Thursday, June 29, 2006

High Definition

I went to Birmingham and watched HGTV on HDTV. I had never seen HDTV before, and this was a big ole wiiiide screen. I liked it--the wide screen skews the dimensions a little, especially right in the middle. So all the women choosing their dream homes are shaped kind of like me in the hip department. Every detail crisp and sharp.


The next day we went to Kelly Ingram Park, where the black city kids who believed in freedom faced water cannons, sharp-fanged German shepherds, and a racist police force.

That was the summer my family moved to Birmingham, 43 years ago.




The statues in the park were sharp, real, compelling.






When did we start needing TV to tell us what reality is?

Thursday, June 22, 2006

More Ducks

I'm off on another research trip tomorrow, and this time my ducks woke me up. Hopping on my chest--"Cindy," >quack< "get up!" A little beak tickling my ear, whispering, "We've got bushels of stuff to get done!" >quack< "Get moving!" Little webbed feet up and down my arms and legs. After all, this is the fourth research trip in three months. They know the drill.

We'll be heading to Birmingham at 6 a.m. tomorrow, so we can get there in time to visit Dad's former church and see what old records still exist. Hopefully we'll find some insight into his leadership, and what he was up to while he was there. We'll visit with older church members who remember my family, and put up a wind sock and see where the winds blow us.

When I got my eyes open enough to get a good look at my ducks this morning, I noticed that they're looking a little bedraggled. After all, the trip to Cincinnati last weekend was a bit of a strain on them, bless their little hearts. Their wings are drooping a little, feathers not quite as well groomed as usual. Their beady eyes have lost a bit of their dark sparkle. They're tired.

I think they need to just float. Dive and splash. Use that oil at the base of their tails to protect all those beautiful feathers. Let the water roll off. Enjoy the sunshine. Take a break and just be ducks.

This may be the last trip for a while.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

My Friend Sam

I've been actively dreading this weekend, the trip to Cincinnati for my aunt Martha's funeral. But this morning, my friend Sam gave me a gift that will help ease the way. I can keep it in my pocket like a cool, smooth stone. It will give me comfort.

Sam Oni is a famous name in our family--he's the man who came from Ghana to attend Mercer University. His was the first dark face to be anything other than hired help on that campus, when he came as a student in September of 1963. He was also the first black person to join a white Baptist church in the state of Georgia, when he stood before my grandfather's congregation a few days later, and was voted in by a slim majority. It was, as he said to me when we sat together in his living room, a "faith-shattering experience."

I never knew Sam until I went to Georgia last month. None of us did. He continued going to Vineville Baptist Church for a year or more when he was in college, but never felt accepted. After the racial epithets were hurled towards where he stood at the front of the church the day he joined, he always felt self-conscious, looked-at. As he said, "the climate was not exactly conducive for reflection, for meditation, for just being in the presence of God." If he happened to arrive at church early and sit in an empty pew, no one else would sit there. No one in the church reached out to him, invited him for Sunday dinner, asked him about his family or his studies at school. He never experienced the legendary "southern hospitality" that he felt he so richly deserved. Where was the warm welcome for this young man who had traveled across the world, the fruit of the Baptists' own labor in the missions field? He never felt it, so he got out of Georgia as soon as he could. He landed in Berkeley, California in the late 60's. Graduate school, flower children, the Black Panthers, accepted at last. It was the beginning of a love affair with a city as far from Georgia as Sam could get.

I did finally get to meet Sam, though. I spent two amazing hours hearing his stories. What a gift!

The thing that first struck me when I walked into Sam's apartment was the picture directly across from the door. It was a picture of a stained glass window in Tattnall Square Church, the Baptist church on the edge of the Mercer Campus. I recognized the picture because it hangs on my mother's wall as well. I remembered hearing that Sam had been thrown out of that church or something, and it struck me as ironic to see it as I walked in the door. While I was there, he told me the whole story: the visit from the Tattnall Square minister the first week, who made a personal visit to Sam's dorm room to let him know that he would not be welcome at Tattnall Square. Three years later, when Sam decided to visit Tattnall Square and the ushers physically blocked him from entering the sanctuary. His visit the following week, when they actually closed and locked the front doors so that he couldn't get in. Why would this, of all things, be the picture to greet me as I entered his home?

This morning, when I finally finished transcribing the tape of our time together, I got to hear the answer in Sam's beautiful, lilting voice all over again:

Now, for me, Cindy, I don’t know about you, but forgiveness is so therapeutic. It heals the forgiver as well as the forgiven. Let me labor the obvious. Whether you realize it or not, the only time that we live is really and truly the here and now. So people can latch onto incidents of the past, and let that affect them whichever way, and in fact maybe even retard their growth and progress. Or be obsessed with the future, and be made insecure by it. But really and truly, the time one lives, is here and now.
And that is my gift from Sam, the one that will soothe my heart and spirits as I drive in a family-filled car to Cincinnati, as we sort through Martha's belongings, as we grieve together.

Really and truly, the time one lives, is here and now. That I can do.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

Slides

I spent the past long weekend at The Lake, a tiny place in north Georgia that has meant the world to our family for over 60 years.

We still stay in my grandparents' cabin when we go, though now it belongs to my Uncle Buddy and has had several improvements since its days as a one-room cabin. It was mighty sweet back then, though, and full to bursting with love and my grandmama's spunk.

The cabin wasn't quite so full of family this trip--just the four of us for a good chunk of the time. And I had some time to go through the keepsakes still in Grandmama's chest of drawers. Her college scrapbook from the twenties is there, along with her wedding dress, her oldest daughter Sunny's baby books, and a picture of the flower-piled cemetery the day after little Sunny died. I've been to that cemetery now, so I recognize it when I see it.

It's different being there now--I have a new lens for looking closely. I know more, understand more, ask different questions, feel through it in a different way.

This time, I even went through the drawer of Granddaddy's slides. The phrase "gold mine" is trite and over-used, but it fits. When you first open the drawer, you notice that it's tumbled-up and disorganized, though most all the slides are in boxes. Some are labeled correctly, some are mislabeled, and many have no notations at all. So when you pull out a box and start popping slides in the viewer, there's no telling what you'll find.

But, oh, goodness, once you really dig in, the life that streams out of that drawer!

Granddaddy loved photography--he had lots of equipment, and even developed his own pictures (though not the slides, of course). And looking at the slides, just me and that lit-up 2x2 square of color, is about the closest I can come to being inside his head, seeing what he saw. Loving what he loved.

There are photos from their travels all around the world: Cuba, Panama, Chile, Ecuador, Rome, France, Luxembourg, Scotland, England, California, New York City, Mt. Ranier, The Lake. And there are pictures of people, mostly family. Us. Some posed, some not. Pictures of us swimming, playing, concentrating, eating, talking, smiling at him. Loving him back.

And he's in a lot of the pictures, too. I have lots of memories of waiting, posing while he got it all set up, then all of us counting together, eager with anticipation as he ran around and joined us just in time for the shutter to capture the moment with him in it.

But there's one roll of pictures that's completely different. No people, no exotic places. Just the lake, the changing fall trees, their house in Macon. A few simple images. It's from October of 1977, just three months before Granddaddy died of cancer. He knew he was going, and through the lens of his camera, he said goodbye.

Goodbye again, my granddaddy.

A POSTSCRIPT . . .
After writing this piece this morning at the lake, I came home and learned that my Aunt Martha, my mom's younger sister, had drifted peacefully away in her sleep in the wee hours at the hospice facility in Cincinnati.

Safe travels, Martha. We all love you dearly.