotlights, glows like a kind of heaven.

Can I follow you? Asks Oscar
Of course, says Otis.
I mean, walk right next to you.
Sure. I know what you mean.
And what is that?
That – Otis turns is head — is a child on a bike, with his father by his side.
A father?
Yeah.
The new dog’s face feels strange.
And what is this? What is this I feel? He asks.
That’s happiness, brother.
Happiness? Should I be worried about that? Happiness?
No. It’s ok.

I spent three weeks last month in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a high plains town bowled by mountains so beautiful they’re named after female body parts. Every afternoon, these mountains collected clouds around them like school children after recess, gathering round for naptime. Evenings the children awoke and spilled forth their dreams. I wrote as much as I could, but found the words drifting in strange directions.

And then an inspiring and committed young man from the town, with his whole life in front of him, unfurling in colors so richly beautiful they don’t yet have names — a future Olympian, a future congressman, a future father walking his dog in the dusk — was hit by a car. He flew over the hood and landed in a field of roses.

The sun had just set. His girlfriend stood stunned next to the space where he had just been. One by one, the stars came out.

And you think: why? And you think: oh world, I know there is no rhyme or reason, and the love that holds you in your place in the galaxy asks only that we be there for every experience that manifests. But you think: the pain.

Where does it end? Can it end? What does it feel like when its over?

The two dogs round another corner and start heading home.
Are we friends? asks Oscar.
Sure, says Otis.
Oh, I’ve never had a friend! Is it nice?
It is, says Otis.
Oh yeah, says Oscar. I think you’re right. I think it is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Stick close to me, brother, says Otis, I’m going to show you how to piss a gate.

Update: She’s as beautiful as she is awesome.

The day is grace animated
The day is love given breath
This moment, you are held,
What more can you ever possibly need?

“Some days,” he says, “All I want is to go back.”

I drove to New York late that night. It was after midnight, Otis slept soundly and the roads were clear through southern Jersey. As I drove I had the thought, yet again, oh why do we make it so difficult for ourselves? We come into the world pure.

And then are fed toxic ideas until they define us.

Then when they put a gun in our hand and say blow up Mumbai, we do. When they put the idea that we are our bank account in our heads, we believe it. Four is less than five, they say, and we agree, and accept that our lives are less than in some significant, inalterable way.

Back here at Gallaudet, the semester is finishing up. Students rush to finish projects and complete four months of reading in a week. They hurry about with a sense of purpose that was largely absent earlier. Evenings at the dog park at the edge of campus, a bunch of students and I shiver with our hands in our pockets while our dogs play you can’t catch me.

I’m gonna run. You see me running? You see? You. Can’t. Catch. Me.

One by one the students leave to get back to their work. Two police cars drive fiercely down West Virginia Avenue, lights flashing. I stand in the dark with Otis, watching them go by.

There are fences everywhere around the campus, and how can we break them? There’s walls around our hearts, how can we bring them down?

UPDATE: The time on the Poster is wrong. The festivities start at 7, not 8. Also, I’m first up, so get there early if you’re coming.

The school is on a hill in Northeastern DC, surrounded by a neighborhood that has long been almost entirely African-American and brutally poor. Hemmed in by such a neighborhood, by spiked iron fences and patrolling police and 24hr hour security cameras, by their own sense-lack, the student community has become as cloistered and isolated as a fundamentalist compound.

The fence is high and the world outside, ah, the world outside, we’re never really going to understand each other. How can we? The moats between us and them are deep and wide. Our experience is not your experience, yours is not ours, and what’s in that gap is so crucial that we must, out of necessity – not choice — travel separately.

And this enormous country that holds both our communities, black and deaf? We know the truth. It doesn’t care. The long wind off the plains will turn our footprints to dust before the end of the day.

That was the story, and if it wasn’t told outright, it was told in look and deed. It was told in the choices people in the black and the deaf communities made, the thousand little surrenders that brought a life to the dead-end alley of never gonna happen.

Tuesday night, two hundred students gathered before the giant screen in the new building to watch the election returns come in. I sat next to a boy in a wheelchair, behind a man who can’t see or hear, to the left of three girls who had dyed their curly hair a color that was meant to represent either autumn sunset or spilt blood. Around the great, cavernous hall, other students stood, sat, stared, and squirmed as the giant screen silently ticked off the results.

They called Pennsylvania. They called Ohio. They called New Hampshire. The students jumped and cheered; a silent cheer, hands raised overhead and vibrating.

This is why it matters. This is what I could see in their faces: if a black man can be president, why can’t I? I, a deaf woman from Puerto Rico, a hard of hearing white man from rural Georgia; I, the son of the son of the son of men who could not hear and who, for generations, avoided those who could so as to not be burned by their prejudice.

You could see the wheels turning: Wait a second! Maybe there is a place at the table for me! For me! You could see the vision form: a White House cabinet meeting, dignitaries of all age and color, men and women, Jew, Christian, Muslim — and deaf.

To steal from Robert F. Kennedy: the world as it could be, not as it is.

The numbers poured in from the west coast. The victory was official. Ten students danced up front, a routine they’d worked out over by the elevator. People hugged the person next to them; hugged strangers, dogs, their teachers.

People say: but its just words. Hope over fear? Unity over division? One America over divided Americas? Just words.

The president-elect came on stage, clasping the hand of his daughter, a first family like no other, and then, bookended by bulletproof glass, spoke of the honor he had won and the challenges we face. There’s a lot of work to do, he said, we’re going to need everyone. We’re going to need all parties, all colors, disabled and non.

The students watched and nodded.

Tear down the gates. We’re part of this now.

Got an email from my old trail boss in California.

He wrote: It’s a good day. Let’s get to work.