From Trump to Triumph
About five or six years ago, a good friend of mine gifted me a really decent, bright red T-shirt. It was emblazoned with the “Triumph” logo, the one from the British motorcycle company.
My friend worked at a local motorcycle repair-shop, and brand reps came through all of the time with various corporate swag. He saw the shirt, thought of me, and he handed it over the next time we played pool together at our neighborhood pub.
Again, that was about five or six years ago. About four years ago, I accidently wore it to work one morning. I was commuting to San Francisco at the time, and I was riding up on the BART. And I was getting some looks — really cold-eye, forlorn looks.
Yeah, my mistake: it was the day after the presidential election, in November 2016. I wore a button-down shirt over the T-shirt, so the whole logo wasn’t visible. But all of these Bay-area commuters I was with could see it was a bright red T-shirt with the letters T, R, U, M and P, in that order. Holy f!cuking oops. I put it on without thinking — can’t imagine where my thoughts were that morning…
“Throw it out,” my friend said, laughing when I told him about it. “We get stuff all the time, I’ll bring you something else. Something blue.”
So I did: I threw it out, or more likely dropped it into a Goodwill bucket. But my friend never did replace it; he never got the chance. The shop closed, he lost his salary and benefits, spiraled into a depression that’d always been close at his heels, and tragically took his own life. That was about a year ago.
Am thinking of him today. I wish he was here. He wasn’t as liberal or as politically opinionated as I am, but he saw enough of the cruelty and disregard that hallmarked the Trump administration to be truly disgusted by it. I know how he would have voted. I know that — were he here today — we’d be celebrating this day together.
There are days when good things you thought would last forever come to heartbreaking ends. And there are days when awful things you never thought would end finally hit the skids. You just never know.
Not everyone made it all the way down this road, from Trump to Triumph. And I’m taking a minute out of my day, putting some words on paper, thinking of those who would’ve loved to have been here.
But I wish I’d kept his shirt.
