Doves

Severe storms delivered a sucker punch to my tornado stricken city today.

In a mass demonstration of inanimate fatalism, hundreds of skyscraper windows leapt from the safety of their casings and plummeted to the sidewalk leaving the streets covered in sparkling shards of glass.

Driving home from an afternoon meeting, I saw people of all kinds standing in the rain holding anti-war signs on a street corner.

I stopped at a red light and looked around at my fellow commuters. Most of them seemed oblivious to the protest on the sidewalk.

I wondered if the protesters felt ignored.

A young, African American woman in a bright, orange rain coat held up a sign that said,

"No Torture."

Her message reminded me of that photo of a hooded Iraqi prisoner trying to comfort his visiting son and a post I read offering a detailed explanation of the practice of waterboarding.

I remembered both making me feel completely hopeless.

I honked my car horn and the young woman in the orange coat looked over at me.

I waved and gave her the thumb's up.

The smile that tore across her face lit up the grey afternoon.

It was contagious and spread to my face so quickly I barely knew what hit me.

We held each other's gaze for a moment grinning like idiots, connected.

The traffic light turned green and I drove towards home wearing a smile so big it made my head tingle.

It felt like hope.