Is this the pain of too much tenderness?
To make me nod my head in reverence?

-From Love, Mos Def

I yelled “fuck you” to the sunset. Driving back from my childhood home (the only real house I ever dream about, the house that’s so full of memories I almost can’t fit them in my heart, I almost can’t feel them), the sky was insane, maddening. After a hot day with rain on and off, the sky just wouldn’t stop moving. Bright and rosy on the edges, burning with the sun, cool and deep overhead. The clouds persistently willfully bewildering, charcoal and cotton and fire, moving as only clouds do, to their own cloud logic. I said I’m not going to take a picture, I’m going to remember it, but as we drove through firefly-lit hushed fields, the sky said, “Can you remember this? And this? Can you remember all of this?” Will you remember when the sky was dusk and the clouds were glowing? Will you remember when the sky was glowing and the clouds were dusk?

It’s strange how some moments can leave you feeling unexpectedly raw. Some days I’ll be walking along through the world, fully possessed of my maturity and composure and whatever other calloused armor lets us get through the day in a capable and functioning fashion, and some small gesture will undo me. It’s usually something seemingly insignificant, something I could easily pass by without noticing at all. But it will leave me a weepy puddly mess, for a minute or two.

That time I walked Clio near the playground of my boys’ old school, and kids with their winter-bright outside faces were playing some game where they touch hands and race around and touch hands again. Or the glowing teenagers at the Pride parade, beamingly, defiantly happy about wearing what they wanted to wear and loving who they wanted to love. And the old people at the parade, too. Same. Or the young man who came into the dentist’s waiting room to sit by his mom, and they just sat there quiet and calm, speaking their own silent language, when I was so nervous and impatient myself. Or the lady cleaning my teeth, who was chattering about her son’s chocolate zucchini bread and her neighbor’s green bean salad and a concert she missed because the musicians were so old and it was raining, because she knew I was nervous as hell and her constant stream of words fell like a cooling rain. Or shimmying dogs meeting each other on the towpath, brimming with hope and love and a hint of fear. Or the little girl singing a song to the boxes of tin foil at the grocery store, and making her dad listen to all of it, and her dad’s delighted face.

We made a trip to the grocery store in the evening, when I was feeling a little tired and undone anyway, and everything, everything, everything seemed moving. Just people with tired faces at close of day, doing the chores they always do, moving through the store and chatting and laughing and being kind to each other when they were trying to find something or having trouble reaching something, or just slow to move along the aisle. All in it together. And when we walked out into the cooling dusk I felt so stupidly happy and sad I could burst. Absurd moment, absurd me.

I suppose it’s moments of connection, if I stop and look at it rationally, that strike such a tender chord; moments of communication or thoughtfulness or kindness. And they’re everywhere. They’re all around us. I feel crazy for getting so emotional about small things, but maybe we’re crazy for not being constantly undone by these moments, for not being constantly aglow with emotion set off by these small gestures.

We drove home from the store through pockets of Trump country in a blue state, with signs on the lawn that always seem defiant and angry, despite the fact that their guy won, that their guys control everything. But you just know if they met their neighbors at the grocery store or the dentist’s office or the post office, everyone would be kind, everyone would be helpful, everyone would joke about their shared worries and woes, about the things we all share. On the eve of our 250th birthday, it feels a bit like everything has gone wrong: the great experiment, flawed from the first, is coming apart at the seams, revealing some sad rot at its core. We hear, again and again, that we’re more divided now than we have ever been. Being told that we’re divided fuels division, and serves some purpose or other for some men who have never been to a grocery store in their lives. It makes them richer or more powerful, in ways I don’t want to think about long enough to understand. But we’re really not divided, day-to-day, in our neighborhoods and shops and work; I have to believe that we’re not as divided as they say.

All around us are these bruising moments of connection; we’re all coming together and moving apart, going on with our lives, sharing our absurdity and our worries and our joys. When Holden Caulfield is moved to sadness or happiness by little things like a kid’s roller skate key or a boy walking behind his parents in a straight line singing a song, or a cranky cab driver who doesn’t know where the ducks go in winter, he says, “It kills me.” I recently read that phrase described as his pangs of love. And I think that’s what it is. Not love for a family member or partner, but love for a stranger, for all strangers. Love born from the recognition that their worries are our worries, their happiness is our happiness. Love for the people pushing their carts through the grocery store or sitting beside us in a waiting room. It’s a strange feeling. There’s sadness in it, but there’s joy, too. And there’s comfort. We don’t all have the same memories of childhood, but we were all children once, we all have memories of childhood that hit us unexpectedly in their glancing discombobulating way; we don’t all see the same clouds or the same sunset, but we all have clouds moving into and out of our skies with their strange cloud logic, we’re all warmed by the same sun. We’re all in it together.