The Best Christmas Ever

This past weekend, while sidelined with the flu, I was watching television in the afternoon and noted that a number of channels were running Christmas movies, in July.  It's a thing.  It did make me all warm and fuzzy inside (not that the climbing temperatures as we were easing from a period of mild weather into a much warmer pattern wouldn't also have done that).  And it made me nostalgic for that warmth and closeness you feel as fall becomes winter and your family gathers closer.

I have a trove of treasured memories of Christmases as a child, especially the ones when my parents would bundle us all into the station wagon on Christmas Eve and we'd leave our modest suburban home and stop first in the Curtis Park area of Sacramento at my Aunt Sara and Uncle Manuel's house, which was full of relatives and friends and smelled of Italian sausage and fresh basked cookies - and then we'd drive just a few blocks further to the South Land Park home of my grandparents.  My grandmother always had this small, leafless tree with tasteful shiny ornaments on it set atop the piano in their living room.  She would be busy in the kitchen, my mother and father would sit with my grandfather in the living room, often with whatever relatives or friends were in town visiting my grandparents, and my sisters and I would go into the den to play.  Especially at that time of year the den was magical because all of the beautiful colored glass curios my grandmother kept on shelves in the picture windows in that room sparkled  in the glow of holiday lights beaming forth in the neighborhood.  By the time we'd make the long drive home I would be very tired and fall asleep in the car, often to be carried in by my parents once we arrived and not awaken until the magical Christmas pre-dawn.

I have subsequently had many, many delightful and warm Christmases while raising my own children, and have been blessed to experience the holiday as a sleep deprived parent catching glimpses of wonder, in the way each of my children experienced the holiday.  I think about us all gathered in front of the fireplace, of the kids decorating the tree together, of a ski trip or two to round out the holiday week, and as they began to grow of that real homecoming feel when we were all finally together in the same place.

If I had to pick just one year, one panoramic snapshot of a moment when I stopped to look around and there was everyone all gathered together and full of the joy of the season, I think I know what year that would be, what the moment of crystal realization felt like.  It was the year our daughter Audrey was in the hospital at Stanford, about eight months into her battle with anorexia.  I remember that my former husband and I were both somewhat at a loss still in understanding the disease and its impact on our entire family, let alone fully grasping how it was devastating Audrey physically and emotionally.  I remember being at a place where I was heartbroken so much of the time to watch my vibrant fourteen year old daughter literally vanishing before our eyes.  She was a freshman in high school, and it was just after Thanksgiving that her pediatrician advised me we had reached a crisis point and that she would need to get into inpatient care to survive.  I remember that those were the terms she used, 'to survive'.

It was a stressful time.  My oldest was in her senior year of high school and my youngest was still in grammar school.  I worked long hours, and on Tuesdays evenings make the more than three hour each way drive out to Stanford to visit with Audrey and participate in a parent support group.  On Saturdays we would all drive out, Lucy and Mack coming with me from outside Sacramento and the three little children coming with Rahmon and Rosemary from the east bay.  We would gather in this opulent home in Atherton that had been converted into an inpatient facility, and for about an hour we could all visit with Audrey in the common room while other families also met with their children.  It was draining, and about a month into the process I couldn't honestly tell if real progress was being made, but I took heart in the reality that Audrey was very engaged in wanting to make sure I bought specific presents for the three younger children that she had spent a great deal of time determining would be perfect for them.  At the time I saw it as a sign of her confidently re-emerging into her family, although the reality was we had many years still ahead of us in the struggle to conquer the disease.

But, that Christmas was one for the ages.  It was a blessing beyond measure.  I remember that it was very cold, about twenty-eight degrees when we left Sacramento early in the morning and only a few degrees above thirty when we reached Atherton.  Some of the children (they were adolescents and young teens) had been allowed to go home on special passes, but the ones who were in shakier physical condition had to remain, although their families could visit and we were allowed to bring and exchange Christmas gifts.  We had the common room, which boasted a large Christmas tree in the corner, all to ourselves that day as the only other family visiting used the front room of the house.  There were ten of us gathered, the six children, Rahmon, Rosemary and me, and Rosemary's mother.  I remember being relieved that I had remembered to pack a gift for grandma.  We gathered and the children were laughing and playing and there was a Christmas movie playing on the large flat screen TV above the fireplace.  The children were 17, 14, 11,9, 8 and 4 that Christmas, the youngest just shy of her fifth birthday.  We are a predominantly Nigerian-American family, and there is a light-heartedness in the way we all fold so easily together that is greatly influenced by West African culture.  We each opened one present, and there was much support and anticipation as surprises were unveiled.  And there is nothing more musical than the peels of laughter of children bouncing off hard wood floors and rolling up the walls and across the beamed ceilings of warm room on a cold day.

We were able to have a longer stay than usual, but because of special rules in a place where people are being treated for eating disorders, the children couldn't eat while we were there, and they were getting hungry as morning became afternoon.  The attendant, a young man who was a graduate student at the university, told us he could sign Audrey out for an hour if we wanted to get out and let the children have a snack.  He said we were a very short drive from the Rodin sculpture garden, which he thought would be a fun place to gather for more holiday fun.   And so we did that.  We packed into cars and bundled up and drove the few blocks to the outside garden.  I remember that grandma was wearing traditional Nigerian clothes, and even with a shawl pulled around her and the brightly colored scarf I'd given her wrapped around her neck, I didn't think she'd be comfortable too long outside, not to mention how the cold would impact Audrey.  But it was a bright, sunny day, and the children had so much energy to vent that they just burst forth into the courtyard and began to run around chasing each other.  Rahmon was shooting pictures of them with his camera and Rosemary and I walked among the sculptures, including The Thinker, admiring Rodin's work.  I remember looking over at the two boys, Mack and Justin, playing a game of tag and running in circles around grandma in front of Rodin's "Gates of Hell".  Lucy, the oldest, took Ashley, who does not do well in the cold , first by the hand and then wrapped a big arm around her, holding Audrey's hand firmly in her other hand, as she danced with her younger sisters from sculpture to sculpture.  And the littlest, Sabrina, flitted from one group to the next, and Rahmon kept snapping picture after picture of her.  At one point Sabrina poked her head through the legs of one of the statues and smiled up at her father and her took a picture before realizing the statue was a male nude and her little apple cheeked face was resting just below the penis.  It was a lark though, the whole time we were there.  It could have been a playground or Disneyland for all the delight the children took in running and playing with each other there.  And because it was cold, we all kept close together.  I remember thinking how fortunate we were that it didn't matter where we were (for certainly one doesn't imagine cementing a holiday memory in front of the Gates of Hell) it was that we were together and that we all really love each other so very much.

All of the children remember that holiday so vividly.  They remember being happy.  And for me it was a special moment when I understood we were a family, a unit woven intricately and solidly together out of love.  I know that wherever we are in life or in the world, any of us and all of us, we will always be able to conjure that Christmas, those moments, in our hearts.  Because it really was the best Christmas ever.                 

Miss Kay: The College Roomate Experience

My junior year of college was a pivotal time for me in many ways that I wasn't fully cognizant of at the time.  It was a time of letting experience flow over me as I coped with unacknowledged loss and loneliness in the wake of my father's death and as so many of my closest friends were abroad for the year.  Perhaps the most striking experience within a very full year of living was that of having Miss Kay for my roommate.  She was from the south originally, the only daughter in a southern doctor's family, and she happened to become my roommate because my father had passed away and after much wrangling with my mother over my planned time in Rome for junior year, it was ultimately decided that I should stay at school rather than travel abroad.  (Mom:  "Sweety, you should just go to Rome with your friends.  Your sisters travelled and you should travel too. "   Me:  "Are you sure, because I keep sensing you don't really want me to go."  Mom:  "Far from it.  Go, experience life.  It's what your father would have wanted.  Don't worry about the money at a time when I am obviously very concerned about our finances.  And, no reason to worry about me and your baby sister all alone in this house with all the others grown and gone, and you off to Italy.  None of that is oyur concern, as consuming as it is.  Go. You should go.")

So, I did not go to Rome, although most of my friends were there or elsewhere in Europe - my support system floating someplace far off.  The loss of my father, who was a great deal like me and who was perhaps a much greater influence and balance in my life than I had realized, was suppressed I suppose while I took on whatever came next at full speed.  I let the housing office at school know I would need a dorm room after all, and they did their best to accommodate me.  I needed a no smoking room.  This was the 1980s when students were given preferences over the 'freedoms' that has arisen in the 1970s and into the 80s to smoke in designated areas on high school campuses.  Colleges, like much of the rest of the adult world - were places where people had generally been free to smoke wherever they wanted - but my college, St. Mary's in bucolic Moraga, California, nestled quietly into the hills to the east of Berkeley - had reserved many dorm rooms for non-smokers only (while our professors and other students were free to smoke away in class).  The non-smoking designation assumed, one presumes that the ventilation of 19th and early 20th century construction was up to the task of isolating smoke exhaled in one tiny room from the next.  And this was California during a time of excess, so besides the vapor of tar and nicotine, one was also subject at any time to a contact high from the pervasive cloud of marijuana smoke enveloping all living areas unimpeded by the obligatory towels stuffed into doorway floors.  My allergy and sensitivity was to nicotine not cannabis, thank the good Lord.

I mention all of this because Miss Kay was my assigned roommate in our non-smoking room in a designated non-smoking suite of rooms, a double and a single on our side of a shared bathroom and another double and single on the other side.  Directly across the hall from our suite mates was the dorm room occupied by the largest marijuana supplier on this side of campus (and perhaps this portion of the east bay), and his buttoned down business major roommates.  Odd combinations arose when one put oneself out to the vagaries of the room and roommate lottery.  And I should point out that I do not ascribe a surname to Miss Kay not so much to protect her identity (any statutes of limitation would long since have expired), but because she was in many ways ethereal, not so much of this world as of space, and once we tacked on the "Miss" to her shortened first name, she became like Cher and Madonna and Kesha - someone to whom a surname was unnecessary and who was utterly recognizable as Miss Kay alone.

This delicate southern belle entered our dorm room shortly after I had moved my things in.  She was wearing a pair of Ray Ban wayfarer sunglasses, had a bright smile, dimples, and one of those epic extra long cigarettes dangling from her lips that had the longest stream of still attached ash at the end I had ever seen.  It was as if she had taken the drag of all drags before entering the room and the ash clung to the body of the cigarette like a fossil unaware of its own extinction.  "Hi Hon! I'm Kay."  She effused in a scratchy, throaty voice reminiscent of the 1930s actress Tallulah Bankhead, arms outstretched to roll me into her embrace.  As she hugged me some of that ash finally detached and affixed itself to my pastel SMC hoodie, leaving a small grey scar at the shoulder that would remain for the rest of the year.  Miss Kay was about my height, although she was wearing heels with her pedal pusher jeans and her oversized white tee shirt emblazoned with a picture of her favorite band, the B-52s.  They are also southern.   

It was my friend Bug who dubbed her "Miss Kay", after the main character in a television mini-series from the late 1970s about a woman born into slavery who lived over 100 years to finally see Jim Crow eradicated - The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman.  Bug, a towering young man of Robin Williamsesque energy and wit, entered a room much like a pinball machine himself, with lights flashing and bells going off everywhere, and he felt Miss Kay defied age and time.  Indeed, she defied a great many principles of physics in our time together as roommates.  Bug was part of Kay's entourage, an extended band of merry pranksters, 80s partiers and very free spirits.  Indeed, as much of a rollercoaster ride as it was to live with her, she brought many people together and I think the most enduring impact she had upon me was that she brought Bug into my life.  But, Miss Kay was a force of nature, not anything like anyone I had ever shared a room with before - including all of my sisters. 

I mentioned to her gently as she unpacked on that first day (she had more sequined evening gowns than seemed reasonable for a student at a San Francisco Bay area college campus) that we were in a non-smoking suite, and that I had a particular sensitivity to cigarette smoke that has caused an embarrassing episode the previous spring requiring the calling of paramedics to provide CPR (the embarrassing part was that the paramedics whooshed right by unconscious me on the floor of my next door neighbor's room and instead offered mouth to mouth to the much hotter girl in the bed of that dorm room who was sleeping off a drunk after chain-smoking and cannon balling all evening while I typed her term paper -  while our floor's androgynous oddball resident had come to my aid and had her mouth upon mine as I awoke in horror despite the reality she did not actually know CPR).

"Oh, hon, I don't smoke.  Maybe one or two here and there, socially, to be polite.  But, don't you worry, I don't smoke."  She advised as she then plopped down onto her bed, rolled over onto her back, set an ashtray on her stomach and pulled one of her Virginia Slims 100s out of the carton in her nightstand.  "And could you close the curtains, it's a little bright in here."

Miss Kay was a nocturnal creature by nature.  She rarely rose before noon, creating great complications in her academic schedule, and by mid afternoon she was generally a flurry of activity making plans for and dressing up for the evening ahead, ice tinkling in her tumbler of vodka tonic as she dropped dresses on the top of her bed to assess while she teased up her hair into a power bouffant.
She had lovely, sparkling blue eyes full of mischief that were visible 2-3 minutes out of the day before she put on the shades.  Often I would come back from class and our room would be full of people and smoke, new wave music blaring from her boom box (or my stereo, which was community property), the sound of tops being popped on cans of Coors Light or Jack Daniels or Smirnoff being poured into glasses, the lights dimmed and the room only illuminated during those momentary forays into the refrigerator for more supplies.

Sometimes I was a little overwhelmed.  I had a very good time in college, but I also worked very hard.  I graduated with honors in a Great Books based Liberal Arts program that also required four years of laboratory science (ancient to modern) and four years of classical mathematics.  Miss Kay referred to me and my friends from our academic program (one of whom occupied the single room next to our double and had the great misfortune of sharing a foyer with us) as The Integrals, not so much because that was the name of our major as because it announced us to the normal hordes of humanity already populating the party room.  I wheezed my way through the early weeks and months with Miss Kay, and I adapted as best I could to our regimen, which was most notable for its unpredictability.  Miss Kay was prone to benders and could disappear for days at a time, re-appearing just as suddenly with no explanation.  I might come home of an evening to find this or that gentleman rolling about in her extra long twin bed with Miss Kay, both of them three sheets to the wind and passed out very quickly post coitus, or sometimes one imagines, snoring while still astride.  And there was that unfortunate incident that led to our suitemate having to discard her retainer, which sat in a case in our shared medicine cabinet next to the case that held Miss Kay's diaphragm.  Not that I was without sin, as our poor suitemate could attest, as she suffered quite a shock and emitted a blood curdling scream one night when my gentleman friend stuck his arm in her window by mistake on one of those nights when he thought it would be cute to reach in and grab me by the arm while I slept to let me know he was on his way over.   With Miss Kay it was more about the constancy of variety.

Bug sometimes would come sit on my bed with me as I tried to read a book while a party began to build around me in the room, and he'd cover us both with this crocheted blanket that he called "Our Mesh", our protective buffer and private place amidst the madness of any given evening.  This from Bug, who himself had hollowed out the attic space on the wide ledge off his single room at the top of De La Salle Hall, and converted it into a speakeasy that he called The Prohibition Pub, where he would host small delightful hooch parties of an evening.  He just understood that Miss Kay was sexanddrugsandrockandroll 24/7, and sometimes you needed the shelter of the mesh.  Indeed.

And, ironic as it was in this situation, there was that tendency, when in Rome... I remember vividly coming back from my chemistry lab class on a Thursday morning.  It was a three hour lab with Brother Brendan, a stern silver-haired misogynistic septuagenarian in a cassock.  I had been up preparing for an essay exam the night before and Miss Kay had arrived back to our room about nine with her usual band of bon vivants, all in brightly colored 1960s dresses, hair teased up (even some of the men), massive earrings dangling and bouncing against their necks and shoulders.  They laughed and talked, turned up the music, the booze flowed freely, the room was heavy with smoke, and they took turns snorting lines off this massive mirror that Miss Kay kept tucked under her bed most of the day (perhaps so we could never prove whether or not she could see her reflection).  I had to be up by 7, and when the party was not slowing down by midnight (although the music was turned down after the fiftieth or sixtieth time our next door neighbors, Andy and Kevin, pounded on the wall and shouted expletives at us as they tried to sleep in their bunk beds along that wall), Miss Kay offered me one of her 'black beauties', small capsules she kept in a plastic Halloween jack o lantern on the bookshelf.  She said it would help me be more alert for my exam in the morning.  "In fact," she advised, pouring a second little black pill into my hand, "Take two, Hon.  You're a big girl."  I did as I was told, washing it down with some warm Coors Light.  I think the party ended some time after 3 a.m., although by then I was wide awake.  By about 9:30, half an hour into my chemistry lab and exam, I began to experience the sensation known as "speed bugs" a crawling within one's skin and a bugging of one's eyes.  As I struggled to write out all of the many thoughts that were in my head in the essay exam and watched my hand fly over the  paper, a metamorphosis began to occur, and it was not a pleasant one.  For the first time in my life I understood clearly the lyrics to that song Johnny Cash made famous - "Sunday Morning Coming Down". 

I struggled back to our dorm room at about noon, once my Chemistry lab let out.  I felt like a dried up tread mark left behind by an earth mover when the ground was still muddy.  My mouth felt like the inside of an old sock.  I was a little put out with Miss Kay and her suggestion of not one but two of her little beauties.  I burst through our door to find the curtains drawn, the room enveloped in shadow and Miss Kay on her back in her bed, her sunglasses on, that ashtray resting just below her breasts.  She absently flicked some ash onto the carpet and pointed at me as I came into the room.  It was noon, she had just awakened and it was time for the soap opera All My Children on TV.  "Hon," she called out through the grinding gravel of a chain smoking 80 year old Alabama alcoholic's voice, "Flip on the tube for me.  It's time for All Ma Kids."

She lived an enchanted life in many ways that year.  Her party circuit was legendary, epic, and seemingly unending.  For someone I can't recall actually seeing emerge from her bed in the afternoon, she was off at some point, and fluttered about making that loud clanging intimate conversation of the deeply intoxicated, highball glass in one hand, cigarette in the other, her head bouncing back in uproarious laughter.  She was infectious (and not just her laughter).  She endeared herself to you.  She was unforgettable.  She attended our college Christmas Ball dressed as a tree, her hair teased up like Marge Simpson's and painted bright green, filled with little miniature lights, and when she emerged up onto the stage at that party with Bug, he in bright red hair and dressed as a candy cane, and he plugged her in so she could burst forth with glistening light, the weight of that hair and those lights and whatever else was mingled with it to make it stand three feet tall and stiff as a board, overwhelmed her and she toppled over backward as gracefully as the Griswold's tree in the "Christmas Vacation" movie, showing her world to all those below as her pouffed out taffeta gown went horizontal.

I took a break from Miss Kay just after the Christmas Ball, heading to New York to study art and architecture (and pubs and bars) for the extended January term.  It was so pleasant to share a room at the historic Barbizon Hotel on the upper east side with my much quieter friend, Julie.  We had a marvelous time, learned a great deal about Impressionist art and gothic architecture and only had to hold each other's heads out of the toilet one time during our entire six week sojourn.  When I returned to Moraga, a day earlier than Miss Kay for the spring term, I walked into our dark, musty room, redolent of stale beer, cigarette ash and bong water, and walked toward my side of the room to throw open both the windows and the curtains only to find my twin bed had been replaced with a standing tiki bar.  She had even moved her "emergency mini fridge" out of its place in her corner of the room and plugged it in under the bar.  I set my bags down and opened the window anyway, trying to breathe in fresh air.  There was a bright blue bean bag chair next to the bar, it was an overstuffed cast off that had served as a guest room of sorts for my friend Patty, who lived off campus and often needed a place to crash. I was trying to figure out where Miss Kay could have taken the bed, how she got it out of the room, when Bug dropped by.  To this day I don't know for sure if my memory of Kay's voice is really her voice or if it's Bug doing his impression of her, but he strode, in, looked at me, at the bar and then at the bean bag.  "Hon," he said, all gravelly and southern like Miss Kay, "it's all about your priorities."  Then he dropped into the bean bag chair, reached over to retrieve the crocheted blanket off the floor and patted the small space next to him, "Now come join me under the mesh."  

I never saw Miss Kay again after my senior year, as she dropped out of school, hung around for a while, allegedly checked in and out of rehab a few times. Married, divorced.  Who knows what else after that.  She is vivid in my memory though.  I tried to locate her almost six months ago, when Bug died, suddenly, ripping through the space/time continuum an upsetting the center of gravity for so many of us.  We wanted Miss Kay to be there, to say goodbye to Bug with all of the rest of us.  But Miss Kay could not be found.  She was ephemeral, it would appear, in her timelessness.  Were it not for a few snapshots I still have of her, one in particular in which she is smiling broadly with Bug in a drug store on a day when the clerk mistook her for Kate Pierson of her beloved B-52s, I might wonder if she really existed at all or if she was some wild amalgam of all the excess and inexplicable allure of that period.                     
     

Why History Matters

I read a great deal of history and historical fiction, or at least fiction that is historical in context today because it was very reflective of the culture and of specific occurrences when it was written.  I have also been a witness to history every day of my life, as has everyone else on this planet who keeps his or her eyes open - and who uses the tool most important to understanding why history matters - our ears.  Talking is always less important than listening, than really hearing.  There is an awful lot of talking going on right now, but not a great deal of listening, or even sufficient effort to really see.

I am trying to remember the exact phrasing from  a V. S. Naipaul book, the novel Guerillas, which is about a Caribbean country beset by violence.  The book was written in the mid 1970s and I read it only a few years later than that, and it was so evocative of the era while also teeming with history we had simply failed to learn from and accept in order to avoid repeating.  I believe the line is "When everyone is just fighting no one is fighting FOR anything."  I accept that is a paraphrase since I do not have the book with me and have not read it in more than thirty years, but like all of Naipaul's books, I have carried it with me and was thinking about it as I read posts people placed on Facebook and heard talking heads speaking loudly about their opinions about the flag controversy that is going on right now over the flying of Confederate flags at statehouses and official buildings.  We post into the ether on Facebook, and in our Babelesque media people just spout off whatever it is they are thinking as if it is true and correct - and they generally talk over the voices of others if opinions differ.  Opinion is opinion.  And of course we no longer seem to know the difference between opinion and fact and because we shout down those who disagree with us, we have terribly rude and dismissive "debates" on so-called news programs, and we distort even the purpose of this dialogue.  To an observer it would appear we are all just fighting to fight and that nobody is actually fighting FOR anything.

Which brings me back to Naipaul and the relevance of history.  In his book there is much violence but it is not the sort of gratuitous, graphic violence we read in many books and certainly see in movies - it is more vivid than that, as he conveys the pervasiveness of violence -the constancy of threat and fear in the environment.  To those living in this place, whose home it is, and probably to those who come and stay for a while as well, this pervasiveness desensitizes.  The visitors, are a British woman, Jane, and Roche, who had spent time in a South African prison but was now little more than a slave keeper himself.  Jane, "had no memory".  And Roche, despite all he had been through, could maintain the 'peace' the status quo, as long as he controlled those who worked for him.  The mid 1970s were a volatile and violent time in history.  In the United States the anti-war 60s had devolved into violent, domestic terrorist dominated activity.  The civil rights workers of the prior decade who had been the victims of untoward violence themselves but remained committed to non-violence, were replaced in the 1970s with violent and radicalized groups.  Just a couple of years after Guerrillas was published one of the icons of the British royal family and of that empire's final shining moments in World War II, Lord Mountbatten, was blown up along with his grandson on the family boat by IRA terrorists.  Jane in the book was probably not unlike a Patty Hearst, scion of a wealthy, prominent albeit controversial family, yanked from her college apartment violently only to emerge months later brandishing an automatic weapon during a bank robbery.  And even as Saigon fell in 1975, the dual powers of the West and the East continued to parcel out their rough justice in strongholds in Africa, South and Central America, elsewhere in southeast Asia, and quite fatefully as the US left Viet Nam, the then Soviet Union entered Afghanistan.

At the end of the day Jane and Roche symbolized the lingering wound of global colonialism and how readily the ensuing generations of the oppressors, regardless of their deeply held personal beliefs, oppress in their own way and serve to the populations they drop themselves into as festering reminders of the painful scars left in the land and in the hearts of the people by their forbearers. They are part of that ambient tension and implicit violence, ready to strike at any time.

A few years later Naipaul would write his masterpiece of post-colonial Africa, A Bend in The River, with the theme echoed by the foolish character of the 'new order' in that unnamed African country - Indar  that "the airplane is faster than the heart" - progress moves us forward and we must forget the old.  Nancy Mitford captured the same themes in her witty, biting novels of England between the wars, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.  Mitford chafed at the divisions within her own family, cousins to Churchill, her youngest sister a Cavendish became the Duchess of Devonshire and was briefly the in law of the ill-fated Kathleen Kennedy, their father a Hun-bashing member of the House of Lords - her sister Diana imprisoned alongside her Fascist husband and her sister Decca off to America to become a lifelong Communist living in Oakland, and most tragic of all, their sister Unity became a close confidante of Hitler and lingered for years a shell of her former self after a failed suicide attempt.   Yes, all of that in one family, and Mitford honed in on the cacophony of political ideologies coming at Brits in between the wars as she wrote of her heroine Linda becoming quite besotted by a revolutionary shouting out his political manifesto to join in the Spanish Civil War from a podium alongside many others where other people with very differing views were shouting their own manifestos.  In a slap to her elitist social class' dabbling in all of these ideologies, Mitford has Linda become significantly more concerned about how small domestic animals are being treated in these oppressive regions than how the people are actually fairing.

But what does all of this have to do with confederate flags flying from statehouses in 2015 and the babel of discourse on the internet and among our jaded media about whether the arguments should even be made right now since the Civil War happened so very long ago and had nothing to do with the recent cold-blooded racist motivated murder of 9 Black Americans in their AME Church where they had gathered for prayer?  Well, everything, of course.  What drew poor, misguided Unity Mitford (and so very many more of her European compatriots) to embrace Hitler's wit and his progressive ideas about how to bring Germany back to economic prosperity even as she also heard the carefully veiled but horribly apparent murderously racist platform upon which he endeavored to deliver this [prosperity and prominence.  Yes, Germany was down, but not out, and out of the jaws of defeat Hitler saw not a pathway of harmony or unity, but of blame and recrimination.  And he had a flag to reflect his ideology.  Like the pogroms that swept across Russia and Eastern Europe long before the Nazis began their extermination, he saw a path for some if they could only stand upon the bones of others.  And, of course, long overlooked by western historians and westerners in general is that the mind-boggling ongoing atrocity that it was to claim 6 million lives while the entire civilized world shielded their eyes from the glare, was that beginning not much more than forty years earlier King Leopold of tiny Belgium had managed to systematically massacre more like 10 million Africans in what at the time was known at the Belgian Congo in pursuit of commerce.  First it was ivory that was harvested to help Belgium grow, and then when the Scottish inventor Dunlop developed the inflatable tire, it was rubber that had to be harvested in Africa before the plants could grow tall enough in South America to begin to compete.

Those fictional islanders in Naipaul's book so ravaged by ongoing violence and oppressed once again by Roche and Jane (who had no memory, no concept of history), represented similar victims of colonialism.  And, of course, here in our country, the one spared the greatest scars of a former colony for having broken free so quickly, our vestige was slavery followed by the even greater injustice of Jim Crow in the south.  In the 1970s when Naipaul was writing his novels of Africa and Central America mirroring the world around us, Langston Hughes' dream deferred exploded all over the United States. 

We are here in 2015 with hundreds of years of history of domestic terrorism and hate in this country.  The 20th century opened with much promise here, but it occurred in the very recent wake  of two presidential assassinations, Garfield's and McKinley's, the latter at the hands of an anarchist in an era of anarchy we seem to have forgotten.  In Germany today if groups begin to form, as they have done and continue to do, looking to revive fascism, racist xenophobia, they are shunned and protections are put into place to try to keep them from growing.  As proud as the heritage is in Germany of all it has endured and evolved into in its many iterations over hundreds of years, there are no Nazi flags hung at statehouses, or even from individual houses.  History matters.  We are who we were in our smallest, darkest moments.  If we fail to acknowledge, really see and listen to history, and understand the undercurrents still reverberating that keep so many ill at ease and feeling unsafe in the presence of the 'existing order' we perpetuate the sins of the past. 

I have no idea what concept of history the young man who gunned down 9 people in a house of God possessed, but he rambled on with standard racial stereotyping to justify his actions.  In God's house.  During the civil rights movement churches were fair game for the pockets of racists yearning for a past glory, ostensibly, and on this tiny planet of ours one of those Mitford sisters, Decca, was roughed up with all the other white liberals trying to get free after a gathering and a bombing in the American south.  The reality was though that Mitford's path to safety that night was much more sure than that of any Black American also present.  And there were a lot of confederate flags flying from truck beds roaming the streets that night, and in South Carolina the confederate flag was flying as it has since the Civil War, to honor confederate soldiers and the proud legacy of the southern way of life.  But still we want to insist in our 21st century enlightenment that it is not a symbol of slavery or oppression or violence toward and dominion over Black Americans.

So right now, just as we had when Mitford's fictional Linda was wandering about in the park listening to the ideologues droning their political views from their little podiums trying to shout each other down, there is a cacophony going on.  One hundred and fifty years after the nation came back together after a war that cost so many lives, including that of its president, we are still shouting into the wilderness about what a flag really means.  Some are saying we should get over it, the past is past.  Flags have nothing to do with racist violence.  Really?  They understand up close and personal how flags incite violence and ways of thinking in Germany in 2015.  They refuse to forget, they insist upon remembering - because the moment you let go of memory you enable repetition.  Why do we fail to see it here?  Why do we say things like "some people may be offended" by flying a confederate flag from a statehouse?  A state house.  We want people to forget what it is uncomfortable for us to remember.  We are tired of paying for the sins of the past and for putting too much 'connotation' into the actions of a few or reading too much meaning into a flag that stood for a whole lot of things in its time, but would never have been crafted except for a will to preserve slavery and the brutality and oppression that necessarily accompanied it - the dominance of one race over another. 

I suppose the question I keep asking myself is, if we'd stopped flying those confederate flags from official buildings, if we'd had an open dialogue about our past, about what has happened and how it made us feel and how we feel today.  If we'd done those things, would those nine people still be alive today?   I think we are all mostly comfortable saying we should not be history deniers, but we are guilty of being history down players, history sanitizers.  We want to extract the good from the bad and preserve symbols of an old order.  Why? We have to admit and face up to where we've been.  But are we all fully comfortable insisting that we not be history forgetters?  I suppose if we were we wouldn't be shouting at each other on TV, or posting and dodging on the internet and closing our minds and eyes, and our very capable ears, to the echoes of our authentic past.  It is not someone else's past that we have long since finished apologizing for - it is yours and mine. History is not a distraction from important events going on today, it's not a shiny object keeping our eyes from seeing what is so clearly still in front of us.  History is an important prologue.  History matters.   

Stuckeys - Reflections on Summer Road Trips with our Dad

Summer road trips are among the most cherished memories of my childhood.  To be honest, I can't even remember all of the destinations, but my father had a knack for making the journey an adventure.  And that is saying a lot when you consider these road trips involved squeezing six or seven children and one or two adults into a station wagon, likely one that lacked air conditioning, to travel hundreds of miles a day, sometimes for days on end.  I used to channel my father when I'd take my own children up to Oregon and Washington, or down to Disneyland, Monterey, anywhere we chose to drive rather than fly.  But it was different.  We had air conditioning. a smaller crew, a roomy SUV most of the time if not a rental car, and rather than an AM radio trying to catch a local station, we had XM or CDs or we used Bluetooth.  And although I never bought a vehicle fitted with video, sometimes the kids would have a hand held DVD player or they'd individually plug in to their electronic devices to entertain themselves.  Only when they were very small did we engage in sing alongs and play games with license plates, or was I subjected to their energetic games of "Slug Bug".  We also did not have specific places we always stopped at along the way like my father did, as we don't really favor roadside chain restaurants, and if we did, once the kids saw an In N Out sign there was no re-directing them.

My father knew his chains.  Howard Johnson's (the restaurant, not just the hotels) for the vanilla ice cream and wide orange booths.  Ditto Carnation outlets in California.  And when we really hit the open road he was a devotee of Stuckey's, and it wasn't a road trip for him if he didn't get a nice pecan roll once a day.  To this day I don't remember what else they served at Stuckey's although I have memories of the smell of wax paper wrapped around white bread sandwiches and of my face peering over a formica topped table as my sisters and I huddled eating tuna fish, potato chips and ice cold milk.  I even remember being in the way back of our bronze colored 1965 Plymouth Valiant wagon probably in 1970, and having my older sister Bridget talk me into making faces at the people in the car behind us because we were never going to see them again.  Bridgey leaned up close to the rear window as we rolled along and stuck one finger up inside her upper lip to pull it at the right side and the other pinned her nose back so it looked like a pig's snout, and she began to squeal at the people tailgating us in a large Buick sedan.  Our car was filled with noise and chatter, the distant scratchy hum of the radio at the front of the car playing "I Think I Love You" or Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" (because those two songs played more than any other songs on AM radio that summer and we would hear them each four or five times a day) as my oldest sister fumbled with the radio dial trying to hold it at the place where there was no static; the girls in the middle seat were chattering away about the sights and sounds of Yosemite we'd just experienced while the baby dozed in her car seat, her stomach filled inadvertently with sour formula as we'd neglected to put enough ice in the ice chest.  Soon enough she'd begin to explode and projectile vomit - but that was an adventure for much later in the day.  With all of that cacophony about us I felt safe in joining Bridgey in her antics and made faces and sounds myself, pressing my face right up against the rear windshield.  No sooner had I done this, assured of my anonymity by the long miles we'd yet to travel that day, when my father began to slow the car to exit the freeway, and the Buick behind us did likewise.

We pulled into the parking lot of a Stuckey's somewhere in Nevada as we were making our way east to Carson City from Yosemite and would then head to my grandparents house in Cedar Flat at Lake Tahoe.  I remember the sound of my father's car wheels on the loose gravel in the Stuckey's parking lot, and of the larger tires of the Buick as it skirted past us to another parking spot.  I remained low in the way back seat as everyone began to exit the car, and as the girls filed out of the middle seat I slipped over the back of the way back seat to come out one of their doors, certain the people in that other car were going to come after my sister and me as we exited from the back of our car for how rude we'd been.  Which would not make my father happy.  He and my mother were very big on good manners and graciousness.  As I rolled along the middle seat of the car toward the passenger side door, I picked up my little sister's red sweater and squeezed into it, hoping to further disguise myself.  Bridgey fearlessly, exited the car once my father opened up the back door.

We entered Stuckey's without incident though, and I didn't recognize anyone in the small establishment as being the occupants of the Buick.  My father ordered us all to 'stretch our legs' in the parking lot and take any necessary bathroom breaks before joining him at the table.  He was carrying the baby, who was sound asleep, but a little gassy, and folded her into a high chair.  That may be the day we had the tuna fish sandwiches and milk, but maybe not.  It was late afternoon and we were all tired as I don't remember how many days we'd been in Yosemite, but I knew we'd started our morning there with a hike through the meadow, and then we'd had the long drive.  My two oldest sisters, who were teenagers, were trying to look like they weren't with the rest of us, and once the meal was over and my father handed them the keys to the car to get us all settled while he used the restroom before heading out again, they tried to become invisible.  The oldest sat low in the front seat, the second oldest was directly behind her in the middle seat, also riding low.  Bridgey and I were joined by my younger sister in the way back for this leg of the trip as the ice chest was now riding up front, newly stocked with a few Shasta colas.  It was hot and we were sticky and sweaty a few minutes after getting into the car.  The windows were rolled down but it was probably 90 degrees out.  The wait for my father's return from the men's room seemed interminable.

Up front my oldest sister was getting annoyed, complaining about the length of my father's bathroom stay and that people were certainly noticing it was taking him so long.  She wanted us to remind him to cut back on the pecan rolls, which were obviously binding him up a bit.  The second oldest wondered how anyone could humanly manage to stay this long in a Stuckey's restroom, and she advised he must be breathing through his mouth while in there because she didn't think they cleaned them as often as they should (note: our experience was only of the ladies' room, so we could only imagine how shabby the men's room was).  None of us considered our father's comfort.  He worked all year long as a teacher, and then during the summer break he taught both gymnastic camp (which we attended) and summer school.  Even during the school year he spent at least one weekend day working in his cigar store to augment the family income, and he seldom missed a volleyball game or Father-Daughter Dance, or school play of ours.  Then, in the two weeks or so he actually had off every summer, it was into the wagon with the kids to hit the road.  And always he was in good humor, singing along to the radio, or when there was no reception, leading us all in singing "Ramblin' Rose" or "How Much is That Doggy in the Window", or telling us jokes or making his painful puns based on our snippets of conversation.

No, mostly to us he was the salt and pepper crew cut and 17 inch neck sticking out from one of his short-sleeved sports shirts that we observed from the shoulders up at his back as he led us down the highway.  So, we were not so much relieved as just irritated when he finally emerged from Stuckey's, his eyes uncharacteristically reddened as if with tears, as he slid back into the driver's seat.  He took the keys from my oldest sister and then took a deep breath, not putting the key in the ignition, despite the fact he too must have been sweltering.  Nobody asked him what was wrong, but one of my sisters, asked him to please start the car, that he had been in the bathroom forever and she just wanted to get on the road already.

He turned around and looked at as many of us as he could take in from that perch.  I could see even from the way back that he had been crying, which seemed impossible.  At that point in my life I had never seen him cry at all.  But, as he looked at us all his eyes welled up again a little, and then finally his face broke out into a smile and he chuckled to himself.  "Do you know what happened to me?"  He asked.  Everyone shook their heads and some began to look away from him out the window.

He didn't have to tell us anything.  What went on in that men's room somewhere outside Carson City, Nevada, was his own darn business. But, he did tell us.  You see, apparently those pecan rolls had been a little binding, and his fortysomething digestive system had seized up on him at some point.  He must have been bearing down a little, his eyes shut tightly.  The bathrooms in Stuckey's were on timers, and he'd been in there a while and was all by himself at that point in one of the two stalls opposite the small row of urinals.  Seems that while his eyes were pressed closed the timer had run out.  He got through whatever impasse his bowels had been posing and opened his eyes, and the place was pitch black.  For a moment he thought he'd gone blind.  You heard me, he thought he'd gone blind.  He was sitting on a toilet somewhere in Nevada and his seven daughters were crowded into a Plymouth station wagon out in the parking lot, and he was suddenly quite blind.  He was at an utter loss. How was he going to get us out of here?  How was he going to go on with his life and provide for us all?  Who could he call if he could find a payphone?  And how to explain spontaneous blindness caused by straining too much?  All of these terrible thoughts were swirling in his head as he tried to make sense of things sitting in the darkness for an interminable moment before another traveler felt the need to answer nature's call and came swooping into the men's room, turning the timer over and filling the room with God's own light.  That was when the tears began to flow. 

As always, my father got no sympathy, just groaning from all about the car and insistent pleas to just start the engine and get us out of here.  I am certain had the darkness gone on a few more seconds his eyes would have begun to adjust and he would have seen the outlines of his hands, of the stall and recognized the situation for what it was.  He was an incredibly intelligent man.  But in that moment  on day whatever of a long summer road trip, after getting seven children up and out in the morning and hiking with us and giving us the history of whatever meadow we were passing through, after feeding us all lunch and getting just a few seconds to collect himself in the privacy of an ill-maintained public restroom -   he had been filled with panic and shame and a moment of desperation.  And in the next moment he'd been able to laugh at himself, and invite us all to do the same.  That's who he was. 

      
   

Day One, Empty Nest

I had a much more hectic weekend than I'd anticipated getting ready to send my youngest child off to Army boot camp, but amidst all of the mixed emotions I felt as a mother as my son embarked on this next stage of his life with a course he chose decisively to serve, there was also time to reflect.  I walked very early Sunday morning, before the sunrise even, because I could not sleep.  I walked again Monday evening in and around the village in Fair Oaks, after I got the final text from my son that he was at Fort Benning and it would now be three months before I was likely to hear from him again.

I thought as I walked along familiar narrow, tree lined streets down toward the river of the significance of the reality that Mack had texted me more times as he made the trip east that day than he had in the prior 3 or 4 months combined.  Obviously he was a little nervous about all that lay ahead as well, but I think he also kept me informed to keep me comforted. 

I don't think there was disquiet in my mind as this passage approached, but the timing posed emotional challenges.  I had not consciously realized until I was far away from the house Sunday morning that not only was Mack leaving on Father's Day, always a complicated day for him, but it also happened to be the anniversary of the day my older son died.  I think that realization caused me to measure time differently than I would have just thinking about Mack going off to the Army just two weeks after graduating high school.  Now I was more aware of the full span, of how hopefulness and wonder had been set aside so suddenly twenty-six years earlier, and then later three very unique little wonders came into the world beginning with Lucy, and then three years later Audrey, and finally three years after that Mack.  I thought about the enchanting video Lucy had just posted from the summit of Mount Saint Helens on Father's Day, her bright eyes and adorable dimples visible as she greeted her dad and then gave a breathless travelogue as her camera panned the vistas to Mount Hood and Mount Rainier ("I think that's Mount Rainier over there", she advised ) off in the blue distance.   She is the adventurer and the nurturer.  She does not let obstacles stand in her way and she continues to possess the incongruous combination of a child's wonder and a sage's wisdom well beyond her years.  She has eased seamlessly over the past five or six years from the very open young adult who would come to me for counsel into the grown daughter who helps me think things through, or advises me when I should stop thinking and just do what feels right.   And all of the other children light up when she enters a room.  She is 'sissy', the oldest, their leader.  Even my Labrador, who has never lived in the same house as Lucy, both lights up and calms down in her presence.  And there she was on Sunday, all bundled up and holding a sign that said Happy Father's Day from the summit.  Who could have foretold?

And then there is Audrey, who called her brother and talked with him for over an hour Saturday night wanting to reassure him and encourage him and engage him in the everyday workings of her own life.  My little marsupial.  The baby and toddler who was always holding on tight, clinging so firmly you could literally let go of her and there was no danger she would fall.  If it is possible for a child to be born knowing they will be a middle child, that was Audrey, but then God in his infinite wisdom stretched our family out to include three younger siblings and she got to shed some of the unease of the middle to be more of nurturer herself.  Much like her namesake, Audrey Hepburn, our Audrey is swanlike and graceful, and she is the only one among the children who has her own special name, made up of an amalgam of our family languages to connote her good heart and that she is much loved by God.  Benu.  Of course, the kids all call her 'Audge' too, or 'Paudge', and if she is being disagreeable she becomes "The Paudge", which I think means the one who will not move.  That's where that big heart comes in to balance things.  I remember the first Mother's Day we celebrated after Lucy had gone away to college, with Audrey in charge.  She kept me upstairs a very long time in the morning and finally led me down to the table in our breakfast room where she and Mack had prepared two perfectly poached eggs for me along with strong coffee.  Over my shoulder I could see the kitchen - multiple pots and pans strewn about, flour tossed here and there along the counters and splattered on the ventilation hood of the stove, the sink quite full of dishes and utensils.  I made sure to take pictures of them because I could only guess what had gone into the preparation of those two poached eggs that had resulted in virtually every kitchen item and cooking ingredient being utilized along the way. 

As I walked down the long upstairs hallway last night I opened each of the children's bedroom doors (leaving Mack's open for air, a luxury I can now exercise).  I opened the blinds to let light into Mack's room and looked about at his many stacked books, his model airplanes and massive Lego Star Wars creations (his architectural creations are all downstairs), video consoles and games filling his large, dusty desk, and bins of who knows what and stacks of military gear in an order I know he understands, all about the room.  I will have to delicately downsize all of this in his absence, carefully cataloguing what I relegate to storage.  He was the last one, the quiet one, who was so happy and so peaceful even as a baby that his sisters dubbed him The Buddha, and that is who he has been ever since.  I've observed as he has evolved from the shy pre-teen and teenager who would scarcely say a word in group settings, but if you were in a one on one situation with him he would rattle on about science fiction books or the game he was mastering on the X Box, or the hierarchy and tribes of Middle Earth.  Now he stops and listens more, takes in what interests others, and he dialogues.  He is still shy, still painfully introverted - a trait he was pummeled with genetically, getting the biggest dose from both sides of the family.  But, I've seen him transform with his friends and galvanize them, I've noticed many of them look up to him as a leader.  And I was thinking last night in the stillness of the house with Lois sleeping silently downstairs in her crate and no game sounds or excited conversations spilling out of Mack's room, that he will be fine at Fort Benning.

He was the bird I feared I might have to toss out of the nest, as he often peered over the side and then looked back at me, skeptically, not making any moves toward the edge.  It wasn't that the nest was warm and welcoming and familiar so much as that he worried about his mother bird in it all alone once he dove out.  That can happen with the youngest.  The others scamper off one by one out into the world, feeling the broader air and space, knowing the perch is still there and they can alight to rest again any time.   But the last one has had some space, has felt the adjustment as each successive bird takes to flight, and maybe little boy birds raised by single mothers are more protective by nature.  I feared I'd have to toughen him up, but he did it himself.  I think at some point he looked at me as the last of those ten little ants in the crowded bed in the children's song that begins 'there were ten in the bed, and the little one said, roll over, roll over".  So they all rolled over and one fell out, and on each successive round the little one orders them all to roll over.  And then at the end of the song there were two in the bed and little one said roll over, and the last other ant fell out - and then all the little one said was 'good night'.

Last night I knew Mack had arrived safely at Fort Benning.  I knew he would be strong and would be true to his authentic self.  I'd last texted him to enjoy the adventure ahead.  And I understood last night as I dozed off to sleep that I wasn't just speaking of the next four months of basic training and AIT.  I meant the whole adventure ahead. For all of us, each of us.   

"Give me light, give me hope, keep me free from birth"

I have been finding quiet moments for prayer and reflection over the last 36 or so hours since the terrorist church shootings happened in South Carolina on Wednesday night, and was listening last night and this morning to many of the songs of the late George Harrison, including, "Give Me Love", one of the most compelling entreaties of self to reach out with full heart and soul to be guided by God's love.  And, I suppose if you don't believe in God, then it is easiest to explain that Harrison is seeking to understand pure Love and to have it guide his thoughts and actions.

Love, God, is the place I go when I cannot make sense of human action, when I need to assess my own motives, when I need to be outside the constraints of myself and my petty existence.  That is a place I have to go to any time I am confronted with just how visceral race relations are in my cherished country.  Visceral - emanating from deep inward feeling - not engagement of intellect.  We feel how we feel sometimes.  Therapists tell us feelings are never wrong - but they need to be explored.  Acting on feelings we have not subjected to examination, assessment, well that can be very wrong and very harmful indeed.  And it is very apparent to me that there is much action taking place in this country that is visceral, devoid of valid intellectual engagement, of self-examination, of the sort of therapeutic dialogue that better enables us to understand the source of our feelings and to work them through in a healthy way.  And hopefully we get to the place where we don't feel hate or feel compelled to act on it. 

Like anyone else of kind heart and empathetic bent, I would love to bind my actions to the sort of soul searching oneness with Love that George Harrison spoke of striving toward, and like anyone else of imperfect nature I fall short time and again.  But I keep trying, keep self-examining, keep reaching out, and keep saying things out loud  to find out what they mean and how to make sense of them, so that I embrace love and repel hate.

I have a terrible, painful memory of what for many years I felt was unforgiveable bigotry on my part.  I was a small child, four years old, sitting in the way back of our station wagon in the parking lot of a private school in San Diego.  Our car was crowded with my mother, me and five of my sisters while my father was interviewing for a job he would never take because at the end of the day my mother did not want to move away from her hometown.  Boys were coming and going from class at the school, all in crisp khakis, white oxford shirts and maroon sweater vests or blazers.  It was not a particularly diverse school, mostly clean cut white boys not yet challenging the constraints of conformity in the mid turning to late 1960s, the view was mostly homogenous.  But there were a few Asians, some Latinos and a very few African Americans.  I watched about seventy or eighty boys file by the car moving from one class to the other, and only three were black.  Two sported the same crew cut as most of the other boys at the school, but one had a mini-Afro developing and it was bleached out at the tips either by the sun or chemicals.  It was the late summer of 1966 and these were the last few days of their summer session at school.  These three boys walked together from one set of classrooms across the quad and toward the classrooms on the other side of where we had parked.  They were probably thirteen or fourteen years old. 

I turned around to face my mother and commented that the young man with the orange-tipped mini-Afro looked wild, like a monkey.  My mother was horrified, and I could see immediately in her face that she could not believe what was coming out of my mouth.  Without even knowing why yet, I understood I had said something terrible.  Fortunately, my mother didn't just scold me and advise that 'we don't ever say something like that', she explained why it was so offensive.  She told me some things people sometimes said about Sicilians like her, but how those were generally cultural and not physical 'denigrations', and why it was never acceptable to compare any human being to an animal.  She went on to tell me that I was too young and lacked sufficient human experience to understand just how badly we, as a human family, had treated Africans, and later black Americans, "but someday you will begin to grasp the magnitude, the scope of time without relief from oppression and violence, the venal disregard for human dignity", she advised, "and then however bad you feel right now about the implications of what you just said will seem insignificant to how bad you should feel."  She always spoke to me as an adult, often with words I could not fully understand - but this was very clear to me.  I remember sobbing, feeling so bad about being so offensive, and she did not comfort me and say it was okay.  It was the most profound lesson she taught me in my early life.  After that my eyes were upon her actions and those of my father, as my ears attuned to their words in the ensuing years to determine that they were consistent and to look for guidance. 

What I remember now is that my mother did not take issue with the way I would stare at and moon over the cover of one of my father's Harry Belafonte albums - because I thought (and probably still do to this day) that he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen.  Ditto with Sidney Poitier when I asked if it was okay for me to go see "A Warm December" when I was about ten (or my crushes on Bruce Lee, William Holden and Carlos Santana all in this same timeframe and for no particular reason).  Harry Belafonte wasn't a 'black' singer or Poitier a 'black' actor to me nor were they pointed out as such by my parents, although my parents were very much aware of the deep civil rights commitments of both of these men and they respected and admired them for it.  Somehow, as I was growing up, it was conveyed through how we lived our lives (my grandparents included, as they brought a number of their friends back from South Vietnam and helped them get residency as the war there escalated, and one of the stories my grandmother told me to comfort me during a prolonged stay with them when I was sick as a child was of the children who welcomed her and her older sister when they had to move to the black part of their Tennessee town after he mother was widowed) - that people are people.  We certainly recognized cultural and physical differences, and I remember my mother struggling over interracial dating with my two oldest sisters, but she conveyed to me that her fears were about harm coming to my sister or to the boy she was out with, because of what others held in their hearts. 

I didn't share her fears, although I suppose they were understandable.  Those were volatile times.  In the wake of the church bombings and lynchings and assassinations of the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement had emerged amidst some fairly general anarchy.   I guess what got lost was that white power movements didn't disappear, they just receded from the mainstream.  We let ourselves believe they were not just dormant, but dying.

By the 1980s, when I was in college, a white girl going to a Mecha or a BSU dance was not an act of defiance or solidarity, it was about going to the dances with more and better music.  But, even in the midst of mindless college fraternization and frivolity, I read, witnessed, remembered.  We looked out to other trouble spots in the world, South Africa, the always tense Middle East, where issues of racial and religious injustice seemed most harsh.  We allowed ourselves to think those were the problem areas and we had continued to move forward in a society of equality.  Late in that decade I got married and after introducing my Nigerian born husband to one of my old college friends, the friend, a young man who had shared a suite with buddies of all racial origins and who had certainly presented as somewhat counter-cultural in the buttoned down yuppie times into which we emerged from the womb of collegiate protection - commented to me "Wow, you guys have really got it made professionally what with affirmative action and all".  A comment off the top of his head, I supposed, but it stung as it seemed to demean both my husband and me as somehow likelier to succeed than him (he was an Anglo-Saxon male) based solely on gender and race privileges we would accrue in the business world.  Since  our experiences had been just the opposite of that - if any doors were ever opened to us, they led to multi-storied opportunities devoid of staircases (and that ever present glass ceiling) - and continued to be so, I wanted to disabuse him of his theory.  But, it was a wedding and not the time or place.

I think that is what most racial injustice this far into human experience is about.  It is not about any real perception that an ethnicity or race or gender is lesser, but that someone of that race or ethnicity or gender is going to get something in life that we do not get, that we are denied.  We are a global economy and we are increasingly a multi-racial species rather than a species of significant, distinct races.   The planet has become smaller, sources of education and communication far advanced, and so we can no longer live in real ignorance of our similarities across cultures.  It is a time in history when we should be able to celebrate the diversity of cultures even as we preserve the history of each.  And why in this country in which I was born after so much history of sanctioned mistreatment and separation and so much having been sacrificed to the effort to overcome and equalize - do we still have citizens walking around believing they have the right to harm or kill black people?  Yes, this type of hatred extends to other groups, genders, etc. - but we have not yet fully resolved the centuries' long problem that began with slavery.  Jim Crow, the great evil that emerged in the south and endured for more than a hundred years through the Civil Rights movement, was more harmful even than the atrocities, corruption and disarray of generations of post-colonial unrest in many countries in Africa.  And then things seemed better, I guess, at least in California where I grew up.  Yes, we still saw and felt some unease, some displeasure, but the violence, the terrorism, the entrenchment wasn't apparent.  Until we elected a black President.  I can't really tie the renewed violence and absence of a public dialogue to anything else.  I remember my father telling me how there would never be another bombing killing little girls in their church.   There would be no more disappeared/murdered civil rights workers.  We saw the evil for what it was and we called it out by its name, and we could now move forward.  I feel I have to call this one as I see it, for electing Barack Obama crossed a line that apparently some in this country did not want to cross.  It wasn't about one person, about any political party, it was about what that meant.  Anyone, any black American, could now grow up to be President.  Why did I see that as hopeful and about damn time (and I'm waiting for the day when a woman can lead this country too), and clearly so many others saw it as a threat?  What did it mean to them?  Why did it frighten or anger them?  What is it we have not said out loud to each other what we need to say out loud and start analyzing?


Why are there immediate apologists for a terrorist, citing mental issues after Wednesday night's mass shooting in a church?  Does anyone think Timothy McVeigh was really well-balanced emotionally and mentally?  But when he blew up the Murrah building and we saw those bodies coming out of the buildings, including little tiny ones in firefighters' arms, we called the act out for the terrorism it was.  It was motivated out of hate.  What happened in South Carolina evolved from the same sort of hate.  And we have to stop saying "if the victims were white we wouldn't be having this conversation'.    No excuses, we have to have a dialogue on race, on equality, on acceptance of where we've been and what we've done as a people and the harm it has caused and will continue to cause until we stop making excuses.        

The dialogue we need to have makes many people uncomfortable.  That is unfortunate, because for many more there is no real peace, no true safety, no semblance of equality, nothing that approximates actual freedom- without that dialogue and the progress it must bring about.  As a white mother in a black family I have experienced much that makes me hopeful about race relations in this country, and much that causes me alarm.  I have a cloak of invisibility at times that forces me to see things while remaining unseen for who and what I really am.  As my former husband advised me before we married, I would be giving up my culture, my race in some aspects as we married and especially as we had children, and he was right.  He understood this as someone who had to discard some of his own culture in coming to America, in assimilating, in leaving behind the legacy of having been born Yoruba in Nigeria where his ethnic group were the political leaders in a country of diverse cultures, religions and ethnicities to venture into the middle of America where his heavy accent and his deep chocolate complexion made him even more of a minority than just being a black American would.

And here we stand fifteen years into the 21st century in America, and things should be better, safer for ALL of us.  Regardless of political affiliation we should be proud that we live in a country where someone from a multicultural background, with a broad worldview, grew up to become president - that this was possible here.  Any white child, any black child, any brown child, any child regardless of gender, can grow up to be president here.  Except the ones who are killed because they are black, or because they are Muslim, or Jewish, or because we think their parents came here illegally, or because girls shouldn't be able to do everything boys can do.   Nine people in a church in South Carolina are not alive today because of hate.  A group of Amish girls are not alive today because of hate.  Countless Jewish Americans are not alive today because of hate.  Matthew Shepherd is not alive today because of hate.  The list goes sadly on and on.  What do we think they are getting that was supposed to be for us?  What are they receiving that they didn't deserve?  What threat are they posing to our worldview or our religious views that simply cannot be tolerated or allowed to exist for one more minute?  And why do we think that we are the arbiters to determine the level of human dignity any other person should receive, let alone to determine who gets to breathe free and who has to stop breathing?

My mother was right all those years ago not to comfort me and tell me it was okay, that I hadn't understood the implications of what I'd said.  I spoke out of ignorance, and she schooled me, but the reality was I had said something harmful and unacceptable, and I needed to feel discomfort to think about how I would feel on the receiving end of such words.  And I've known the pain of having to bury a child, though gratefully not due to an act of violence.   We need a better dialogue in this country, more personal accountability for actions.  And, we need it now.  I pray we get it and that God hears me prayers and keeps my heart open.  Please God, don't let me know the pain of burying a child due to racial violence.  Instead "Give me love, give me love, give me peace on earth.  Give me light, give me hope, keep me free from birth.  Give me hope, help me cope - with this heavy load.  Trying to touch and reach you, with heart and soul."    

             

Fearless

This is a terribly personal post, but also I suspect a rather universal one - about fear and fearlessness.  When we are very young our fears are generally quite simple and they revolve mostly around our basic need for security.  When we are small and relatively helpless in a big world we are also in many ways blessedly unaware of real physical dangers and if we are lucky are also unencumbered by anxieties and irrationalities that can begin to burden us over time.  That is not always the case, some people are born hard-wired toward anxiety and its attendant irrationality, but for me that was not the burden of my childhood.  I was afraid of the dark at some point, not for fear of the darkness itself but for the absence of line of sight to familiar comforts like my parents.  I was afraid of being left behind (quite rationally, as it happened on a few traumatic occasions), not because I feared the unknown or lacked an explorer's sensibility - but I think the fear of permanent separation outweighed the curiosity of the new and heretofore unexplored.  And sometimes I was afraid of heights.  Not always.  I would scale a tree and sit up in its highest branches, look out from the windows of tall buildings with amazement, but at some point I developed an inconsistent comfort with high places.

As a small child I did indeed fear separation from my parents in the darkness (there were no other substitutes for feeling completely safe in my still forming consciousness) and suffered from night terrors so vivid that I often awoke my entire household with my piercing screams or frenzied somnambulant dialogue outlining the impending peril I was facing in my half-sleep state.  Many was the morning I awoke bathed in a cold sweat and still  hugging my mother's sweater about my head and face as I clutched it during the night to surround myself with her essence to get me through the dark night.  And, after being left behind at the state fair after all of the sisters had been counted off getting into the station wagon, I walked in subtlely widening circles singing "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so" to myself for a little over an hour until my parents realized they were one child short and came back to get me.  Finally, on a trip when I was seven years old to Seattle, all of my sisters ran out onto the balcony of the Space Needle and looked through the telescopes at Seattle and the Puget Sound below - while I clung desperately to my father's pant leg and closed my eyes tightly, eventually vomiting into the wastebasket.

I was in some ways a mass of contradictions, boundless in energy and curiosity to try any new thing or explore any new place, but also crippled at times by fears that baffled my parents.  When I was five I nearly drowned in the pool at the hotel we were staying at in San Diego because I let go of the side and slipped under the water in the deep end unable to swim , and at six I was swimming out to the buoys in the shockingly cold water at Lake Tahoe on my own.  Painfully introverted, I would nonetheless plunge into a circle of children and soon be leading them on some adventure.  Unable to comprehend why I would sometimes fear perfectly normal things, or why I was the one child in the family who had such disturbingly vivid dreams that could turn everyday objects in my room into other-worldly terrors while viewing them through my open but sleeping eyes,  I asked my mother.  She said something that seemed ridiculous to me at the time, but it may have been the most sage thing I had ever heard.  "Sometimes, sweety babe, we see and hear things that aren't about today.  I think you see things much farther down the road sometimes, but your little mind isn't formed enough to cope with them."  She comforted me that what was in my dreams wasn't real in the very next breath, but I understood on some level that she was saying what was in my dreams was real.

One night a number of years ago I was walking down the narrow street we lived on with my children and one of their friends.  I was a Halloween spook walk, because our streets had no streetlights, the houses were all generally set back from the street and the trees were tall and mature, their branches making eerie shadows in the moonlight in time to the startling whispers of the wind.  My two younger children were clinging to me so tightly that I had trouble walking, but my oldest and her friend were enjoying the adventure, the spectacle.  Other than the restraint of two rigid little bodies wrapped around me and fingernails cutting into my arms and legs, I was at peace.  I really couldn't say at what age I shed any fear of the dark but I had such an awareness in that moment of fearlessness.

Many years before that, when I was young and single and living life on my own terms as I was wont to do, I was riding my racing bike in the canyon between San Ramon and Moraga, flying down and narrow, winding road at close to forty miles an hour and as the wind slapped me in the face as I rounded a corner my breathing halted momentarily.  I had to catch myself and will air out of my lungs and then back in, and I slowed the bike down.  Fearless, to the point of recklessness.  That was not as peaceful a feeling when it caught up to me like that.  I loved cycling, did it most every day after work, then took a boat out to row on the reservoir in Lafayette, and then went home for the night.  But, I understood I needed to slow down a bit.  I understood I was overcompensating as I had been for a few years in many different ways, to prove to myself I wasn't powerless.  I'd endured a significant trauma a few years earlier, barely survived it actually, and had been racing and pushing and testing my own limits whenever I got the chance ever since.  A cycling accident a few days after that revelation in the canyon, albeit at a much slower speed, sidetracked me for a few weeks while broken bones and stitched up head wounds healed.  While resting up one evening I dozed off in a chair on our back deck and fell into a dream.  I understood in the dream that what my mother had said to me as a child was very true.  I remembered my greatest fear while being whisked off into the night in a strange place as the gravity of my circumstances began to become clear, was that this was where I would die - in this piercing night in an unfamiliar place.  I wasn't so much afraid of death itself or even of the pain on the way to death, but I thought I was never going to see my parents again.  That was the terribly unsettling thing to me at the time, the overwhelming thing. Everything comfortable and familiar and secure would be gone forever and what was happening now would be the last things I would know.  Except even at the time, I was still my mother's child, still me, and I struggled to push those unsettling thoughts aside.  'I awoke on the deck into the stillness  of night.  I wasn't afraid or startled and the objects around me weren't distorted or threatening.

I resumed cycling a couple of weeks later, although I remember literally being shaky as I stood over my new racing bike and kicked off from our curb.  I had hit the ground, with my face, at twenty plus miles an hour and skidded forward thirty feet before landing in brush out of sight of the trail, bleeding profusely from the head and face and eventually losing consciousness.  Had a young boy not seen the accident and come to my aid, well, who knows.  So, I had felt up close and personal the worst that could happen, essentially, when riding my bike.  I shook that off because I also knew the best that could happen, and it was the freedom, the propelling myself forward under my own steam with nature all around me.  I stopped shaking and just started riding.