I walked out of high school to protest the invasion of Iraq. I remember reading Knight Ridder and feeling confused that everyone else around me was so certain and took delight when Stephen Colbert launched The Colbert Report as a way of speaking to that. I remember walking past 500 Boylston downtown and seeing someone looking for money on their cardboard sign — with a healthy extra heaping of Islamaphobia thrown in.

So here I was, walking through the Commons to grab a quick something from the Starbucks on the corner of Charles when I saw the red, white, and black of the Iraqi flag — one after the other — being waved at the bandstand. The takbir in green. I’d been trying to find a way to write about the moments of friendship I’d seen between Haitians and Scots in the streets of Boston and was running into the reminder once again as to how rare it was to see writing show up with joy, and here were Iraqis chanting what I was later told was written like this — منصور يا بغداد. I thought of a book I’d read ages ago — Iraq+100 — and wondered if the writers of that would have ever imagined this. The rhythmic chanting. The flags. Emerson kids staying in the city for the summer wandering into the growing bandstand circle to dance.