August Memory

Fall is coming - my favorite time of year.  This year is flying by - heck they all do with an acceleration that comes with getting older.  But right now it is August, heat lingers, ragweed abounds, school is starting again.  This year has battered and bruised many of us. People have been tentative in my neighborhood. Many walk the dogs, or just take a walk but few greet each other, or make eye contact. 

Gone are the lazy summer days of communities - with neighbors gathering on porches or chatting at the store.  There was an easiness to living.  I remember sensing this when I was about 5, my mom was making dinner and she shooed me outside to get out from under her feet.   

It was an early August evening, windows open, and I sat on the back steps and listening to the sounds of the neighborhood winding down the day.  

I could hear the sounds of other homes in the process of meal preparation, and my mom’s as well.  Conversations as people walked by the house, other kids still playing outside or being called in to wash their hands.  The sense of that moment sticks with me - a sense of a community - differing lives all with the same intention - to close out the day that had just been.

Of course at that time I had very little understanding of how communities functioned, the concept of cultural and racial separation.  White middle class suburban America.  A bubble of prosperity and a peaceful haven away from the strife that was seen on the nightly news - of which I had no clue.   

Our neighborhood was a mixture of Irish, Italian, and German immigrants. Most Christian but many Jews. My parents were first generation American German.  This is the culture I grew up in. 

My first understanding of racism came at music camp - a two week camp held at a local university for stringed instruments.  I played the violin.  I remember one of the mothers was responsible for room assignments.  I was about 11 and vaguely aware of a scene playing out at the desk where a mother was adamant that she didn’t like her daughter’s room mate assignment.   

I remember my mom stepping up and saying - we will switch.  I was just my clueless self as we went to the assigned room to find my room mate was African American.  My mother, ever her gracious self, introduced us and proceeded to get me settled in and she left.  

Delta, my room mate, was there on scholarship, from Newark - inner city.  Her life couldn’t have been any different than mine.  But we became fast friends, rooming together every year of camp.  She was an artist on the cello.  While I knew her last name, I never knew how to spell it, and when we moved to Pennsylvania when I was 13, I never went back to music camp. I never saw her again nor did  I play the violin after that either. Medicine had caught my attention, and I never looked back. 

That experience introduced me to outside the ‘bubble’.  My mother’s common sense approach to people and embodying the fact that all persons ARE created equal - regardless of culture, class or race was a gift.  I wasn’t raised in fear. I was raised to have a strong sense of self, and to not fear the unknowns of this world.    I am grateful to her for this lesson.