The Balloons, the Church and the Song

A flaring one color rainbow of soft indigo hovered as sky on the fourteenth of last Sunday. The scrapped up hills of snow stained with tar, concrete and motor oil were diminishing underneath themselves, capillaries rippling, towards houses, down into gutters and into the roots of trees enclosed in sidewalks. The two twenty-eight bus would arrive in five and the walk is always a pushing slope toward the stop.

The MetroCard® was deposited and a two-seat space by a window occupied. The destination was the last stop 242^nd Street Van Cortland train station. It is a twenty minute trip however every stop the bell rings or someone is getting on. We entered into Riverdale Avenue which runs parallel to South Broadway. We will not stay long on this strip of road however it is an important stop.

It's Getty Square where someone opened a commercial sandwich shop next door to the Y. The Y the one you cannot find on the YMCA's official website. The one that my best friend and I joke about every time we pass by from Shop Rite®. The Y that posted a job opening, in The Book at Employment One Stop, that required of you to have martial arts training, a security guard license and dance instructor experience all for seven dollars and fifteen cent a hour.

In the square at two thirty on a Sunday nothing was happening except one person turning the corner down from South Broadway with big red and silver helium filled balloons. Yes it was that day for teenagers and young mothers to have construction paper cut outs with crayon written notes that will be taped or magnetized on refrigerators until Easter.

The person with the big red and silver balloons holding them with a grip blocking her profile would be a footnote for the rest of the day explaining the volume of held hands on Seventh Avenue, impromptu kisses at stop signs, long lines for late lunches at diners because 'that is the place –that holds the story of a late night after the club and tripping out and dot dot they met lighting up each other cigarettes.'

On the bus there was no evidence of this day just men and women coming from and going to church services, getting to work to relief someone of a shift or going to that particular store because the meat is not fresh at bodega around the corner. The week had past leading toward this day but the appointment was with poems and music on the sub level floor of a Methodist Church on the corner of Thirteenth Street and Seventh Avenue.

There was an aisle divided by folding chairs east and west layers of six rows. Three coffee urns and canned fruit in eight ounce Styrofoam bowls sat on a table in the back off to the side. Was there a carpet? That cannot be recalled because the grand piano stood up in front black and worn but ready to play another day. It did in this room with stained glass windows of saints and angels that faced the next door neighbor's brick wall.

The first performer was a singer. She shared – in truth forewarn that her voice was not in its greatest shape. However because it was this place, this crowd of old friends, familiar faces and of course we were in a church – all is forgiven when good intentions are abound. Her song selection woke me up not from sleep but from what I had forgotten and why red and silver balloons were plain faces in a big picture, Hallmark® window displays were just blurs while walking and chatting and what February really marked.

The woman stomp her foot to find her rhythm while holding a piece of sheet music. She sang:
Lift every voice and sing, Til earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; Let our rejoicing rise /High as the listening skies, /Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. /Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, /Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us; Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on 'til victory is won…

She was off-key but that did not matter. She was not African-American but that did not and will never matter. She sang a song that was created from struggle, hope and redemption. She sang a song that will always matter because humanity is still struggling in the Congo, Myanmar, Haiti, Afghanistan and right here in America. Redemption is constantly fighting for its name Peace but this world on this Planet Earth thinks redemption synonymous with revenge and retribution.

There is a song within us that wakes us up to where we have been with all the tragedies we have left behind. There is a song within us that keeps us from going numb on that day that particular day of love.