Today has already been eventful. After yoga and meditation this morning and a final blast of mental affliction stamped into my private, hand-written journal, I walked to the convenience store because now I want to read from library books I have borrowed and am out of Chai Tea. What will become of this luscious, lecherous habit.

I’ve got my green cloth, re-useable grocery bag that announces to the world that I’m trying to be conscientious.  Now I am talking to my favorite cashier. As I place my three items onto her conveyor-belt-for-one counter, I smile, and she smiles, and we are happy to see each other once again.

“You’ve got that hoedown music playing”, I say with the best country accent I can muster. I say this while I slap my now-bent knee and stomp my foot down twice onto the musty wooden floor boards in imitation of what I think is “everything honky tonk”.

The cashier’s face is young, freckled, wide-open, and bright with smiling blue eyes and “that haircut” that has lasted here (where I once and again live) for the past 20 years.

“I love Country music”, she says, “you don’t?”

Because she and I have now developed a cashier-customer relationship of total honesty with one another, I say, “Nope”. “I hate it.”

This is not entirely true, so I explain to her that the other night I listened to a pianist who played with the Allman Brothers and other timeless musical groups. He never sang with them just played the piano, but, that night he played and sang alone a Hank Williams’ song, in his own style of playing Hank Williams.

I explain to her, I heard the verse “and the moon hid behind a cloud so no one else could see it cry, while the sun… and I’m so lonesome I could…”, and Norah Jones singing Hank Williams lyrics, as well as other Country artists in a way I can hear and appreciate the wealth of Country music, and the cashier and I make other customers wait in line while we clear this thing up.

This is my explanation-answer to her question, “what kind of music do you like”? I wanted to let her know I had not ruled out Country music entirely, and I was traveling south for a concert tonight.

Now I am headed home to my one-bedroom apartment that I’ve come to love, and gaze at a pristine, blue sky that promises forever through one white birch tree flourishing with skyward-turned limbs, except for one that is broken and sagging but still hanging on among heartier, budding maples and elms. A robin settles onto the top of the largest, sturdy tree and jumps from branch to branch until it settles so I can get a look at it for a good five minutes.

There is one daffodil growing, in my alcove neighborhood, on the lawn of a new tenant who moved to the U.S. from South Africa and whose mother came to America in 1975 to try and make a place for him to live in less fear for his life. She named him Kennedy.

“Do you go by Kennedy, or a nickname, or is it Kennedy only…”, I ask.

“Kennedy only”, he says in a definitive and beautiful South African English dialect.

In the back of my mind words and phrases like hope, the promise of, liberty, freedom, and Kennedy are floating. His face helps me not to place them into any kind of formula for assumptions and none-of-my-business certainties.

I realize I am just happy to be talking to him and tell him there is a tree in Africa that when I look at it in photos, I always feel God, and before I can say the name of the tree, he is already nodding his head in recognition and knowing anticipation of the tree I will name.

I say, “I’m never sure how to pronounce it, but I think it is called an Acacia”.

He helps me pronounce it as I have pronounced it with a short “a” in the middle when actually the “a” is long. He goes on to tell me more about the tree then what I can see in pictures.

While he talks I remember how the daffodil on his lawn made me very happy this morning. He had been working very hard for days on his small patch of land. His legs and arms long with lean muscles, he cleared away dead leaves, branches, old dust and debris that filled six, large lawn bags. He did this for his three young children who will be joining him next spring.

“I love trees,” I say, when he is through speaking.

“mmm”, he hums as we both stand in silence looking up at the nearest tree.

I wonder what words and how many are floating around in the back of his mind now. I respect his privacy and don’t ask but feel a pang of sorrow that perhaps does not belong to me. I turn to watch his face looking up and then look down at the dirt where I have swirled an oval with my sandaled toe.

“Well, I have to be going,” I say.

I realize I have jarred him into hospitality as he puts up his hand and says, “yes, yes, of course”, and backs away.

“I look forward to meeting your children,” I say. Then all I can see are his radiant eyes and smile, and I thank God for this man’s smile, Kennedy’s smile. It has been a gift given today and so was the smile of my favorite cashier.

I imagine her still—enjoying the music.