On the Road Again…

Dear family and friends,

My better half and I are once again about to hit the open road as we (very slowly) make our way to Praia, Cabo Verde. This has been one hell of a journey, but since we are moving, I wanted to give you all a brief update.

In all honesty, leaving is absolutely more bitter than sweet. Coming back to Washington DC is normally a mixed bag and I tend to oscillate between yearning for the long overdue homecoming with family and friends, and lamenting the inevitable torture that is death by a thousand racialized microaggressions.

I have to apologize to all of you because I wanted to see you and show you some love … the kind of love that just doesn’t translate via zoom. Please know that I love you and I will see you on the other side of the Rona.

This year, once filled with promise, seems to be heralding the literal apocalypse. Let’s consider the evidence: killer bees, raging global bush fires, the coronavirus, and lynchings in the public square. And we ain’t even half way through the year yet.

To put it mildly, 2020 has been a pretty shitty year. But I am nevertheless grateful for the small blessings and am humbled that I was able to help at least one person on this particular journey.

Family and friends, I would like to tell you about Naymon. Naymon is a skinny black man with a short Afro and a great, big heart. He is the concierge in our building here in Virginia and is the blueprint for excellence in customer care and customer service. When we first arrived, he went way beyond the purview of his job to help us get settled into our new home and has, since then, always shown us nothing but kindness. It is the sort of kindness that my husband and I have yearned for in this area because people have a tendency to be apathetic about our existence at best, and downright hostile towards us the rest of the time.

I have complained about my neighbors on this blog before, but it bears repeating that they are rude, dismissive and sometimes just plain nasty. I’m sure you can only imagine how they treat my friend Naymon if that is how they interact with us, their actual neighbors. And despite their inexcusable behavior towards him, he always treats everyone with the same familiar kindness and profound respect that is touching because it is genuine. We felt “at home” because of him - a feeling we do not take for granted as global nomads.

So, with his service in mind, my husband and I decided to write him a thank you note and give him a tip. The tip is normally customary at Christmas time but this building unfortunately does not have a Christmas drive for their staff. So we gave Naymon a tip as a token of our appreciation on this, the eve of our next journey. We are not rich but we gave as much as we could to intimate just how much we appreciated him and his service.

I wasn’t ready for what happened next.

Our friend Naymon, our dear, sweet Naymon had to take a walk around the block to keep me from seeing the emotion run down his face. When he returned, he told me that we had no idea how much our token meant to him … how he didn’t know how he would have otherwise made it through the week. He thanked me profusely before I walked back to my empty apartment where I quietly wept in my husbands’ arms … feeling all the emotions.

But I don’t actually know how I feel right now. To be clear, I’m not writing this story for kudos and do not want them (because we literally did the bare minimum). I’m writing this story because that black man, my brother, with a full time job, a job where he constantly is in danger of coming into contact with the coronavirus, was a few dollars away from not being able to eat or provide for his family. I am stunned. I’m sad we can’t give more. I’m angry that my neighbors take his service for granted. I’m pissed that someone as kind and hardworking as Naymon is seemingly destined for failure because racialized systems are in place to all but ensure his failure. I’m fucking overwhelmed.

But I’m thankful. I’m thankful for the opportunity to show that man a bit of the kindness he always showed us. I’m grateful that we made a small difference in his life and I’m hopeful that it was just the first of many well-deserved blessings.

We all will, at one point or another, need this type of unexpected support. My message to you today is simple: show someone you love them. Do it now … what you might consider small or insignificant will mean the world to someone, someday.

In 2020, all of us need a bit of tenderness. Be kind and be blessed.

Yours always,

the trendy one …