A white-haired man walked into the coffee shop carrying a guitar case. A pretty woman in leather mule heels came in behind him. I couldn’t tell if she was his daughter or his wife. Unzipping the case, the musician exchanged a few words with the barista. The barista walked around and let us know the musician was going to perform a song.
We patrons of the coffee shop looked up from our screens. We made uneasy eye contact. We’d been emerged in our own worlds, and here a stranger was forcing us into a collective experience.
Then the musician in sneakers and sunglasses began to sing “Come and Get Your Love.”
He had to be seventy or more, but he worked those black and white tiles with the vitality of a man half his age. He leaned into the twanging verses, the sinews working in his tanned hands as his fingers danced over the chords.
Come and get your love
Come and get your love
Come and get your love
Come and get your love
I found myself tapping my feet. The red-haired college student with her melted iced coffee and stickered Apple laptop smiled at the table next to mine. The woman in the brown recliner mouthed the lyrics I’d only heard in a commercial, but she didn’t look up from her screen.
I refused to look away as that seventy-year-old man performed. I was taken back to the days my father—now in his sixties—would come home in his work truck with a cassette tape that had a demo of a song he’d written with his friend.
We’d celebrate by loading up in the station wagon and going out to Moss’s Coach House inside the border of Kentucky for smoked po’ boy sandwiches and cottage cheese and peaches. We’d play that song the whole way there and the whole way back.
On those nights, the hope inside the vehicle was as tangible as the air-conditioner’s sporadic breaths. “This one’s it,” he’d say, and I believed him.
I am sure he believed it too.
We were one recorded song away from him not having to build barns until dark. One recorded song away from my mom not having to waitress to send me and my brother to private school.
It didn’t happen.
Something else, though, did.
Twenty-some years have passed since I’ve listened to one of those demo songs. But now I wake before the sun to pursue a dream that, on paper, doesn’t make much sense. I continue to pursue it because my father taught me that that hope is part of living the dream.
So, I will continue writing at the coffee shop as the seventy-year-old man moves from venue to venue to perform songs few remember. I will continue writing as my father scrawls lyrics on scrap 2’ x 4’s with his black carpenter’s pencil. I will continue writing as a muralist adds a strip of teal to a shipping crate or a baker shapes a loaf or a dancer extends an arm and bends.
And sometimes I say to my children, “This one’s it,” and they believe me.
From time to time, I believe myself too.
Have you given up hope on your dreams, or are you still pursuing them? What inspires you when you feel that hope dwindling?
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