DEFEAT FASCISM

 While I can't say for sure what caused this insanity in other states, in mine it was the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States of America. Twice. It lulled many of us into the false assumption that America had turned a final corner leading to a righteous state.

It made me remember when I had seen witnessed an African American man allowed to sit in a movie theater in my state, in a spot chose by himself, for the first time in my life.

It made me remember when I had seen an African American family served in a restaurant in my state for the first time in my life.

It made me remember when I had seen an African American sit on a city council in my state for the first time in my life.

Now an African American and his family occupied the White House. I thought we had arrived.

Unfortunately, we hadn't. What happened next was reminiscent of the old science fiction films of the 1950s. You know, the ones in which nuclear testing had awakened some prehistoric monster who emerged full-grown from the bowels of the earth to wreak destruction. Only this time it was the monster of bigotry, prejudice, racism, and xenophobia that slithered out quietly then, emboldened, transmogrified into the monster of all monsters.

Worse still, whereas in the old movies brave people fought and destroyed the monster. (Remember: "It just might work?") This time evil people said, "We can train this monster to do our bidding." It was easy. All it took was a reshowing of "Gone With the Wind" and some jokes about watermelon patches on the White House lawn. Americans do love their myths.

So here we are, ruled by a madman and an army of monsters. Of course not all states have joined the horde.

Just enough. 

Sunday Break

It's Sunday and time to take a break from the adventures of being a newlywed in 1972 Little Rock. Here's a short story I wrote, base on an incident when I was writing pieces for the Quapaw Quarter Chronicle when editor Starr Mitchell was trying to make it a serious publication. Any resemblance to actual persons is coincidental.

The Assignment

By Jimmie von Tungeln

           

Truth be known, I didn’t want to do the piece in the first place. Hell, I wasn’t even a journalist. I was a consultant, a pretty good one, and should have stuck to it. But I had been doing these modest little columns for a Little Rock quarterly that promoted historic preservation. I was acquainted with the editor, I lived in a so-called historic district, and I knew most of the people who lived there. So, I agreed to help.

 It was a good fit. People associated living in historic neighborhoods with eccentricity back in those days. Things that supported that viewpoint were always welcome. So, folks liked my little “human interest” pieces. As for me, I was happy to stick to them. There was no chance of running out of characters, and I didn’t have to travel.

            Then the editor called me one day and asked me to stop by. When I got there, she up and gave me an assignment. Just like that, like I was some cub reporter or something. This posed a noticeable departure from the usual process whereby I just picked out some local oddball and wrote about how they had adjusted to living in an old house.

This time she picked the subject. Why? Beats me. Maybe I was getting stale or she was trying to sell more copies or something. Rather than speculate, I went along with her for the moment.

            Well guess what? You never know what dish life is going to serve up and what decisions are going to throw themselves in front of you, threatening your hemostasis like a group of western bandits with their pistols drawn and ready.

Here’s how it started.

            A local banker, known to us all as a neighbor and a nice guy, had bought one of the most historic homes in the city. It boasted such long-term ownerships that the house and grounds came with a caretaker who had worked there since the Depression. Mr. Pitts cared for the grounds and lived in a small apartment attached to the carriage house, a.k.a. the garage. He was a quiet little man of advanced age who lived alone and remained out of sight when not working. All the neighbors knew him to nod at, but none of us had ever talked to him.

            The editor explained the human-interest angle. Supposedly, a friendship had grown up between Mr. Pitts and the banker’s young son Alfie—Alfred Chidester LaRue was his full name—a little blond-haired kid from the high-rent side of life. Get it? Old black gardener and white heir apparent, the image of an odd couple as corny as it was appealing to our liberal audience. All I had to do was interview the old man, mine a few historic nuggets and take a picture of him and the kid together. It would produce enough “ain’t that cutes?” to make a tough man buy a round of drinks. There was no Pulitzer looming, but it would get me through until another deadline appeared, like a hungry tiger emerging from the mist. No problem.

Anyway, I didn’t have to. These columns represented a public service for me. In other words, I didn’t get paid. Seeing my words in print provided my only emolument. So, I had a degree of leverage unavailable to a poor inky wretch actually writing for a living.

I could have refused the assignment and interviewed, instead, a friend who was restoring a cottage near ours and who looked more like Charles Manson than Manson did himself. He played cello in the city’s symphony orchestra and would have been great material for a photo essay, the research being carried out over a couple of beers. Why should I spend a dry afternoon interviewing the town’s oldest gardener? It didn’t make a bit of sense. “To hell with the editor and her aspirations,” I kept telling myself. Was I my own man or what?

            Naturally, I took the assignment. I had to go through the banker himself and he pretty much outlined what he wanted the piece to say. Alfie was an only-child and, having few young friends in the neighborhood, he had taken up with Mr. Pitts. Followed him everywhere. Shared secrets with him. Even helped with the yardwork. Well, maybe a little. The important thing was the friendship that had developed between man and boy. That was the angle.

            Sure. One of the greatest and most persistent dreams of American Caucasians is that, someday, an African-American will love them. But I could pretend with the best, so I pressed on to complete the assignment.

            I set up an appointment for the next Saturday afternoon. It was a nice autumn day that welcomed a person outdoors like an old friend wanting to show you his garden. I grabbed an ancient Rolliflex camera that I used for such work, made sure I had pen and paper, and walked the two blocks to the house.

The house sat on a half-block facing one of the two main streets leading directly to downtown. When it was built, wealth had followed the topography. The larger houses were on the highest ground and homes fell off in size and value as the topography dropped. It was never more than a short walk from the mansions to the homes from which domestic help could be hired, for practically nothing, in the good old days. In other words, urban form followed economic function. Households weren’t separated by income as they are now. That’s how, thanks to the historic preservation craze, I could afford to live near a bunch of mansions.

            Anyway, I arrived. Mr. Pitts had dressed up a bit. He always wore neat clothes with a narrow-brimmed dress hat. Today he had added a tie. He stood at attention with his hands to his side and presented a smile like a boot-camper at inspection. Alfie was bouncing a ball against a tree and the parents stood by with pride. All was set for this to be a painless adventure. Wham, bam, thank you m’aam and I meet my deadline.

            I called little Alfie over and made him sit for a picture with Mr. Pitts. As I lined it up, I pulled a few grunts out of the kid to the effect that he liked Mr. Pitts and enjoyed helping him with the yard work. Mr. Pitts sat smiling through thick eyeglass lenses that distorted his face to where it looked like one of those cartoon characters that has just seen something either real juicy or real dangerous.

            So far, so good.

            Figuring I had about all out of Alfie I was going to get, I excused him with “Now Alfie, why don’t you let Mr. Pitts and me visit while you get back to your yard work?” In other words, “Scram, kid!”

            Alfie was more than happy to be rid of adults so he walked to beyond the garage. There, someone had dug a shallow pit from which smoke was rising. Within the pit, I assumed from the smell, were dead leaves, trash, and some sort of organic waste. Alfie amused himself by kicking more leaves into the fire.

His mother saw the opportunity and appeared from nowhere with a tray of cookies and iced tea. She sat them on the bench between us and asked, sweetly, and devoid of sincerity, the way a southern woman can ask, if we were comfortable. After receiving affirmatives, she then swished away amid a crackling of petticoats and an almost audible smile. I pushed the tray toward Mr. Pitts. He smiled and pushed it back toward me.

            “No, please, go ahead,” I stammered, fumbling for my writing pen.

            “Thank you, suh,” he said. He exaggerated the “suh” so I—so we both—would know he didn’t attach any meaning to it. Then he took a cookie in one hand and a glass of tea in another. He neither drank nor ate right away, though. He rested the arm with the cookie on his leg and wrapped a hand around the glass of tea as if to keep it from flying away. He smiled at me. His eyes looked even larger than before.

            A breeze filled the yard and blew smoke from Alfie’s fire toward us. As it did, Mr. Pits finally raised the cookie in a soft arc to his mouth and took a small bite from it. He lowered it and raised his glass with the same grand gesture and sipped his tea.

            Hoping to get started, I asked him how long he had lived around there.

            “Oh, I was born around here,” he said. “I been here for as long as I can remember. We lived on Tenth Street but it went for the freeway. House ain’t there no more.”

            He chewed his cookie with what I thought was a grim expression. As he did, the smoke circled us and I caught the pleasant smell of burning leaves punctuated by the sharp odor of the other trash smoldering in the pit. Mr. Pitts stiffened slightly and his eyes seemed to retreat behind his thick glasses.

            “I been here since when things were different than they are now,” he said. “Way different.”

Then, that far into the interview, he stopped talking. His voice didn’t exactly trail away as much as it fluttered beyond us like a feather caught in a whirlwind.

            I was losing him. I hurried back to work.

            “Different in what way?” I asked.

            He just looked at me. He seemed to struggle to respond and when he did, it wasn’t really to me but, it seemed, to the trees and the garden and maybe to the city itself with all its history and smoky secrets.

            “Way yonder different. Folks weren’t as good to you then.” He took another bite of cookie and drank from his glass. That energized him.

“My folks had it hard back then.”

            I tasted panic. Alfie had disappeared behind the garage and I felt as if I were on an asteroid hurtling through space with an alien. This affair wasn’t going according to plan. I nodded as if I understood and scratched on my pad without looking up. He continued.

            “The worse was what they done to Mr. Carter.”

            “Mr. Carter?” That was all I could manage.

            “Ain’t nobody should have had that done to them. Nobody. I don’t care if he was colored.”

            I gave up and stared at my pad. What was he saying, and where was he taking me? I stared right through my pad and into the ground. From therein oozed a memory. I met it halfway and solved the mystery.

Back in the 1920s, there had been a lynching in Little Rock, less than a half-mile from where we sat. It happened right in the middle of what was then the center of the “colored” commercial area, along Ninth Street.

“Oh my god,” I thought. “This is where he is going.” I tried to raise my head but it took three attempts to overcome the gravity created by that realization. When I did manage to look up, Mr. Pitts was somewhere far away, and scared. I mean really scared. His hand was shaking so much the tea was spilling.

            “I remember that day like it was yesterday,” he continued. They made us all go inside, for they knew there was to be trouble. I was just a child, but the oldest. My Momma put the youngest under the bed and made me watch after them. She said the white folks had done killed Mr. Carter and was draggin’ him down Ninth Street behind a car. She was scared and she made us all cry.

“We could hear people yellin’. They was honkin’ their horns and yellin’ so loud we could hear them in the bedroom. Wasn’t no colored folks on the street, except Mr. Carter and he was dead. They hung him and beat him and drug him up and down Ninth Street. We was all hidin’ and cryin.’ My Momma was tellin’ us to be quiet.” He stopped, looked away and back, directly at me.

“They shouldn’t have done that.”

            Here I was. It was a nice brisk autumn day and I should have been somewhere else, but I was sitting in someone else’s yard listening to an old man reciting his version of our city’s most awful moment and I couldn’t escape.

            “They drug him and drug him. All back and forth on Ninth Street. We could hear the cars and them horns honkin’, the honkin,’ oh my lord, the honkin’. Ain’t nobody ought to have that done to them. We was still cryin’ when they built a fire at Ninth and Broadway and burned him up. We could smell the smoke and that made us cry harder. My momma had some cookies in her apron pocket and she gave one to the younger kids to hush them up. She broke one in half and gave me a piece. She took the other half and then she started cryin’ too.”

            He looked at the cookie in his hand, then returned to that awful day.

            “Somebody said they broke one of his arms off and waved it at the cars going down Broadway,” he said. “I don’t know. Nobody looked out the window the whole time, for we was too scared.”

            I pretended to write something.

            “Too bad,” he said so low I barely heard him. “Them was bad days. Bad for us all.”

            The smoke circled us and I sat as still as I could. Mr. Pitts stopped talking and sat with his hand with the cookie resting on his leg. As the fog of remembrance cleared, he began to smile. He didn’t say anything. He was done talking to white strangers for the day.

            He sat there proud and triumphant, a black-skinned Cicero having had his say, needing neither accolades nor approval. I thanked him, not sure at all whether he even heard me, and then eased away and headed home. I was all confusion, trying to sort out what had just happened. I still had an assignment but what the hell was I going to write? The truth about what happened? That would be the honest thing. It might even be a good piece. Shake the readers up a bit. Let them know that history wasn’t all about Victorian houses. Hell yes!

            Back home, I sat in the kitchen and stared through the window. When I tried, I could hear the shouts on the street, feel the throb of the car engines running, and smell the acrid smoke of man and wood burning.

Damn that old man!

Outside the afternoon was dissolving into evening. The shadows got longer and darker the way our thoughts will as we doze. Beyond the kitchen window, the air was still crisp and clear. Inside, it was dark and gloomy. The evening sky changed purposefully that time of year like a lover moving from caresses to kisses, and then to the dark undertones of passion. My thoughts moved that way, too, as I reflected on the day and what it was trying to tell me. Maybe it was trying to tell me to be brave, or truthful …, or honest. Maybe it was suggesting that I approach what I was doing with something a little deeper than just seeing my name in print. Maybe it was just trying to tell me to say something else entirely, before darkness came. Maybe. Maybe.

After a time, I stood up and retrieved a beat-up Remington typewriter and package of paper from a closet and carried them, with as much gentleness as I could muster, into the kitchen. I placed the typewriter on the kitchen table so I could see beyond it into the deepening gloom. Then I slid a page of paper into it and turned the cylinder so the paper was position precisely across the top, aligned there neat and worthy of higher-level thought. I drew and released a long breath of sad air—air that had once moved through the city and down the streets and around the large oak trees past the moving cars and quaint old houses and had once even flowed around the twitching, smoking body of John Carter.

I didn’t want to, but I smelled that smoke.

Click, click, I advanced the paper.

I was ready. My mind was as clear as the way of a traveler making the last turn on the last curve before home. I rubbed my hands. I thought how funny it would be to make the Sign of the Cross.

Instead, I started to type: “Mr. Otis Pitts, age 70 and a lifelong resident of Little Rock, has a new best friend who is only five years old.”

July 2009

Revised 2017

Thinking About Things: Sepember 24, 2017

We are now embroiled in a great controversy about how much respect to pay our national anthem. It is fitting and proper that we do so. Let's think about it.

It doesn’t bother me. I served my country and will never apologize for the matter in which I do or don’t respect her. Those who are watching the Ken Burns/ Lynn Novick documentary on the Vietnam War are seeing evidence that my country sent me into one of the worst strategic blunders in its history. One is free to make up one’s mind as to whether the adventure was immoral or illegal. For me, both at the time and in retrospect, it was both.

But I served. And because of that, I’ll stand or not stand for a human-inspired musical rendition of my country’s worth. And I’ll allow others to do as they see fit as well. Their path to this moment has been different from mine, and that demands empathy.

For example, I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be a man of African-American descent, during my lifetime

A man of my age would have heard their father, a grown man working to provide for his family, called a “boy.”

That person would have attended a substandard school.

That person, having served his country as I did, would have been denied housing of his choice upon return from war.

That person would have seen a presidential aspirant, telecasting a “Southern-Strategy, announce his candidacy in the Mississippi city in which four civil rights were murdered for attempting to register people of his color to vote.

That person, upon entering the job market, would have been denied good jobs and promotions.

The list goes on and on. For women of color, it would have been worse.

With that as a background, the respect paid the national anthem recedes in importance as an issue. Yuval Noah Harari, in his book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind suggests that our species requires mythology at a certain point to maintain an expansion of our group development. If true, then the myths surrounding patriotic fervor are as much utilitarian as they are morality-based. Showing an almost worshipful respect for a national anthem for example can help a society expand its importance.

To me, it would depend upon the circumstance. At a memorial service for those who stormed the beaches at Normandy, I will stand tall and proud.

For a ceremony celebrating the passage of the Civil Rights Act, I would stand tall and proud, as I would for many other ceremonies celebrating the great moments of our nation’s history as I see them.

For celebrating those activities or individuals that demean or trivialize honor, respect, and duty, I might take a walk. For those celebrating anyone who would seek to destroy the institutions that have guided America through her greatest moments, I might even sit on my butt.

At this moment, we Americans will take sides once more. A percentage of them will choose to show respect for our symbols without restraint. A percentage will continue to protest. Neither change nor contemplation will change those minds. The important group, the group that includes me, will use this opportunity to reflect upon the challenge, and push ourselves to amend and improve our country.

That, it seems to me, would be a good and proper thing.

Just thinking …

Sailing To Oblivium: August 16, 2017

It’s one of those days when a person ought to try to get his mind off current events. Unhinged minds are swarming about like hornets. Their buzzing dominates the news and clogs the very air we breathe. It’s like trying to respire nuggets of pure filth.

It brings me once again to the lines of Matthew Arnold:

“I, on men's impious uproar hurl'd,

Think often, as I hear them rave,

That peace has left the upper world

And now keeps only in the grave.”

Gosh I hope not. Arnold found peace and hope in Kensington Gardens. I’ve turned to watching and listening to Yeol Eum perform Mozart’sPiano Symphony Number 21. It gives me a few minutes peace. Moreover, it gives me hope.

If there are young people like Yeol Eum amongst us, and there is beautiful music waiting to be played and heard, can it drown out the insanity about us? Gosh, I hope so.

What was so startling about the last few days is the number of people whom I had considered normal, rational friends who have aligned themselves with, well, the scum of the earth: the KKK, the Aryan National, American Nazis, and assorted hatemongers. Where it will all end I don’t know. Those groups are quite adroit at passing their anger and hatred to others, and they now have a new friend who just happens to be the most powerful man on the face of the earth.

It’s more than a little unsettling.

What we are seeing may be what happens when people quit reading poetry and listening to Mozart. Perhaps we should all go to a public place of quiet reflection as Arnold did and seek hope as he expressed it:

Calm soul of all things! make it mine

To feel, amid the city's jar,

That there abides a peace of thine,

Man did not make, and cannot mar.

Meanwhile, send a bigot a link to Mozart.

It can’t hurt.

Sailing To Oblivium: August 15, 2017

The TV announcers seem surprised. What rocks have they been hiding under? Those chickens have been headed our way for a long time.

One wonders when a pundit, in earching for the origins of Charlottesville, VA, will remember SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts’ famous cop-out in Shelby County v. Holder. As the Court gutted voting rights, he claimed “…while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.” (Emphasis mine) That is to say, “Hey, racism is over now. We don’t need no stinkin’ voting rights legislation anymore.”

Or, will a reporter finally remind us that Ronald Reagan first announced his presidential candidacy in Philadelphia, MS, the town where the three civil rights workers: Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney were slain by white supremacists in 1964.

The message was plain, “Hey y’all, I’m with you on this race thing. Let’s make America white again.”

 The chickens coming home now have been wandering around long before Donald Trump announced his campaign. One only had to be there when America elected Barack Obama president. The thought of a person of color in the white house shook the foundations of white society with enough strength to awaken Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. It did awaken Jim Crow like nuclear tests awakened the monsters of the 1950s’ Sci-Fi movies. Bigotry was fashionable again in the bars, coffee shops, hunting clubs, and hair salons of the South. Like all cancers, it soon spread over all of America’s body.

People you thought were reasonable and sane began joking and frolicking: photoshopping watermelon patches on the White House lawn, wearing blackface outfits to parties, calling the gracious First Lady of our country a gorilla, or resurrecting stale old racist jokes from the 1950s.

The chickens began to strut and peck. We ignored them, perhaps because we were busy, perhaps because we were verifiably Caucasian, or perhaps because we thought America was too strong to be lured into the cesspool of racism, bigotry, and prejudice again. Maybe, after all, we did think the jokes and jibes were a little bit funny. What’s the harm if it doesn’t affect us? Warum ärgern? Es ist nichts.

When situations arose that required complex analysis, we discarded the complexity and chose sides. Violence drew lines that won’t be erased for decades. It was righteous food for the flocks, and it drew them like moths to a flame.

Other chickens, like the fundamentalist religion crowd, joined in dragging new targets. The flocks grew. Fox “news” found an audience and prospered, throwing enough grain on the ground to entice even the previously sane into the mix. Old breeds infiltrated: the KKK, the Aryan Nation, even the Neo-Nazis. Nobody seemed to notice who their flock-mates were.

It was a happy group, pecking and strutting the day away until the Sean Hannity show came on so he could throw them their daily grain. The chickens were happy and content.

Now they are coming home to roost and some wonder why. I just wonder how come it took them so long.

But maybe, just maybe, Charlottesville will provide a Joseph Welch moment for America. Click here for the video of how he handled the Donald Trump of his day.

Mr., we could use a man like
Joseph N. Welch again.

Sailing to Oblivium: July 11, 2017

I had my job because my daddy thought I should work, and he knew a guy. The other fellow had his because he needed to feed his family. I was a white teenager. He was a black man.

We worked at a service station. I earned $20.00 per week, so I don’t imagine he made more than that, less in all likelihood. It was 1960, so that much money went further that it would today, but not very far at all. It would be the equivalent of around $165 a week now, maybe four dollars an hour in today’s dollars, the Koch Brothers’ dream.

The place was managed by a typical Arkansas redneck: a racist, crude, uneducated, foul-mouthed, mean-spirited jerk, assisted by a buddy who was worse. Ever seen the movie Deliverance? Then you get the picture. Anyway, there were periods of inactivity, so the two had plenty of time to think up devilment. One scheme, the one that seemed to give them the most pleasure, was how to, as they put it, “get rid of that n****r.”

His crime? It was a perceived lack of respect, though they didn’t figure the boss would accept that as an excuse for firing. So, they developed an alternate plan. The poor fellow had a set time for the noon break. He didn’t have a car, and no place close by served “his kind.” Each day he hurried to his home on the east side of Pine Bluff, had his “dinner,” and rushed back. Sometimes it took him a minute or two longer than he was allocated. Why not bring his lunch? Well, this was 1960 and our customers couldn’t be exposed to the sight of a “a colored man eating his dinner” just like he was somebody. He just walked home and back.

Get the picture? Yes, one fateful day the rednecks timed him, and when he came back nearly five minutes late, they fired him.

If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never forget seeing that man turn and start walking back home. And yes, silence was no more than cowardly complicity on my part, not my first and not my last. Maybe I'll be braver when they come after my friends.

This week, it seems that everywhere I look, I see some post about “making America great again.” It has gotten me to thinking. Can anyone tell me the exact date we are supposed to use as a baseline, the time to which we must return?

It sure as hell wasn’t 1960.

Just wondering.

Reconciliation: Day Six

No attempt at reconciliation could succeed without a discussion of the intemperate language that has pervaded our society. One must look no further than a typical comment-stream on You Tube to witness the degradation of our ability to discuss even the most sublime Mozart sonata without resorting, within ten exchanges, to “MFs,” and worse.

What has happened to us? I don’t know. In my youth, knowing adults used the word “prejudice” to warn us against pre-judging others without beginning to understand the issues behind their life. There were no outright power dynamics involved, but prejudice was filled with the subterranean seeds from which could grow a stronger and more active predilection: bigotry.

We were quick to replace the word “prejudice” with “bigotry,” which implies not only discriminatory thought but behavior as well. Thus, those who grew up with unfounded impressions suddenly became bigots. Would the trials of carrying a name eventually affect behavior? Maybe.

It got worse. Both terms were replaced by “racism,” or the use of power to retain power over others by whatever means necessary. Soon, the mildest expression of negative thought toward a person of a different background was termed racism, and the accusations continue to fly until this very day. Reconciliation was tossed into the same linguistic bonfire as understanding, civility, good manners, and friendly discussion.

Why bring this up? To me, prejudice is a condition that one can work on and stifle in its infancy. Perhaps the first step is an admission that it exists. Any time I hear someone deny that they are at all prejudiced, warning bells go off. To doubt a person fully would be an act of prejudice itself, but warning bells are warning bells and useful at times.

Following self-awareness, a second step might involve an attempt at understanding, and a comparison of backgrounds. It happened this way with me. One day I realized that there was no way in the world I could fully comprehend the effect on me had I heard a 16-year old call my 45-year old father “boy.” Nor could I comprehend how it must have felt to see any depiction of my race in the movies as a “happy domestic slave” or a shiftless, stumbling idiot. As someone once remarked, it wasn’t the fact that Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, better known by the stage name “Stepin Fetchit,” consistently portrayed lazy, shiftless black men. The real tragedy was that he was so good at it.

We remain stuck with our prejudices, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “… boats against the current.” I must fight the inclination to regard the uneducated as slow-witted, although my own father, with an 8^th-grade rural education could work algebraic equations in his head without ever having studied algebra. Then there was my father-in-law, blessed with a similar educational background, who could construct an entire house without ever making a mark upon a sheet of paper. My sainted mother read my college books, including Dostoyevsky, while I was visiting home.

The list goes on, and includes the self-taught technician who can stand ten feet away from a malfunctioning automobile engine and diagnose its problem. What a wondrous and diverse world we live in, if we only stop to observe it without pre-judging. (Oh, that pesky Galilean keeps interfering).

My own promise today is to work on my prejudices, and hope, beyond hope, that they never progress into bigotry or racism. That will keep me busy enough that I shouldn’t have time to think ill of you. It should also keep me away from comment threads. I’ll try. In the meantime, I’ll follow the advice of my long-time hero, who said: