Dad hot

February 23, 2015

Greetings from room temp,

My Dad was a loud sneezer.  He would let out an explosion that sounded like a war whoop followed by some unintelligible Scottish phrase that I won’t try to recreate.  It was a dramatic event that would startle our dog.  And the neighbor’s dog.  Anyone who knew my Dad will testify.

I aim to live an interesting life, one that is rich with experiences and adventures and celebrations.  I’m not out to create lists of accomplishments, for my own sake or others, but I strive to have a full life, with an eye on being at my best in the process. 

I suppose that when my children are recounting my life to others they may point to some success or adventures that I might have deemed significant.  But it occurs to me that I will more likely be remembered for quirks and idiosyncrasies that will make them laugh. 

One day I was in the kitchen with my son Sawyer and he was heating up some food in the microwave.  I commented that it seemed he didn’t wait long for it to get warmed up.

He said, with his mouth full: “I like it heated, but I don’t want it ‘Dad-Hot’.

This is how I will be remembered.  It is my war-whoop sneeze.

This was how I learned of the lens through which my children viewed me.   It was suggested in this conversation that microwave settings should include ‘Hot’ ‘Molten Lava Hot’ ‘Surface of the Sun Hot’ and the life altering, ‘Dad-Hot’.

I recognize that I was being teased for a quirk I have.  Probably one that will eclipse a lifetime of more significant moments.  ‘Dad-hot’ is a humbling reminder of what my real legacy will be. 

I enjoy food.  I have my favorite dishes, from the exotic to the mundane, and I like trying new things to add to the list.  I am not a fussy eater, particularly, but I have some standards.  I enjoy well prepared dishes, in a wide variety of cuisines.

But when food is meant to be cooked, it should be hot.  Not warm or lukewarm or cool.  Hot.  No doubt epicureans are rushing to advise me otherwise, but there are some immutable laws of the universe that should not be tampered with, and ‘hot’ is one of them.

  

Coffee should be hot.  I love coffee, and I lean hard on caffeine daily, but I won’t abide a tepid cup.  Soup should be hot.  I have tried gazpacho and it is not soup, it is watery salsa.  Scrambled eggs, spaghetti sauce, stew, steak: hot, hot, hot and hot.  They call it ‘hot chocolate’ because that’s what God meant for it to be.

Ice cream is cold.  Beer is cold. Salads are cool.  Perhaps pudding could be warm.  But most everything else on the spectrum of cooking beyond pudding should be hot.

I don’t mean scalding: I don’t want to be injured eating oatmeal.  But if it doesn’t steam up my glasses, and make me pause before swallowing the first spoonful, it’s probably not hot enough.

So you have some insight into this quirk which I am certain will be mentioned in my eulogy, some many, many decades in the future.  This whole ‘hot food’ thing is a pretty mundane thing to be remembered for, so I’m working on other idiosyncrasies to add to the list.  Humming, cracking my knuckles, and this new one: sneezing really loud.  My Dad’s legacy should carry on.

My friend Floyd loved to sit in his recliner in his underwear and read the paper until he fell asleep.  It didn’t matter if there was a houseful of people milling about, he would sit there with the breeze blowing on him, in bright colored boxers, his glasses on the end of his nose, dozing before he got to page A-3 of the Free Press.

He would not have minded if that’s one of the ways we thought of him.  It was emblematic of his approach to life.  He was comfortable with himself, with the life he assembled over decades of full days.  He was a compassionate man, a dedicated doctor, a loving parent, a good friend, beloved in his community.  And he loved to eat.  I can see  him even now, bent over a plate of Chinese food, smiling, a little sweat beading on his forehead as he devoured the steaming dish, cooked just the way he liked it and served hot enough to know he was really alive.  Hot. Dad-hot.

Hope this finds you digging in,

David

Copyright © 2015 David Smith

Aspire

February 16, 2014

Greetings from the sparkle,

In the world of running, a ten mile race is an interesting distance. It is just beyond the casual competitor’s interest, just enough into the realm of challenge to give some people pause.  But, not so daunting that it seems unlikely without a radical change in lifestyle to train and complete.  It is distinctly American, standing out on any lists of races with ‘-k’ suffixes.

I called my brother and told him about this race, and it folded perfectly into a reason for a visit to the west coast.  In the next months, Doug urged his family to join him in the training to run ten miles.  And so we had a contingent.  Doug, his wife Lee, and their daughter Cali.

The day before the race I asked them if they had any idea about how fast they would run.
They were tentative, shy even, not wanting to sound overconfident, I think.  They each offered a soft goal, contingent on this or that, which made sense since none of them had raced this distance.   I wondered about how those would look a day later.

The morning teased us to deeper optimism, heightened our senses.  It was beautiful, even by southern California standards.  The sun broached the eastern foothills, lighting a cerulean sky, faultless, drawing our eyes from one horizon to the ocean.

We went through the ritual of prerace, loosening our muscles and tightening our shoelaces.  And then sifted into the crowd of brightly colored runners, stood for that eternal moment before the gun goes off and releases us into the road.  And then we ran.

Running with Doug was not new, but it had been too long since the last time.  We settled into a comfortable pace, and then let the conversation flow around the demands of running.

This was a piece I needed more than I might have realized.  Running along with Doug, chatting about subjects short enough to fit in between the demands of respiration, soaking in the sun, the world of color around us.  But just being in the company of my brother, sharing the experience of the run, was like a gift.

The day brought out the best in people.   The runners were working behind smiles, calling out to each other, high-fiving spectators.  People paused on the course, overwhelmed by the view of the ocean splashing on the edge of the world, the coast stretching away from us into a pale mist.

The miles rolled by, punctuated by twenty live bands, each encouraging us in their own repertoire.

Somewhere on the course, Cali bounded with the gazelle gracefulness that comes with youth.  She surged away from us smiling.  Lee passed us in the switchbacks, running her own race, glorying in the sunny morning, the sound of the surf competing with the cheers of the crowd.

Doug ran smart, keeping tabs on his energy, listening to his body.  Both of us were surprised how the miles piled up.  And then I sensed a change, felt him shift to another gear.  We surged to the eight mile, and in the ninth no one passed us.  And Doug said ‘Not leaving anything on the course’.

This was a familiar feeling, and I laughed a little as we began to grind out the last mile.  There is a joy in this, it is letting the horses out, letting the body do all it is capable of, demanding a little more just to see what really is there.   Doug pulled away from me in the last half mile, and I had to sprint to keep up as we charged down toward the finish line.

We both leaned on our knees, gasping for breath, whooping in victory, reveling in the moment, fully alive.  It is hard to describe, but this was less about defeating the clock, or even the distance.  It was more about pushing past a boundary, real or imagined, to see what lay on the other side.  And then celebrating the discovery.

We found the rest of our running party, and everyone finished faster than hoped.  As Sheehan has said; ‘…the heroes were out…’   There were plenty of reasons to celebrate over the weekend, and this just made the list complete.

A morning later I woke with this word in my head, the first thought from my time here: Aspire.

I will speak for myself, but I sense the need in all humans to feel a purpose, a reason to extend themselves.  There is hope in it, there is a necessary optimism that colors our lives when we aspire to drive ourselves beyond whatever the status quo has to offer.

This was another gift I am grateful for.   I loved seeing the aspirations of my fellow runners, and the passion that it evoked. The reminder of my own need to aspire. It came packaged in a ten mile run, a distance far more interesting than just an accumulation of yards.

Hope this finds you aiming higher,

David

Snow Storm Hype

February 9, 2014

Greetings from beyond the bank,

This week we experienced a winter event.  It’s a generic term I arbitrarily inserted to add marginal importance to an otherwise ordinary event where a combination of temperature and moisture produce frozen precipitation.   Well, it snowed.

I am not sure when the media started naming snowstorms, but in doing so merely added an additional annoyance to an already inconvenient season.  Weather is big business.  The media understands that hyping an impending storm will increase viewership and impressions and that helps sell advertising. 

So someone had the idea of labelling snowstorms to give celebrity meteorologists something to say while they were scaring people into staying tuned for the next weather update.  ‘Snowmageddon’ wasn’t good enough, now the storms must have proper names.

This week we were visited by ‘Linus’, an unfortunate name that conjures an image of a sensitive, thoughtful, considerate person who relies on the comfort of a tattered blanket to feel secure.  Which hardly applied here.

We are no strangers to snowstorms here in Michigan.  I suppose we want to know that bad weather is coming, but don’t we have enough drama without making it a TV event?

When snow piles up it wreaks havoc. Schools close, commerce interrupted, mail is cancelled.  Travel plans are thrashed. Traffic snarls, people are stranded, or worse, collide.  This is a place where some people have to get on the roof to shovel off the snow or risk being crushed by it.

One of the official pastimes in our state is ‘Waiting for the Plow’.  This is a love-hate activity, depending whether the snowplow clears the road to allow you to get to the grocery store or banks up a five foot high wall of compacted snow at the end of your just- shoveled driveway.

Because we are from Michigan, snow is not so much a reason to stay home but a challenge to get on the road.  Well prepared motorists carry a shovel, salt, chains, emergency flares, first aid kit, food and water in case of being stranded.  My level of preparedness includes a Frisbee in the trunk, which can actually be used for moving small quantities of snow.  It is also a hopeful reminder of another season.

Driving in snow requires a blend of optimism, courage, and patience.  The last element comes into play when you are waiting for the tow truck to pull you out of wherever you are stuck. 

And then there is the question of what to wear.  Typically, the best advice is to dress like you did when you were 10 and your mom wouldn’t let you go out unless you had three layers under your snowsuit.  Fashion tends to give way to function in winter.  It’s not that we want to look like arctic explorers; comfort, sometimes survival, is often a higher priority than appearance.

But in all of this, someone is trying to sell air time on the local news.  And so we put up with the hype, and hope the motivation is to inform us and not just manipulate us.  But I am not naive.  My guess is that we are only one step away from branding storms.  Don’t be surprised when the day comes that the Weather Channel introduces weather like ‘The Progressive Insurance Blizzard’ or ‘McDonald’s Flurries’ or ‘Mucinex Minor Accumulation’. 

I don’t begrudge the weather-hawkers trying to make a living, I can just shut them off if I don’t want to hear it.  It’s weather; it will happen again tomorrow.  To paraphrase Longfellow, the best thing one can do when it snows, is to let it snow. 

Now, where is that Frisbee?

Hope this finds you making snow angels,

David

Copyright © 2015 David Smith

Choices

February 2, 2015

Greetings from the pondering,

“I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!” ― Mark Twain

I sat in the parking lot waiting for something to click.  I am sure if anyone had been watching they would have been amused at the faces I was making, and the fact that once in a while I was talking out loud to myself.  I stared out the windshield, and took a deep breath and sighed.

Like all of us, I am faced with choices throughout the day.  Some are trivial, some carry greater consequence.  When I find myself wrestling with a decision, especially when I am graced with the time to consider it, I go through the same process that we probably all do. 

Our decisions are formed with a blend of logic and emotion and environment.  We have our personal philosophies, our experiences, and in all likelihood a host of subconscious influences that we would deny to our friends.  For the most part, our choices are a sum of emotional reactions plus rational thinking plus the force of our circumstances, which often includes other people. 

All the pros and cons accumulate, sometimes in real lists on lined paper, sometimes in the ether of our conscious.  The elements of the decision line up and do battle, and when the skirmish is complete, sometimes there is a clear winner.  But many times it is not that satisfying.

Often our decisions are just momentum, the result of the choices upon choices upon choices that lead down a certain path.  A habitual way of making decisions, which usually serves us, but sometimes blinds us to what is possible.  Or we choose simply to choose, because a good decision now is better than a perfect decision ‘someday’.

We mix in thought upon thought. Rationalizations.  Consequences.  Compromises.  This is how it’s always been done, so somehow an answer will form.  Probably.

Sometimes the choices are clear and easy.  Just as often the answer is in a murky fog of ambiguity.  And so we put the subject to our tests:  What is best for me?  What is fair?  What is kind?  What would my heroes do?  How much does this matter?  Who will care in six months?  What is the cost?  How many calories?  Who else will this effect?

All of this, my experiences, my philosophy, my core values, probably influenced to a degree by what I had for breakfast, whirl around my decisions.  And then this feather floats down from where the angels wait, and settles on one side of the scales.

I stared out the windshield and felt the air cooling around me, heard the wind whispering around the glass.  My mind wandered from my dilemma. 

Along the roofline of the grocery store I noticed there was an owl.  Not a real one, it turns out: it was a molded facsimile.   Every thirty feet or so along the edge of the roof, there was another owl; I’m sure they have always been there but I hadn’t noticed.   Not decoration, I decided, but to intimidate real birds to keep them from roosting on the roof and fouling the building and the people going in and out.

I followed the roofline the length of the façade, seeing these stern guardians with their identical owl-scowls.  And there, in the long stretch between two corners of the building where the owls stood watch, there was a row of pigeons, perhaps twenty interlopers, huddled together in a tight line.  I don’t know if smirks can form on beaks, but the implication was there.

My mouth was open in a smile.  It was as if someone had created a New Yorker cartoon and left off the caption for me to fill in.  “We’ll wait here until someone sees the irony in this.”

And then I laughed harder than the moment called for.  I laughed until tears formed, and I was breathless.  I rubbed my eyes and sighed again.  And what followed was this perfect moment of clarity, when choices fell into place among choices and the scales tipped.

Perspective comes to me in so many ways, but none better than this.  All of the logic and lists of pros and cons and reasonable thinking goes into the decision recipe.  And then there is this wafer thin effect that tips you in one direction.  It might be some random thought, or a ray of sunshine.  A sign.  It could be plastic owl that reminds you that life is funny. 

Sometimes when I look back at enough good decisions I can almost convince myself that I am smart, or that I learn from my experience.  And maybe that’s true to a degree.  But the part of me that still feels like an imposter in the adult world thinks otherwise.  In that odd moment in the parking lot, I realized I was laughing at myself.  My choices were far easier when I stopped taking myself too seriously.  There is a certain symmetry in getting that kind of wisdom from an owl.

Hope this finds you flipping a coin,

David

Copyright © 2015 David Smith

Deflategate

January 26, 2015

Greetings from the hubbub,

Even if you live in the strange periphery of society that I inhabit, where sports news rarely registers unless it somehow affects the price of gasoline, you no doubt have heard about Deflategate.

I will admit I am looking forward to the Superbowl, the one football game I make a point to watch.  However, if you had asked me two weeks ago which teams would likely make it to the Big Kahuna of football, I would have had a hard time focusing long enough to answer.

But when I heard about a team deflating its game balls by a fraction in order to win a game, I’ll admit it caught my attention.  Drama, conspiracy, intrigue, asinine denials!  A clever appellation harkening back to the 1970’s!

This isn’t ordinary cheating.  Not like too many steps taking a lay-up, or a theatric flop in soccer to stick an opponent with a yellow card.  This isn’t nudging another car in the far turn.  It’s not fighting with loaded gloves or running with springs in your shoes.  It’s not steroids or spitballs or pine tar.  It’s not players betting against their own team.  This is a different kind of cheating.  It’s hilarious.

I have done a lot of research on the subject.  So far I have heard that teams want every edge possible in the game, and so it is theorized that the Patriots somehow altered the game balls to make them easier to handle. 

So far opinions are pretty much even as to whether deflating the balls make a substantive difference or not.  From Bill Nye the Science Guy to has-been high school equipment managers, everyone has weighed in on what effect the deflation would make on the plays.

Patriot’s coach Bill Belichick has helped the subject by doing an exhaustive, impartial,  scientific investigation and reporting to the media on his findings.  The best summary of that outcome is that he has created a lot of Seattle Seahawks fans.  I only wish he would have added a little comedic symmetry by echoing “I am not a crook.”  Each time I see an interview with Belichick on this subject, I am reminded of this Mike Birbiglia quote: “What I should have said was nothing.”

So, let’s say for the moment that the underinflated balls produced a better outcome for New England.  Coach Belichick states the team did not tweak the pigskin, and he would have no reason to prevaricate.  So who did? 

There is one theory that the balls were deflated by the Seattle Seahawks, so that that they would be paired with New England in the Superbowl, where they would crush Tom Brady and his soft balls.  There are other suspects.  ESPN.  CIA.  ASPCA.  ASCAP.  North Koreans.  Obamacare.  Mike Birbiglia.

It could be the balls were affected by Global Warming.  A change in temperature, and barometric pressure, could be the culprit.  In which case we can blame cows, camels and pigs, (make your own pigskin connection) which all produce ozone-depleting methane.

It is possible that the referees had a hand in the cheating; everyone knows they bet on the game’s outcome.  (Ask anyone who watched the Lions get cheated out of a Superbowl run against the Dallas Cowboys.)  Another theory is that the people with the most to gain are responsible: NBC and the NFL.  The fact is, the more people talking about this controversy the better the viewership on Sunday.  Ad revenues alone could be in the $300 million range, and that’s a lot of motivation.

This could be the best thing for the Superbowl since wardrobe malfunctions.

The other epiphany I had was this: If New England really deflated the balls and it actually made such a difference that they annihilated Indianapolis (45 to 7) then OBVIOUSLY we should deflate ALL the balls to 11.5 PSI.  We would see some excellent football.

Hope this finds you full of air,

David

Copyright © 2015 David Smith

Hurry

January 19, 2015

Greetings from a hasty life,

When you get a Parent’s License, you are given a list of phrases to memorize.  Here are a few on the final exam:

“Because I said so.”

“Don’t make me come in there.”

“Stop jumping on the couch or Santa will not come this year.”

“Who left these lights on?  It looks like an airport in here.”

and

“Hurry up!”

Children move at a pace that is natural to them.  Their awareness of the pressure of the clock and the demands of the world’s schedule is vague and slippery and dissolves each night in sleep.

We set the example; we show them how important it is to be industrious, to hustle while we hurry.  We tell them how we admire others who are busy, accomplished.  We praise them when they fill their days with things to do, like sports and music and extra education and volunteering.  They respond by waking when they are rested, and moving as if they owned the world, and adapting to whatever comes with a playful joy.

We try to wear that off them in school with rigorous activities and strict class periods punctuated by Pavlovian bells to enforce the rush.  And when summer comes, or the long breaks at the holidays, they revert to their natural state.

Eventually the world begins to win.  It says “Hurry up!” and our children become their parents and grandparents.  It is a life of schedules and appointments and days of choices and only so many hours to get everything done so that we can be ready to do the next day’s things to be done.

Life conspires to enforce the hurry.  Socks are missing.  Traffic snarls. Alarms are muted. The unforeseen intersects with us, chaos created by billions of hurrying people ripples out in to the world and swamps our plans and makes us hurry to compensate.

Sometimes we exacerbate our hurry.  Poor planning. Over-committing.  Forgetting.   Procrastination.  Our best laid plans are thwarted by sleep or habit or faulty memory or a broken shoelace we never got around to replacing.

Sometimes I have found that these circumstances bring something better out of me.  No time to waste: act at optimum efficiency.  Think, decide, act. Repeat.  Get to the next block as fast as possible.  I thrive on the hectic. 

But the hectic is not a compassionate life partner.  Haste makes waste.  Not just because of mistakes born out of going too fast, but because of the toxins that are created in its wake. Fear, panic, anxiety are the ingredients to the hectic life.  Hurrying through a hectic day creates stress, and the body resents it.

In my travels I have found groups of people, whole cultures even, who do not understand the hurry.  In the south.  On Indian reservations.  In Mexico.  In Hawaii.  They all have their version of this: “Oh, you’ll get used to it; the people here are on Rez time.”

With some time in these environments, I am reminded that some things that should not be hurried: Reading.  Eating.  Listening to music.  Conversations.  Personal reflection. Creating.  Enough time away from the hustle of my ordinary day and I begin to see the hurry for what it is.

But I can’t carry these places with me forever, and the world awaits.  I can’t be late. 

I look for a better example to follow, and I am lost until I think of my children.  Those little people who become us; we, who were at one time, them.

I am not naïve enough to think I can behave like a five year old and still function in an adult world.  But I sense the balance I seek is in what they do best, which is to listen to their natural inclination. 

Strangely, running is not hurrying.  I am often rushing to fit in a run, and as soon as I am on the road, the feeling of hurry leaves me.  Just yesterday morning, the day stretched ahead of me full of lists and potential, pulling at me before the sun came up, the hurry piling up before I could finish my coffee.  I responded by lacing up, and running.

In that excellent hour I found what I was looking for.  I put the rush in its place, saw it for what it was.  In the eternal scheme of things, none of what drives the hurry will matter much.  I ran along the wet roads and sorted things in my head, and put them away for the moment, to be dealt with in good time. 

I ran along the wet roads at the pace I chose.  The hurry unraveled in me, and the longer I ran the closer I got to my true age, my true nature.  I became what my children have tried to teach me by example for most of their lives. 

Today I will make time to thank them.

Hope this finds you dawdling,

David

MLK

January 16, 2006

Greetings from the march,

My friend and I stood in the dark outside the gas station and wondered where we would spend the night.

It was 1977, the middle of June, and as muggy and buggy as it can get in Mississippi in the summer.  For more than a week we’d been beyond the Mason Dixon, bicycling through a series of small towns, each mile bringing us further south and further back in time.  Further into a place of great hospitality, culture, history and great despair and injustice.

I remember feeling afraid, as if I were witnessing a wrong I should report to someone.  I heard Black men, old enough to be my father, called ‘boy’, saw Blacks step off the sidewalk to let White people pass, heard the word ‘nigger’ casually peppered in nearly every sentence.  It was an uncomfortable place to be, an American in America, and feeling like some alien visitor. In 1977, not 1957.

Small towns in Mississippi were cut from the same pattern.  A half dozen shops, a few houses along the main street, a few church steeples.  Smaller houses, some shacks, dotted the side streets.  There would be some city office, or city hall, sometimes with its own steeple.  Benches or chairs arranged in front of wherever men would collect and talk in shade.  The barber shop, the hardware store, the police station.

We stayed in roadside parks, or wherever people would have us; one night in a house on stilts in a swamp, the next night a farmer’s barn, another night in a luxurious home, guest of a wealthy lawyer.

This night we had arrived too late in the town to find a place to stay.  We considered the town park near the tracks on the edge of town, until we were urged along by the local police.  We coasted into the little town on our bikes, hoping to see a friendly face and make a connection.

We struck up a conversation with a group of guys hanging out at the gas station, hoping that by the time they closed we would be able to drop our sleeping bags behind the building.  It was not an ideal location, but hidden enough from the local cops to avoid being rousted.

Clyde was the eldest of the group.  The rest of them were young boys, none older than 15.  They were curious about us, wondered where we’d come from, where we were headed why we were traveling as we were.  It was a conversation I’d had a hundred times.

It was a neutral moment, one without the burden of race or class to slow it down.  If they were uncomfortable with our being White they did not show it.  We talked and laughed and one by one set aside the barriers that strangers carry.

When enough time had passed I asked Clyde if it would be all right for us to spend the night behind the gas station, promising to be gone in the morning and to leave no mess.  I asked politely, giving the man the deference he was due, hoping he would help us.

Clyde was quiet then, but just as politely told me no.  It was not his gas station, and he could not give that kind of permission.  He was embarrassed and I didn’t press it further.

Now it was very late, and dark, and I was not looking forward to pedaling out of town to try to find safe place to sleep.  I turned to one of the boys we had been talking with, an enthusiastic kid who had a million questions about traveling.

His eyes grew big.  I knew that he could spend all night asking us about our adventures,

He agreed to have us stay at his house, and ran home to tell his parents.  He wasn’t gone long. 

“They said ‘no’.” he said once he caught his breath.  He did not look at me.

I could not let it go, we needed him.  “We won’t be any trouble and we’ll be gone early.  Maybe if I talked to them...” I tried.

The boy hesitated. 

I could understand his parent’s caution, undoubtedly wondering why their son would bring home strangers at ten o’clock at night, asking if they could sleep in his back yard.  It would throw some people.  I’d had that conversation a few times too, and many times charmed my way into a place to stay and a bite to eat.  But now I sensed a new thing.

Just to the south of us civil rights workers were murdered while trying to help Blacks register to vote, not even a year from the time Dr. King gave his “I have a dream” speech.  In the thirteen years that followed there were protest marches and rallies and more violence.  The roads north and south were lined with places where the civil rights war was being fought in Mississippi.   Blacks and Whites still walked a different walk here.  Being charming and earnest was not going to make a dent in that culture.

In the moment I waited for the young man to answer me, I felt the weight of our history, clinging like the humid air around us.  The moment dragged on and finally he said;  “No, my parents won’t let you stay with us.”  The look in his eyes told me that the neutral moment had passed.  The look told me that he’d been reminded about our differences, and he’d resigned himself to that.  In the weeks that followed I saw this look more than once.

I like to think that the last thirty or so years has made a difference in those small towns.  I am afraid to look too closely to find that it has not.  I like to think there has been a difference in me, and that I have made some difference.

None of us are free from the burden of racism and it’s prejudicial cousins.  You’re too Amish, too Muslim, too Irish, too Indian, too African, too different.  I don’t know you yet so let me judge you, fear you, hate you, by what I think I know about ‘your kind’. 

We are also burdened by what we allow.  Some stand up and make changes and take chances, but we are not all so courageous. 

They say that the hope is in our children, that each generation is more colorblind than the last.  My prayer for today, as we remember one of the courageous ones, is that I will be an instrument that makes that future a certainty, and that my children will not see the just the differences in others, but the beauty that common in all of us.

Hope this finds you dreaming,

David

Copyright © 2006 David Smith

“Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”

Taken from Dr. Martin Luther King’s  ‘Dream’ speech given in Washington, D.C. 1963