Standing on a sidewalk with a sign
To the couple I saw on April 5th, 2025
A week ago, I could not attend the April 5th protests because I was experiencing my second day of upper abdominal pain. After a fruitless trip to the Urgent Care, my daughter took me to the ER where I was diagnosed with gallstones.
It was on the short five mile drive from our house to Urgent Care that I saw a man and woman standing on the sidewalk in front of an assisted-living apartment complex. Both white haired and smiling, their rain jackets zipped up with no umbrellas or hats. That April morning in Central Texas had brought rain showers and a temperature drop, but by afternoon the rain had stopped, a blanket of grey clouds remained.
The woman waved with one hand while her husband fought against the wind to keep a piece of white poster board from folding in the wind. The sign was filled with words written in black, but all I could read in a glimpse as we passed was Hands Off! I waved excitedly with two hands through my closed window and hoped they saw me. I envisioned pulling over, parking, and joining them but another 60 seconds and we turned into the Urgent Care parking lot.
I recognized that reference to Hands Off! an organizing collective bringing together dozens of organizations to protest on April 5th; it was expected to be the largest protest since President Donald Trump took office 75 days ago.
By 4 pm, I was waiting in the ER and living vicariously through photos and videos on my social media feeds. Several thousand people gathered to protest at the Texas state capitol in Austin as well as many large suburbs of Central Texas. I live in Georgetown, Texas, an hour's drive north of Austin, and I assumed there hadn’t been protests here. Not necessarily because Georgetown is the county seat of a conservative county and a known mecca for retirees, but because there was a country music festival, Two Step Inn, downtown that day, which approximately doubled the population of the city. I couldn’t imagine anyone braving such a crowd.
My pain was low in the small ER waiting room; it was quiet except for the loud, long squeak every time the double doors opened to take a patient back to registration. I thought again of the couple I saw standing alone on the sidewalk waving at the five lanes of traffic racing by in both directions. Saturday people driving past car washes, strip malls of fast food and doctors offices, car washes, banks, and retirement communities. It was just the two of them—no one passing by on foot, no one in the parking lot. Were others supposed to show but didn’t? Did they know about protests planned in other cities? Had they considered navigation transport and parking?
I wondered about their planning. When did they buy the poster board? With the weekly grocery order or on a last minute trip to a local store? What words had they put on their sign that I could not see? Did they make the sign the night before or first thing Saturday morning?
After I was check-in and got my paper hospital bracelet, I sat in Hall Chair #4 waiting for lab work and a CT.
I imagined the couple that morning. They wake and begin their well-worn routines. He makes his coffee and boils the water for her tea. She turns on Good Morning America with captions, mutes the TV, and takes out a hearing aid that’s just too irritating for first thing in the morning. He makes the toast and sets out the butter and jelly. She goes to a drawer and retrieves two pill cases, setting one beside his plate and one beside her cup of tea. They exchange reports on how they slept. He only woke up twice. Her back hurts less today than yesterday.
They clear the dishes and instead of sitting in their recliners, they place poster board on the kitchen table and fish a black Sharpie marker from the junk drawer.
What should we write?
Save Social Security, Medicare, National Parks, Veteran Benefits
Protect immigrants and freedom of the press
What comes after LGBT again?
Does Ukraine have an e on the end?
NPR, PBS, NIH, FDA, EPA, IRS
I’m running out of room.
Well, maybe not the IRS, he jokes.
Do they discuss any trepidation about doing this alone? Or worry that people will yell mean things out of car windows? Do they fear ostracism from their apartment community? Or worry about looking foolish? Who initiated this decision? Is one of them not convinced this matters at all, but where one goes, so goes the other.
From checking into the ER and to being wheeled to the automatic doors was about four hours. My daughter drove us home. The sun had set, and on the drive home I didn’t even think to glance over to where the couple had stood.
Recovering comfortably on my couch, I appreciated my lack of pain and the good news that I did not need surgery. I scrolled through photos and videos of enormous crowds in the expected cities of Washington DC, Boston, New York, San Francisco, and in the unexpected Georgia, Kentucky, Alaska, Pennsylvania. The sting of not being able to attend had faded, but I regretted not having a photo of the couple with the poster board sign. How long did they stand there on that sidewalk on a misty grey Saturday in April? How many people saw them? Does it matter how many?A single protest sign does not (usually) change a politician’s vote or convince one’s neighbors to pay attention to a government’s abuse of power. But I don’t think they did it to claim they changed the world. They’re not that naive; they’ve learned in the second half of their lives that they’ve aged into invisibility in most aspects of society. No, they didn’t do it for others; but for themselves.
Not in the sense of only caring about themselves and issues that impact them. But because when she sits on the bed and removes her rings, placing them in a bowl on the nightstand so they don’t hurt when her hands swell at night, she takes a deep breath and exhales knowing: I did what I could. I wasn’t silent. Because when he curses the CPAP as he straps it over his nose like he must every night, he nods to himself that at least he didn’t let the bastard keep him down. They are physically tired from the day but they will sleep a little better because they stood up, stood together. They did something rather than nothing.
She curls up in bed, her back to him, and positions pillows and small blankets to ease the pain in her hips and back. He lies facing his nightstand because the CPAP tube is too short. He reaches a hand behind him, finding her hand reaching too. She squeezes three times. He squeezes three times. And they sleep.
I’m Jen Machajewski a writer from Texas. You can follow me here on Substack, Instagram, and BlueSky. Always at www.jenmachajewski.com.