 So I'm happy to read tonight a letter and this letter is a result of a book called Radical Hope. The editor of this book is Catalina de Robertis and she has asked a number of writers from around the country to write a letter in response to this devastation that gives us some kind of radical hope. People like Juno Diaz and Cristina Garcia will be in this book. It's being published by Knapp. It is coming out in the first hundred days of the presidency. So I thought it would be appropriate tonight since we're so close to that dark day that I read this letter and everybody took a different approach. Mines called to the woman standing in line at the store. You are ahead of me without a grocery basket, hugging two acorn squash, four ears of corn and a can of oatmeal. Like many of us, you are wearing jeans and an open maroon sweater hitched up on the side where your purse is dangling. Your friend is leaning on a red shopping cart, her face close to a bouquet. Some of the flowers are unnaturally colored, a sea turquoise blue daisy and a mango orange carnation similar to the color of her hair. You are conversing in Spanish slowly and measured as if you know I am eavesdropping and need time to adjust to your accent to rekey my ears. I'm not trying to listen to you, but your whisper while urgent and private is within earshot and the words to Torah and Carcel command my attention. I want to know if you are telling a story about yourself or someone else. Was there a jail? What kind of jail? What kind of torture? As you speak, you don't change expression. I was there ten years and then they let me go. My mother had my children in Buenos Aires. They didn't know me anymore. So I left and came here. Your body stays still as you describe your trip from Argentina to Oakland after a decade in prison, after giving up your children. Had I been further back in line or somewhere across the store, you would have been just another 40-something woman just off work from Kaiser or my credit union picking up something for dinner. And if I had imagined your conversation, it might have been about your hair appointment on Saturday, but I was near a witness to the story of your time in prison where you were tortured leaving your shoulder frozen in one position. You are the woman standing in line at the grocery store, but you are also walking your kid to school near my house. You might be cleaning someone's bathroom or teaching a singing class, translating court documents or counseling community college students. Not all of you are former prisoners. Some of you are refugees from countries that have collapsed or become too dangerous to live in. Many of you are dreamers hoping to have nothing and then something to send back. You have walked across borders, fled a civil war, escaped the ruling party or a fanatic religious movement, or maybe you came here for an education and didn't go back. But for me, you are my sit-do. Who during the fading Ottoman Empire in 1916, took the last of her jewelry into her waistband, crawled through the shrubbery up and down the mountain sides to trade everything she had for rice, flour and beans. She fed my mother and her sister at any cost. She traveled with them barefoot along the stony paths, from the mountains to the cities, her belongings in a bundle on her head to make the two-year journey that ended in Pennsylvania. And a half century later, her granddaughter, my cousin, sat in a fallout shelter while the city burned above her head. Her eyes cat widened and her hearing dulled to the sounds of street blasts and missile cries. She is a mother in New Jersey conducting training for a software company. She is also a woman standing in line. The graduate student in my writing class who had to endure checkpoints and searches every day she moved through her town, the woman in my writing group who lived under two dictatorships, the mother of my student who escaped Pol Pot. They all make coffee and pill oranges, fold laundry and watch TV. The Filipina Lola, once a comfort woman for the Japanese soldiers, cradled her granddaughter in a stuffed chair in Daly City. My friend's sister, with over 50 pieces of shrapnel on her body, is now a master chef and magazine editor. You, women in line at the store arrive every day. Most of you hold your stories inside while you transform your outside to a new person, taking cues from television. You stuff down the pain of buried children, your destroyed homes and lost languages while you fill out forms and registration cards, sign leases and take driving tests. Dear woman standing in line at the store, I want to be attentive to you. Listen well to your whispers, find clues in the way you raise your hand while you talk or tuck your blouse into your waistband and lower your head. I want to hear the endearments you kneel to pour into the ears of your children, along with the instructions and messages. I don't want to unearth your journey out of greed or curiosity, but as a way to know you and let your story tell me who I might be. I am not courageous enough to put my back to my life, to whom I know what I do and how I live. I cannot imagine less in my life or separate from whom I love. I cannot fathom writing the boats that carried you, waving goodbye to my grandmother, paying the man who forged the papers, baking the minister to sign the visa, sneaking onto the train holding my child, eating food from other people's hands, whispering endless prayers, matching the sound of my footprints. Many of us have not learned how to lose something, but you know, woman standing in line, that acorn squash you hold measures your heartbeat as you move from one world to the next, never betraying the spot where your life tore into. I can see there is a story under your skin, and I take courage from the steadiness of your breathing. I pray that the particles of hopefulness that brought you here will lift into the air and we can inhale them into our systems and they ease our journeys and yours too. Thank you.