Who Will We Be

The sourdough was still warm. Felipe had been up since before light, as he is every morning, to make sure the shelves were full. I took the loaf and walked into the park, where a mockingbird was running through its repertoire and, for the first time this spring, a bluebird crossed my sight line and was gone.

History was in process. It is always in process. But the bread was warm and the bird was real.

There is a version of this moment that demands we look away from the small – that the scale of what is happening makes Felipe’s hours and the bluebird’s arrival somehow beside the point. I don’t believe that. I think the small is precisely the point. Not as refuge. Not as consolation. As evidence that the world continues to ask something of us even while larger forces attempt to answer on our behalf.

The Germans of 1939 were not, in their majority, monsters. They were people with bakeries and parks and birds they recognized from previous springs. They had children and debts and opinions about their neighbors. What they had, most of them, was a talent for the interval – for living in the space between what they knew and what they would later be required to account for.

We know what we know. That is not a political statement. It is a historical one. The promises made were specific. The distance between those promises and what has followed is measurable. The interval is open.

The mockingbird doesn’t know any of this. The bluebird doesn’t know. Felipe knows what he knows, which is that the ovens require his presence before the rest of us have decided whether to get out of bed.

Who will you be while history is still in process – before it hardens into record, before the question becomes retrospective, before the answer is no longer yours to give?

The bread was warm. That is not nothing. But it is not enough.

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