Something I Thought was for Other People

Today is a historic day.  This morning the SCOTUS ruled that same-sex marriage is constitutional and that states do not have the right to declare otherwise.  I didn’t really expect to see this happen – same-sex marriage legal across the entire country – in my lifetime.  Tears are spilling over as I write this, which surprises me.  I knew that I believed this to be right and good in my heart, but I am shocked at my relief and happiness regarding this decision.

All morning I watched as positive reactions filled my Facebook page.  But probably the most poignant of all was this one, from a dear college friend:

It affected me deeply, but not so much because it shows how it feels when a barrier comes crashing down, which in itself is huge.  Barriers are rarely toppled so decisively.  With a few notable exceptions, like the literal and symbolic barrier of the Berlin Wall coming down, barriers generally come down in such small increments that one day we look up and finally realize that they’re now, somehow, much more surmountable. 

But that’s not why this post, especially, brought me to tears.  This ruling was the removal of a veil and a gag, enabling love and marriage to be a vision that anyone of us can now see as our option.  Think of how seeing yourself as part of a scene allows you to play your role.  This is everything.  Think of the young girls today who can envision themselves as engineers, physicians, astronauts, rather than the limited number of career options available to them a couple generations ago.  Think of children of color who can envision themselves today receiving the education they deserve, free from segregation.  Think of two people in love who can now share the rights and privileges today’s ruling finally permits.

Unless and until you can see yourself as part of the picture, you can’t know how far your dreams extend, how much you can accomplish, that what we can barely fathom in our dreams can indeed come to pass.  This is why MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech still resonates today.  He was planting a vision of a better world in our collective dreams.  Today we moved closer to that dream of equality, which is perhaps even more stirring after the darkness behind last week’s attack in Charleston moved us away from it.

A memory:  When I put on my first pair of glasses as a young girl, I could distinctly see what previously had been blobs and blurs.  I saw with new eyes a new world:  images and words all at once in focus, sharp and clear.  And I was filled with wonder.  This day, yes, feels like that:  filled with wonder and joy that at times we can see tangibly that love is indeed stronger than hate.

Inventions and Imitations

Yesterday afternoon, Dan and I saw The Imitation Game, a superb rendering of the life of Alan Turing, the man who cracked Enigma, the Nazi cipher believed to be unbreakable.  Turing’s contributions to the Allied efforts remained classified until only recently and his tragic death at his own hand devastates me.  That one of the greatest minds of the past century was treated in such an inhumane way breaks my heart.  I broke down in tears on the way home from the theater.  I haven’t been so affected by a film in years.

But it’s easy to mourn the loss of someone with such potential, someone who used his powers for good in a time of such darkness.  It’s easy to mourn someone so exceptional in his thinking, someone so ahead of his time.  And while I am incredibly sad for all of us that we lost Turing too soon, it’s impossible for me to not also mourn the potential of other lives lost, other suicides of young men and women, who still today cannot fully enjoy the same rights and privileges as me.  The right to marry, for example.  LGBT teens have a suicide rate four times higher than straight kids.  LGBT kids have hopes and dreams, just like anyone else, and yet they suffer quietly the traumas of adolescence that we all did, and more, and most do so with a great deal less support and a great deal more derision.

This week, Brandon Stanton’s photography blog, Humans of NewYork, featured a boy named Vidal from a dangerous neighborhood in Brooklyn.  When asked who he most admired, the boy championed his principal Ms. Lopez, who held the students to high standards and refused to allow the students to think poorly of themselves.  Brandon found his way to the school and met Ms. Lopez.  Together they brainstormed a way to provide critical opportunities to the students at Vidal’s school.  They launched a fundraiser which raised a half million dollars for the school in a very short time – a few days, only.  I was simultaneously grateful and resentful.  Grateful that Brandon Stanton and Humans of New York had created an opportunity to make school funding sexy, and resentful that many of the donors perhaps voted against school bonds and overrides in their own communities.

And so, how do the stories of Alan Turing and Vidal from the Brooklyn connect?  As exceptional as Turing was, viewing his life and times through our modern, enlightened lens, we can see that he was treated poorly and our instinct is to go back in time reward his exceptionalism by canonizing him, just as we feel compelled to reward the exceptional leadership of Ms. Lopez by empowering her students.

But let us not forget that all children have dreams – it is not unique to those who are exceptional or to those who find themselves in otherwise dead-end circumstances, like a dangerous and violent neighborhood.  All children have dreams, even the ones who are annoying, who have few social skills, whose parents have little to do with them, or who think themselves above following rules or doing homework.

Late last spring, I happened upon a quote from Father John Naus, a Catholic priest who had recently passed away.  He said, “See written on the forehead of everyone you meet, make me feel important.”  I set that as a goal for myself for the school year.  I wrote it out and taped it to my podium in the classroom so I’d be reminded of it every day, multiple times a day.  I’ve been grateful for the reminders, because I need them, as I am not able to remember it when facing 150 students each day, each with his or her own particular need to feel important.  The goal has manifested in a consistently singular way every day.  It’s forced me to be a better listener.  What I hear again and again is that each of the souls I’ve been entrusted with has dreams, big and small.  Some have dreams that are reasonable in scope, and others so far beyond their reach.  Again and again, I remind myself to make each child feel important simply by hearing what he or she has to say, which is light years away from making someone feel different, or apart, which is perhaps our unfortunate human inclination. 

I have no idea if, in my classroom, lurks the next Alan Turing or the next Adam Lanza.  Neither is likely, for which I am grateful and relieved, but I can’t know.  For now I’ll keep reminding myself to listen to each of them, because, as a wise one once noted, we have two ears but only one mouth.  Perhaps Virginia Woolf said it best, “It seemed to her such nonsense----- inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.  The real differences, she thought, standing by the drawing room window, are quite enough, quite enough.”

Malala

If you haven’t yet read I Am Malala, the powerful memoir of Malala Yousafzai, I urge you to do so.  July 12, her birthday, has been proclaimed Malala Day.  This year she turned seventeen, and I wish her the happiest of days and a long, productive life, inshallah.  On 9 October 2012, Malala was shot, along with two of her friends, by a Talib who intended to kill her as a warning to girls seeking education.  Fortunately, she survived and recovered, and has become an international leader intent on razing the roadblocks that prevent females from reaching their potential.  You can hear her speech to the United Nations here.

Across the globe, girls struggle to become educated, sometimes due to political and cultural issues, sometimes due to poverty, or lack of trained teachers or lack of matierals.  In Malala’s hometown, her father was a prominent educator who bucked tradition by celebrating the birth of his daughter, and then further insisted on opening a school for girls where Malala and her classmates thrived and challenged one another to reach their goals.  Their drive and desire to learn was not stopped by threats of death and acts of violence.  Malala’s father was once asked why his daughter was so strong, what had he done that had given her such strength?  His answer was that he did not clip her wings.

What lessons can we take from the story of Malala and her father?  How can we do the same, not only for one another but also for ourselves?  How can we avoid having our wings clipped, when the most pernicious threat is ourselves?  In what ways do we permit our passions and goals to fall into shadow because they are too bold, too dangerous, too ‘out there’?  How can we find our way when we don’t know the path or where no path exists?  Illuminate your way with beacons like Malala, and never forget that reaching the mountain top is only ever done with small, steady steps.

Miz Maya and the Lesson of the Butterfly

Maya Angelou was laid to rest this past weekend.  I’ve always thought of her as Miz Maya.  To use just her first name seems too informal, almost disrespectful, so I’ve always thought of her with the ‘Miz’ before her name.  I don’t recall my age when I first came across her lovely words, but I know it was the famous memoir of her difficult childhood, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.  Before I’d even read the book, I was entranced by the title.  Here was a secret, and she was going to share it with me – with me.  This title, from a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, resonates with most young people, really, feeling boxed in by society and parents and siblings.  As has been said a hundred times over, it’s the powerful story of a poor black girl growing up in the American South in the 1930s.  By the time I’d found I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, I’d already read Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.  I loved that book, so I figured I’d try Miz Maya’s.

Since Miz Maya’s death last week, the section in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings where she recounts the horrific tale of her mother’s boyfriend sexually attacking her has been referred to many times.  His subsequent arrest and release and murder, presumably by some of her family members, led to her decision to stop speaking for many years.  Even as a child, she understood the weight of words.  Words can harm and destroy, but as she learned later for herself and so eloquently demonstrated for all of us, words have also the capacity to raise us up, to comfort, and to heal.

Miz Maya’s legacy to us is that we are changeable creatures in charge of blazing our own paths.  We don’t have to accept any label, whether slapped on by society or by our own thought processes.  Just because we are labeled as X does not make us incapable of becoming Y.  If you read the long list of occupations that Miz Maya held, you’ll see that we are only bound by what we dare to dream:  dancer, prostitute, activist, mother, journalist, writer, university professor, Poet Laureate of the United States.  She is proof that we can change and alter our destinies in ways that we might have been unable to envision for ourselves.  Although I haven’t yet read it, I have always loved the title of another of her books, Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now.  In spite of the problems we encounter in our lives, isn’t it true that we’d prefer our own troubles to taking on someone else’s?  This acceptance of who we are is the very foundation upon which our happiness is built.

I don’t think I’d ever heard Miz Maya’s voice until I watched her recite “On the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration.  If you have never heard her voice, treat yourself to her rich timbre, her beautiful phrasing.  The poem carries such a lovely sentiment of unity and of hope.  It would be Miz Maya that I would choose, if from all the famous people in the world, I could sit and have coffee and talk with one of them.  In spite of her larger-than-life stature, she was firmly grounded.  Here are some of my favorite of her sayings:

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.

I've learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights. I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you'll miss them when they're gone from your life. I've learned that making a "living" is not the same thing as making a "life." I've learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance. I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back. I've learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision. I've learned that even when I have pains, I don't have to be one. I've learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back. I've learned that I still have a lot to learn. I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

Rest in peace, Miz Maya.  The world is a better place, thanks to your presence.

Forsythia Promise

“Hello?” It was towards dawn, and the ring of the phone had awakened me from a deep sleep.
“Cathleen, it’s Rae,” the voice said, and I recognized her distinctive Carolina drawl and slow speech even before she’d said her name. I felt strangely lucid. It had been more than a year since we’d spoken. Last April, as the forsythia was fulfilling the promise of the end of winter, Rae had died. A lethal tumor had grown in her brain, metastasizing in her lungs, taking her quickly but not fast enough.

The last time I’d seen her, she’d looked grey and tired, but she was still herself. She had been my student – I was tutoring her privately, and although she was the same age as my mother, I considered her my friend. Less than a week later, as I eventually learned from her neighbor, she’d checked herself into the hospital. The following day she could no longer speak or walk. Her daughter had flown Rae to Santa Fe so she could die near family. I’d been left wondering what happened; it was so unlike Rae to forget anything, and when I’d shown up at her house to tutor her, I was shocked to find she wasn’t at home. And the next week when I returned, after leaving phone messages, I knew something was horribly wrong before I even knocked on the door. Peeking through the window, I saw the same scene as the previous week. She still wasn’t home, and obviously hadn’t been there since my last attempt to meet with her. It was completely out of character for her; she was punctual, organized, responsible, and considerate. Where could she have gone, I had wondered on my way home. It wasn’t until the third week, when I’d returned again, ever hopeful, that I’d thought to check with her neighbor.

“Rae, how are you?” I asked deliberately, certain I was dreaming.
“Good. Very good,” she replied, but I knew from the way she said it that she was still dead, and that this conversation was something she needed to do.
“Rae,” I said, still trying to convince myself that I was actually speaking to her by repeating her name. “What is it like where you are?”
Her breathing changed, becoming short and shallow, and she was softly weeping, trying hard not to make a sound.
“Beautiful,” she whispered. “It’s beautiful.”
I felt my own breath catch on her words, and I thought of family and how we rarely speak about what matters most.
“But, Rae, why are you calling me?” I asked. I didn’t understand why she’d chosen me, and why now, a year later as the forsythia glowed yellow again. “Why didn’t you call your family?”
“We can’t. It would be too difficult for them,” she whispered, abruptly composed and matter of fact. And then she was gone again, and I stood holding the phone a moment longer, wishing I could understand, and realizing again, I didn’t say goodbye.