The Future Is Out There

Someday I will look back on New Year's Eve 2015 as the day I met Colby Smart. You say you don't know Colby? It could be that you haven't spent as much  time dawdling in front of Trader Joe's on a sunny winter afternoon. To be clear, I was the one committed to the  dawdling. Colby was hard at work. He had an Harmful of petitions, and he was working hard to get as many signatures as he could. Someday, I believe, Colby will be a mover and a shaker.
How do I know this? It might be as simple as that name. Is there another name that screams success more than Colby Smart? Cheesy intelligence, right? While a lot of guys his age were busy shopping for party supplies or hooking up their look for the night to come, he was out there on the street, looking to bring some love to those ideas and values that he carried under his arm: legislative transparency, rerouting the funds raised by selling those outlawed plastic bags, and the list went on. He had eleven of these things, and he was pleased and happy to have my wife and I stand there and scribble our names, address and zip code on every single one of them. My wife, who had been to Trader Joe's earlier that week, was quick to point out which of the Trump's dozen she had affixed her signature to. This did not slow Colby in the slightest. He shuffled through his raft of paper until he found the permutations of the initiatives that he felt she needed to know about. And during that transaction, I busied myself with my own flurry of penmanship practice. I did make a point of looking up at the end of each exchange to ask what I hoped were pertinent questions. I wasn't just signing my name to be signing my name. I wanted to be part of the change that Colby was pushing.
When I looked at those clear, bright eyes, I wondered how long it had been since I felt idealism like that. I could feel the thirty years between our ages in the surge of wisdom that I felt the need to share. And to his credit, Colby stood there and took it all in.
The whole transaction  took about fifteen minutes. When it was over, I had shared my own points about where I wanted the state and the country to land. Colby had shared his, and my wife had made a check on her smart phone for a web site that she felt he should know about. Then  we were on our way again, and Colby asked the next pedestrian coming down the block, "Are you a registered voter?" That's the future out there. I knew him when.