Steve & I just spent a glorious Labor Day weekend at portions of the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival, and I was inspired! We should be telling our stories. Unfortunately, my best thoughts come while driving and listening to NPR. By the time I get to where I can actually record them, I resemble a Jack Webb character from 1960's TV: "Just the facts, Ma'am". I came to the conclusion at the Festival that my stories would be greatly enhanced if I were from Cuba, Ireland, or Appalachia, or just about anywhere in the South, because everything sounds better with an accent. But then, I also realized that my students hardly understand me, so maybe a good vocabulary could substitute for a cool accent. Ya think?
    With the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington just this past week, I thought maybe my first story should be how that intersected with my life. I'm 56, a white, middle-class, California-born female and so it would seem that I'd be worlds apart from the Civil Rights movement that the March on Washington symbolizes. And when I was 6, that was probably true. I was busy skipping 1st grade to 2nd and being confident when a classmate asked me what 'H-U-G-E' spelled that I was right. I said 'hug'. But almost immediately I realized that I had forgotten about that silent e making the u say its own name. But- I -didn't- admit- i- had- been- wrong. I don't know how long that classmate walked around with that error!
    BUT in terms of civil rights (small letters), I knew that people ought to be treated kindly and what was good for the goose was good for the gander (a saying my parents and grandparents said). I understood that to mean that all people were created equal. Well, really, I suppose at six I understood that if I got to sit down on a bus seat that anyone else who got on that bus ought to be able to sit down as long as there were seats. We rode the jitney (the little bus) from Hillside Blvd. to the Top of the Hill in Daly City, CA.
   I actually wasn't aware of the March on Washington when I was 6, when it was happening, but I became very aware of our country's inequalities just 2 years later, in 1965. That was the year we were moving to La Habra in Southern CA AND the year of the Watts riots. I saw them on the news on our brand new color TV. It was even more horrifying than the footage of the VietNam war. This was in my country AND in the place where I was going to be moving very soon. Why were people so angry? I really don't recall getting an explanation. I was frightened. I think I understood from the news that it was a community problem, but of course later I could see that it was an eruption in response to oppression. At 8, I became aware for the first time that people with different skin color lived in different communities, and I began to wonder. From that time forward, I began to pay attention to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the injustices and oppressions that I could never have thought about from my seemingly ordinary position.