When The Music Man showed up in movie theaters years ago, I was young enough that I didn’t fully understand the plot but I remember how the idea of a whole town being duped by a huckster gave me the creeps. That image was very much in my mind when my good friend Tootie and I headed to High Point to view a Donald Trump rally during the presidential campaign. We were in good spirits, expecting to have fun, more curious than anything else that so many people were showing up at Trump rallies, and wondering how anyone could be taken in by a reality tv star posing as a presidential candidate and talking like a snake oil salesman.

As it turned out, we weren’t able to get into the rally, which was held at a gated school, High Point University, an institution that has walled itself off from the community it occupies. Tootie and I drove through the working class neighborhoods that surround HPU, looking for a way in that we never found. The whole experience, the combination of the hate-filled messages on paraphernalia being sold to Trump supporters (“Lock Her Up” “Trump the Bitch”), and the depressing contrast between the country club-like university and the neighborhoods from which it was shut off, all of it left us feeling a little down.

Then, backing up to the impenetrable walls of the school, we found a dead-end street whose residents had apparently taken it upon themselves to brighten their curb with decorations and a quote they attributed to Maya Angelou, the poet who lived for many years in nearby Winston-Salem.  “When you know better, you do better.”

It was a small thing and it was a big thing, finding a glimpse of beauty so unexpectedly in an unlikely spot. After the election just a few weeks after our trip, I find myself going back to that image and holding onto to the hope that, in spite of it all, we will do better.

September 20, 2016, County #31 – Guilford