Optimism, cynicism and realism

Welcome to my own private Connecticut.

I love the light this time of year, when it hits the bright-yellow oak leaves, the maple trees’ palette of red, as the sun burns through the morning haze that drifts over the Housatonic River in Shelton.

Or is that the emissions from the factory down the hill?

Sure, we’re tossed in a political tempest, almost wrecked here on the beach as the nation goes mad — or gaga — over the unfiltered disrupter who encourages racists, gun nuts and those oh so terrified of the “other” that they openly cheer their prejudices, when they should feel shame. “Lock her up ... lock her up.” Really? Still?

A national leader who lets a Saudi despot murder and dismember a dissident journalist in their own Turkish embassy, but concocts a convenient electiontime threat out of a group of destitute, scared, harmless asylum seekers still 800 miles from our southern border. Really?

I was driving around Stamford the other day with an old friend from high school days, back in the early 1970s. Yeah, that city has changed. It had a pop- ulation of about 100,000 then, just before the people who lived downtown were displaced by the first corporate ant farms that line I-95. Now, Stamford’s got another 30,000 people and I can’t maneuver the city without getting lost amid this 21st Century version.

We were driving on the city’s West Side, where it used to be thick with Italian-Americans. Now, late on a warm Saturday afternoon, you see men and women from Central America, South America, sitting on the stoops sipping Coronas in work clothes, taking a breath after their six-day work week. They’re trying to feed their families, just like people have been doing in these multi-family dwellings for the last 100 years.

Up at the top of Stillwater Avenue, there’s a vestigial baseball field. But there’s a lot more soccer played on it and there’s even the outline of a cricket pitch. How cool is that? Connecticut remains a dynamic melting pot, as the next wave of new Americans find their way.

A couple miles east, over by Stamford High, where I was lucky to have been a schooled by several Jamaicans on the soccer team, is a house where a Jewish family lived, after they were brought over from Europe after World War II by the local Jewish community.

I must have been 17 that very hot summer afternoon and I remember sitting at their kitchen table with my buddy, their son. Their shirt sleeves were rolled up in the

I love living in a state where the governor flies the rainbow gay-pride flag above that mansion in Hartford’s North End. I think back a couple years, when same-sex marriage was no big thing anymore. I remember talking with Gov. Dan Malloy in his office when the conversation drifted to gay rights.

heat and that was the first time I saw the haunting, sickening tattoos of the death camps on their wrists. It makes me teary to think about it now, I was so callow. I wish I could go back in time and hug them, thank them for surviving the Nazis and coming to Connecticut.

I love living in a state where the governor flies the rainbow gay-pride flag above that mansion in Hartford’s North End. I think back a couple years, when same-sex marriage was no big thing anymore. I remember talking with Gov. Dan Malloy in his office when the conversation drifted to gay rights.

“When do you think we’ll no longer refer to people as ‘openly gay?’ ” I asked, in rare display of optimism. The fight over LGBTQ rights, he said, will continue for the foreseeable future, and it does. A threat to abortion rights is just around the corner, and although Connecticut state law codifies it, all we need is a sharp shift to the right and who’s to say that can’t vanish?

Gun safety is another reason I am proud to live here, with a diminished worry — thanks to the 2013 gun-safety legislation — that a wretch with an AR-15 will pop out of the shadows of his self-loathing and start killing people. Sandy Hook Elementary School, with its 20 dead first-graders and six slain adults, is more than enough carnage for one lifetime. According to the running tally by Vox Media, there have been 1,891 mass-shooting incidents in the United States since Newtown, with 2,105 deaths and 7,959 wounded.

And if you don’t think the issue of gun safety isn’t on the ballot Tuesday, then maybe you should stay home and not vote at all.

In Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” a family is finally brought together and its conflicts are settled. If only it could be true.