I dip in and out of hope these days. I think we’re all doing that with the state of the world – as they say (“the state of the world” – it sounds like something out of a 1930s sci fi comic). I drove into Chicago last Friday to see a friend and then go to Ikea to buy new kitchen counters that my neighbor is helping me to install. The whole trip was an interesting balancing act in hope and lack thereof. What’s the opposite of hope? Despair? I hope for a job; I despair there will be none…

Hope is such a slippery thing. A friend is doing a photo project on hope, and every time I look at her promo, I’m less sure than the time before what it’s about because I’m less sure than before what hope is. But I know that I bumped into it several times over the weekend.

Having dinner with a friend who I’ve known since I was eighteen, who I still adore and who made me laugh to the point of peeing my pants while standing in front of the iMac store on Michigan Avenue was the hope born of friendship. Going into the Hotel Intercontinental, with its bygone-era Hollywood golden ceilings, and seeing the pool where Johnny Weismuller once swam gave me a funny hope for the way things live in. Weismuller – I’m reading now on Wikipedia – was born in Romania but grew up in Chicago. He had five wives and was buried in Acapulco, and they played a recording of his Tarzan yell at his funeral.

Being out on Michigan Avenue reminded me of my dad – specifically of an early December morning when that great avenue was nearly deserted and we’d gone out to look for breakfast, my mom still asleep back in the hotel. I was in my 20s, and had flown in from Seattle to meet them before heading back to Iowa for Christmas. The night before, we’d had dinner at a restaurant and our waitress had quietly encouraged us to look over the banister at a small seating area below: there sat Michael Jordan and his Bulls teammates right in the midst of their “three-peat” years. Another memory of my dad from years before: going out in the evening for a tuna sandwich and a Coke at the Woolworth’s counter on Michigan for my dinner before my parents went out for the night, and I stayed in the hotel with my homework and the remote control. My dad loved the Woolworth’s counter as much, I sensed, as the nicer restaurant he’d be going to later. I loved sitting there, pretending that we lived in a high-rise apartment, overlooking the Lake, and this was our Saturday night ritual – a sandwich at the luncheonette counter.

These memories hold hope and despair. The hope of my connection to my dad even when he’s gone; the despair of never seeing him again and the finality that still seems impossible to me.

Hope. Despair. What tips the balance? Hearing of couples who have been married for years and have sex every night – this reported to me by an excellent source – gives me hope. Learning from the same source that she has friends in equally long marriages who actually do it several times a night every night, shifts me to despair.

But then HOPE comes back in the oddest ways. I listened on the drive in and out to Adam Gopnik reading Through the Children’s Gate and the precision of his prose and the gentle humor of his voice gave me hope for writers and writing. Seeing the preview for Where the Wild Things Are — seeing that they’ve done something creative and different with such a beloved book, and that the filmmakers were emphasizing its very important kernels — inside all of is hope; inside all of us fear – gave me, well, hope.

Hearing my friend’s adoring stories of her well-adjusted teenaged daughter gives me hope for my kids and a world that’s not too far off. Standing in line at Ikea and  looking into carts filled with items that declared a specific moment in life — a crib, diaper pail, and night light in one,  or mixing bowls, cutting boards, and a tool set in another — made me smile. One must be saturated with hope  to have a baby or to move in with a lover for the first time.

Even getting on to this blog and reading your generous comments gives me hope. In fact, awhile back, someone who lives in town who reads this blog said, “What nice friends you have,” alluding to all of the folks leaving comments here. She thought I knew everyone, as in face-to-face, in-the-flesh know.

“I’ve never met most of them,” I said, which pleased me greatly. That people reach out to someone they’ve never met, is the epitome of hope.