To Be or Naught

When I was maybe thirteen I closed myself in my bedroom, put on my new Jimi Hendrix album, stood on the side of my bed frame and did this crazy deep breathing alternating with challenging breath-holding... it was like a prescription a girl at school had given me-- to make myself faint. I woke up to the last song on the album.. I must have blacked out for thirty minutes... and felt profoundly changed, as though I'd done some mind-altering drug, or entered another reality entirely.  It was terrifying.  My mother asked me later that night what that huge sound had been... it was me, I did not say, crashing on the floor, simulating a kind of death.  I never again played with that scenario.  

A few weeks ago I ran into a woman in my neighborhood. She is familiar... I'd see her years back coming from the 92nd St Y where she swam and exercised-- with a perfect geometric haircut and coordinated outfits.  She liked her ballet flats, her accessories and pins.  We'd smile at one another-- two independent neighborhood women who lived presumably alone.  Then there was a gap-- several years-- we had different daily paths, but recently we met in the grocery store... she seemed warm and glad to see me.  She'd been isolated since the pandemic, she said.  People were no longer kind to her.  That seems impossible, I replied, knowing exactly what she meant, but trying to pry her out of some perceptible bleak mood. You look so fantastic, I said... you're so fashion-forward and well-kept. You haven't aged, I insisted.  She complimented me on my 'style' which is aging rocker/bag lady no-longer-chic, but we had a little laugh. 

Yesterday someone told me she suicided; they described her... we don't even know her name.  All these months I've been agonizing over my friend who succumbed to her brain tumor, my two beloved neighbors who are both suffering from incurable and fatal cancers. And here is this woman-- it was said she'd fallen... but then revealed that she took her life.  I don't know why I thought about my teenage blackout... but I did. 

According to statistics nearly fifty percent of Manhattan households are individuals.  This is a city of single people-- of dreamers and workers and maybe many consummate romantics who spend decades searching for a partner. As a young woman, not even out of college, I was engaged to a man who on paper satisfied every possible criterion for the perfect husband. He was handsome, too, like Alan Bates in Far from the Madding Crowd (my favorite movie at the time)... athletic, brilliant, funny, macho, adoring, a little crazy.  And yet from the moment he put that diamond on my hand I was panicky-- looking for some flaw or crack in the human plaster. Who does this?  Insecure, self-loathing women who feel undeserving of success?  I don't know... but since he passed all tests, I began to misbehave until it became impossible.  He even tried to repair the engagement months later but I was in another headspace.

Many of my women friends made viable partnerships.  A few have wonderful marriages which exceed the sum of their parts. It's hard for single women to really understand what this requires; at our advancing age, it seems incredible to imagine someone making us coffee in the morning when we're exhausted, or embracing us at the end of a rough day.  There is no one. Children are the best-- but they really only want to know what's for dinner. And they grow up and hopefully follow their own dreams.

Throughout my adult life I've lived with men-- for better or worse. I've had two formal engagements-- and two marriages, neither of which was preceded by an engagement, neither of which was particularly successful.  One of them produced my son.  While I've followed my heart, creatively, 'managed' my decades with more passion than prudence, I was never quite 'completed' by a relationship.  The last few nights I've been thinking about how tough I was... I think I wanted to partner with someone who was a prodigy-- an inventor. I wanted to serve someone whose genius was worthy of my sacrificing any ambition I had to his.  And yet, even when I dated someone who seemed fantastic, I ripped them apart in my head-- I exaggerated the smallest fault into a reason to separate. 

But it occurs to me that I was equally hard on myself.  Sure-- I have an Ivy League education, I excelled at things-- I read, I think, I walk, I play bass, I write poetry... but I have not changed the world.  I have not left some scientific contribution or altered literature with groundbreaking talent.  At my age Anthony Trollope had been dead for years, after managing to produce twelve children and fifty three novels.  Einstein had changed modern physics. Mozart-- at less than half my age had put us all to shame. I suppose what I expected from myself I transferred to my fictional version of a partner. The possibility of this becoming a reality, especially after decades, becomes nil. 

Of course all of us women had our suitors-- the men with whom we had sex or the ones who took us to dinner and wanted to make something more... but these begin to diminish.  They themselves become fragile and sad.  The woman who suicided confided to me-- no one had reached out to her for some time.  There is no one to comfort us or pour us a drink at the end of a hard day... or a good day. We are used to this... I suppose I painted myself into this corner and I expect nothing.  But for this woman, it apparently became overwhelming-- the absence of someone. I'm not sure.

Reading the Boggs James Baldwin biography, I remember well the character in Another Country he based on his friend who jumped from the George Washington Bridge.  It haunted James who himself attempted suicide several times. Fortunately for us he was unsuccessful. In my neighborhood, over the past few months, there have been a few jumpers.  It's shocking. We'll never be sure what was in their head, whether they wanted to change their mind at the last second, when it was too late.  Unhappy people have become radicalized and transformed into alternate strong characters.  Often these mass murderers end up killing themselves.  I read the journal of a man who had survived his bridge jump, who admitted that in the instant, he was immediately sorry.

Maybe it takes a biographer to decipher our digressions and behaviors. I am trying, sifting through the unwritten messages left for me by the people I have lost, to analyze my own behavior and understand where I might have veered off my proscribed destiny.  As I write, tonight, ironically a televised biography  playing in the background about Marilyn Monroe.  I don't think I would ever throw in the proverbial towel, and I do take responsibility. It's not always easy, this life... our fate... the choices we've made versus the hand we've been dealt. There's only one version, so far, of this life.  Despite all of the barbs and potholes, I'll take it on. While I never played teenage life-and-death-roulette again, it's ironic that the soundtrack of that incident foreshadowed Jimi's own suicide.  Or not. 

There is never enough kindness in this world.  We in the city often barely speak to or know our neighbors. There is a constant existing possibility of truth or understanding between human beings, without ulterior motives.  And for those of us who find themselves solitary-- without a witness or companion, we are a bit myopic; we lack the advantage and privilege of dialogue. While Marilyn's death is still a bit of a mystery, the fact is, she died alone.  For those of us who live this daily existence, whether by choice or circumstance, we might find a way to extend a version of kindness to ourselves.

When You Dance

Years ago I had a sexual dream about Donald O'Connor.  He was wearing that horizontal striped shirt Gene Kelly wore in Anchors Aweigh. I woke up feeling hung over and baffled: not only do I dislike stripes anywhere besides bedsheets,  but my male crush-template at the time was maybe Scott Weiland.  

Over the years I've had a few iconic, memorable actual dreams that feel epic-- cinematic-- long, complicated narratives with specific settings and locations that felt like inventions-- all featuring some Hollywood actor-- Brian Keith, in one-- who had no real association with anything or anyone.  I'd wake up feeling-- well, a little surprised... but connected. In high school I'd occasionally have a random dream about some boy I barely knew and then blush when I passed him in the hallway.  Little did he know, we'd shared some private intimacy which would remain part of my psyche. 

Of course, they say the people in our dreams are substitutes, like when we dream about a neglected dog, it's actually about our self. Regardless of where these come from, there's a literal hangover-- we replay what we recall in real time; we are affected. 'A dream is a wish your heart makes, when you're fast asleep...' sang Cinderella on my Disney album soundtrack. Children have nightmares... the lyric was confusing.

I just finished the superb new James Baldwin biography.  James participated in the famed March on Washington where Martin Luther King gave his iconic 'I Have a Dream' speech.  MLK had not just a dream but a vision and a moral and social platform.  On a much more personal scale, my son recently realized his 'hoop-dream' of creating an urban basketball platform.  Of course this took incredibly hard work, planning and stress... fundraising, organizing, building, turning small failures into success narratives, and a coming of age. More than a dream, it's a passion he parlayed into a career ambition.  

My father, the war hero, was a fantastic dancer. Not like Michael Jackson or Gene Kelly, but he had incredible grace.  Watching him with my Mom at family weddings and celebrations, they were like movie stars in their own world... waltzing or samba-ing with harmony and skill.  It was sort of a revelation, seeing my parents this way-- transformed.

The US Open always reminds me of my father who was also a superb tennis player.  In fact, his dancing skills were probably honed because the tennis club where he worked as a boy recruited the young single employees to dance with random single women at their evening entertainments. He had plenty of practice, and experience with women in his pre-military career.  I'm sure that helped win my Mom over.  

'Do you love me, now that I can dance?' asked Dave Clark in one of the first 45's in my little collection.  My first real romantic experience was a slow-dance at a summer-camp mixer. I went to an all-girls Catholic camp that year and they integrated us once per season with a boys' camp from across the lake.  It was well chaperoned and the lights were bright, but the DJ put on 'Surfer Girl' and a tall boy held out his arms to 10-year-old me.  I could feel his heart beating, among other things.  But I realized dancing was sort of a physical metaphor. 

'When you Dance...I can really love' Neil Young sang and reinforced this metaphor.  There's an irony-- besides entertainers like Michael Jackson, rock musicians commonly do not actually dance much. Think Dylan, Tom Petty... Clapton, even Hendrix. They move around and weave a kind of sexual veil with their performance but they don't don't do steps. I've dated a few and offstage they can be a little awkward. 

Over years I've thought long and hard about the Donald O'Connor dream... were the initials significant?  Was this a substitute for my father?  As a young girl my father taught me a few steps; this was surely one of the few 'tender' moments between us. Knowing how to partner-dance was a part of our education. I was also sent to ballet-- to tap and jazz and modern dance because it turned out I loved learning steps and the choreographic role-playing.  Not to mention the music.  But dances-- parties-- this seemed to be a much more prevalent courtship ritual in 60's and 70's culture than it is now.  A slow dance with a new crush was a devastatingly sexy experience. I'm dating myself.  My college boyfriend and I loved dancing; it's what brought us together the very first night.  I miss this.

While I can't remember my father ever watching any of my dance recitals (and he certainly boycotted band gigs, lol)... he was very attentive at those of my son's school basketball tournaments he managed.  Although he doesn't really dance, my son shares a kind of athletic grace with his grandfather.  While I never shared my literal dreams with parents, I imagine my father might have been amused by the Donald O'Connor appearance.  I know how they relished watching those musicals...  and besides the Fred Astaire kind, he loved seeing James Brown, Sammy Davis Junior, and later, Michael Jackson. 

All these years later, I recall that old dream like an actual memory. Maybe it was a reference to my father I couldn't understand at the time. I'm trying, years after his passing, to smooth out the rough patches-- not to dance on his grave but to process the legacy with a little remedial choreography and the softer echo of old dreams.

On Point

It's closing in on a year since Matthew Perry's death... and the trail of blame unravels: the unscrupulous doctors and enablers, the greedy parasites who attach themselves to celebrities who are emotionally disabled.  I've seen this-- rockstars who struggle, actors between successes hanging out in bars, drinking themselves into a kind of crippled charisma.  It has an appeal, this state of manic hilarity, of self-effacing confessional deprecations and desperate nightly dramas of carousing.  While some pick up their career and dust themselves off, all too often this ends in tragedy.  It's very hard to measure quantities of alcohol or meds when one is just intent on blurring out the demons.  The failure we fear is too often simply the fear of failure. It's complicated.

Still, in the very sensitive aftermath of a tragic death, there is unprecedented sympathy.  Where were these mourners and criers during crisis?  Matthew was not in an appealing state, and I've argued in vain (pun intended) with addicts and junkies at the midnight hour when nothing but a needle makes any sense.  But after the fact, as a sort of clearance for the victim, there is this blame game... sometimes valid, sometimes a consolation narrative.  Where life insurance is concerned, there is a financial reason to morph a suicide into an accident or a manslaughter scenario.

And then there is the chain reaction-- those who are on a kind of edge and are so derailed by the sad ending of someone who struggled, as they do-- especially when that person was a 'someone' whom they admired.  If this man couldn't manage, one thinks, how can a loser like me ever get clean or sober or 'happy'-- that evasive human nirvana?

Granted, there was a hideous sequence of heinous people who profited from the pseudo-medical art of prescription peddling, especially common among well-known people who want to keep their vices within a more private circle.  But it helps to exonerate the deceased and attribute his errors to an evil little machine of individuals which took away his choices.  The consistent popularity of Law and Order and varieties of Dateline exemplifies our human obsession with blame-attribution.  We want justice for the innocent, and we often want the guilty ones we love to seem less guilty. The dead cannot defend themselves; we must unravel and discover.  

While I find mass shootings (and all random shootings) horrifying, I'm not sure the gun makers are culpable.  For someone strangled with a silk tie, well-- nearly anything in the wrong hands can be transformed into a means of killing.  Of course guns are made for this... and what is wrong with our culture and all past cultures which decided that wounding human bodies was a way of solving massive conflicts? All guns aside, it was God Himself who weaponized rain in Genesis. 'The fire next time,' He warned, in the traditional spiritual which inspired the James Baldwin title.  This always frightened me, like a premonition of firearms, nuclear war.  Summer wildfires are terrifying enough.

We named my very first band The Blame.  Blame it on rock and roll; something like that.  Blame and guilt go hand in hand in adolescence, in bad relationships, in family dynamics.  We grow up pointing fingers... even the dog gets involved as the fallguy-- eating homework, breaking expensive china, etc.  And then there was the pandemic-- the ultimate culprit in stalemating lives, creativity, social connections.  It caused depression, isolation... it had no end, no boundary... for many of my peers this became a new way of living. Come to think of it, was not the great flood of Genesis the ultimate cancel-culture event?  

August always brings with it a kind of nostalgic regret-- the end of summer is sad for children; they must go back to the grind of school, and leave the freedom of unscheduled days and jacket-less afternoons.  We adults carry this with us... the cusp of September seems always harsh for me... as though I no longer deserve a day of respite, of freedom.  We are grown ups-- we must take responsibility for our failures and lapses. Jews have a day of atonement; I wonder how many in Israel will be thinking about the Palestinians whose children will be vaccinated against polio, but destroyed as a people. It's downright ironic, this priority to cease warfare just to insure that these babies in the line of fire are inoculated. 

Not to deny the back-and-forth between our political candidates. Leaders are generally held responsible for the ills of their regime, but the blame game goes far beyond culpability in an election year. Finger pointing and accusations far eclipse the vulnerable reality of policies which are only as solid as theory or hindsight witnesses. We are all to blame for sins of omission, for selfishness, for failing to reach out and empathize.  Too often the burden gets transferred and passed down to the one who has least power to defend.  Like the tastelessly loud guitarists who blame their sound crew-- the venue-- acoustics-- or band members for volume issues. All we have are tools of prevention, and our own hearts and minds which will hopefully embrace some kind of universal truth and move this world forward into not just a foreseeable but an accountable future.

Whistler's Mother

I watched way too much television this weekend-- binged on Black History Month documentaries some of which I'd seen before but which seemed to have new currency.  The Central Park Five film was particularly upsetting... a different variety of police brutality and racism in the 1980's version of city.  As a runner, then, I remember identifying with the jogger;  as a runner, now... waking up morning after morning to a curtailed life, and as a mother... well, I wept for the young men whose lives were amputated and sabotaged.  I hope they've used their settlements well.  

Waking up these alarm-less mornings, I find myself in a half-state of self-identification-- calculating dates, days of the week... marking another strike on my virtual wall of days without a gig.   Unintentionally I often sift through sands of old mornings; the bottom of the proverbial hourglass is rich with these-- heavy-- and to isolate one or two-- well, it is a choice-- it is difficult and leads inevitably down a path of some autobiographical anecdote.  I can't imagine sitting in prison without tools to express and chronicle what one is forced to examine from the beach of one's own life... or driving down some road with brakes on-- no going forward, no U-turns.  The lives of those boys and countless incarcerated innocents-- well, they haunt me.

I searched tonight metaphorically for '29', feeling a bit cheated, but also as though in this limbo of late-February numbers compelled to sew a written memory into the warp and weft of time.  We have stopped becoming, many of us... and what we become matters.  Many of my peers complain or confess they have stopped using their fingers.  We practice, some of us-- but our people are missing.  Our wakings have less clarity; we are foggy and sad.  We know what we will lose today and it is painful.  

In the midst of difficult family reminiscence, as though I need to put a 'cap' on it, I remembered today having breakfast with my father.  He rarely spoke, on the way to work-- spread the Times in front of his face while he gulped his coffee and occasional sardines on toast.  Mostly he rushed out.  We were annoying in the morning.  My mother had a cigarette to keep her company... and the prospect of luxury hours alone with not much on her agenda, so I imagined, except preparing for the evening.  

But once a year I'd go to work with him... take the train, and somewhere near the Graybar building was a place called Il Trattoria, or something like that-- where they served good strong coffee and Italian breads sliced in half-- buttered and grilled.  It was so good, that toast-- no wonder my father shunned his breakfast often.  There he'd be, in this noisy, cluttered place, with his train-friends, all suited and hatted... with their Stetsons and their young-man handsome profiles-- the masters of the business universe which seemed to swarm the streets of midtown in those days.  I can still smell the vague smoky air-- the ghost fumes of train, the hint of after-shave-- the hustle.  I could almost paint it, like a Lester Johnson pack of Walking Men-- like an office-army without formation or rank.  

On a nostalgic website, below a vintage Manhattan photograph from the 1940's, someone recently commented...'except the hats, this could be today'.  But it was precisely the hats that defined the time-- the vague voluntary uniform that sheltered men like my father-- disguised them... protected them.  On that day that I'd accompany him, I'd see him as a completely different species-- a generic man-- strong, protective-- belonging, somehow, to a sort of mise-en-scène-- a plan.  I felt safe and normal.

Of course, at home-- nothing was really normal. My Dad was a bit miserable, disappointed, depressed-- whatever... the ex-soldier without any heroism in his domestic life, with only daughters who annoyed him and a wife who never seemed to tip his scale to happy.   Still, the silhouette he became every day-- was crucial to his purpose in life, the order of days-- to progress and Republicanism.  I noticed that black people wore similar hats, too... but there was a different rhythm to street populations.  Everyone moved slower in their neighborhoods-- with a sort of heavy deliberation, but also a kind of dance to their feet.  I couldn't quite put my finger on it.  

Watching the Ellis Haizlip documentary for the third time, Gladys Knight got me to open my mouth and sing-- it was like an alarm went off in my head.  I looked around the room-- I was alone, but something ignited there.  Through the past years I've walked the city and heard music in my head.  I've written lyrics, transcribed dialogue that was spoken to me, or that I spoke out loud, as though a voice used me as a muse. Lately the masks have muffled not just my voice but my spirit.  I can't imagine singing.  Or whistling.  Another thing that seems to date movies-- we don't have many scripts with people walking down the street whistling a tune.  

I've always loved whistlers... they do the most with what God gives them... the best of them have perfect pitch and bell-clear tone; they have facility-- vibrato and trill-skills.  A passing car silences them... no one hears, or sometimes fellow-passengers on buses resent their music.  There was a man I used to see uptown-- he had a limp but compensated for his heavy foot with a tune that rivaled birds.  I spoke to him once or twice-- he said the music just came to him... the melodies-- he was not responsible- they just came.  He'd rest on the benches on 110th Street and have a cigarette... in between smoke rings, he'd whistle... as though the tunes hitched a ride on the dissolving 'O's.  Most of the time he wore an old hat.  

The tragedies of the past year are about to come full circle with this shortened month.  I tried to postpone it by inventing a 29, but I can't slow time.  Then there are the small losses-- the ones which add up to a diminished life here, although the pile-up of empty days has been a blessing to some-- an opportunity to rest, to grieve, to invent.  Still, pandemic masks like a blight have stifled our expression, camouflaged our emotions, confused our natural facial recognition abilities... discouraged street-eating and drinking, whispering, tongue-sticking and kissing.  They have all but obliterated whistlers.  

G(RACE)

Saturdays have become classic movie nights in my household.  Either post-gig or not, it's still a work day and I try to clear my mental clipboard in the 3-5 AM time slot watching something from either my or someone else's past.  The television somehow offers plenty of quality films, without pay-for-view.  So last week I picked The Great White Hope.  I'd been fortunate enough to have seen that on Broadway, with the larger-than-life James Earl Jones, and Jane Alexander-- live-- in the lead roles, well more than 30 years ago.  It was brilliant-- resonant-- devastating.

Yes, I've been re-reading (the great) James Baldwin... Richard Wright-- but watching the theatre version of hard-edged racial tragedy was jarring and upsetting in a way I'd not expected.  In context of the current discussion of reparation and debt... everyone needs to go back and re-evaluate their African-American history course.  The juggernaut of the 'Me Too' movement stirred up some memory of that book title (acknowledged in a Lennon/Ono song) Woman as Nigger.  Even my laptop did not want to type out that phrase.

Now I'm a white woman with a prosecutable Me-Too incident of my own-- a life-warping, hideous, morally reprehensible, humiliating disgrace I have never brought much to light because, as we women well know, the procedural justice process can double-indemnify the victim.  We are sole witness... testifier, prosecutor, injured party-- and we set ourselves up, in the legal system, for the pillory.  Ask Robert Mueller.  But the ethnic and massive cultural wrongs against a group of people brought here as captives-- against their will--- enslaved, mistreated, and then left-- misplaced, without tools and respect in a foreign country-- unable to go back to their homeland, deprived of comfort and dignity-- and identifiable and stigmatized by physical characteristics that were interpreted by status quo as 'less-than-equal'-- well, it's a disgrace beyond comprehension. For most of us in the current culture where Beyonce is American 'royalty'... Hip Hop dominates the music industry-- fashion-- this is not simple.

Maybe the largest lesson of the Trump presidency-- and I see it as a huge disgusting presidential finger in my face every day-- is the survival of racism.  It's still everywhere.. in spite... despite.
I grew up a relatively privileged little white girl in New York... I had an Irish nanny some of the time, but like most middle-class households in the 50's and 60's.. we had a black housekeeper.  I've written about her many times-- more than a caretaker, she took me to church, sang to me-- loved me in a way no white mother ever did... I used to pray I'd turn black and live with her.  I envied the kids in the projects-- they had a community-- they hung out summer nights playing ball wth friends-- they barbecued and every night seemed like a party.  It seemed so 'safe'.  Little did I understand.

I married a black man.  My first husband-- yes, he was kind of a rockstar.  I'd never dated or been intimate with anyone but white men-- and it was different-- the chemistry was undeniable and the ceremony was like a dare.  I was actually surprised not one member of my family showed up at the wedding.  My parents had seemed like liberal democrats... no, they had no black friends; the soft boundary between me and our housekeeper made my mother nervous, I could see that;  I never told when I went to hang in her 'hood.  And as an aside-- no one in her hood ever made me feel unwelcome or different.  She referred to me as 'My Aimesy' and I loved it.

Was I trying to prove something?  I was not.  I loved the guy.  I was disowned by my family.  They clearly and verbally pronounced that they had one less daughter-- the Princeton/Harvard daughter.  Why was I surprised?  This was bigotry and racism in my own little clan.  It was real.  Was it difficult?  It was.  Even in Harlem people looked at us funny.  He had dreadlocks then and that was not part of Northern American black culture.  We went on a car trip and people in rural New England yelled out their windows at us-- 'Bob Marley go home'.  My girlfriends asked me inappropriate clinical questions about physical traits and ignorant narratives.  I learned things.  Among his people I felt comfortable-- but it was clear they would have preferred dark skin.  We struggled with the normal marital difficulties of rock musicians touring-- separations and misunderstandings... there was no communication technology in those days... just a rotary telephone and letters.

In the end we divorced... yes, we are still very, very  good friends; I am godmother to his 'black' children with his black wife.  I next married a British journalist-- couldn't have been much whiter-- and he was a 'dog' of a husband-- a cheating, hard drinking rogue who never paid a ha'penny of child support.  In the end-- a white non-present baby-Daddy with ghetto behavior.  Do I have the right to talk about racism, bigotry, issues?  To draw conclusions? I do not.

My son who is white British-American might have preferred to have been born black.  He was immersed in basketball culture and Hip Hop from an early age.  He was an incredibly talented young athlete-- was recruited and acknowledged-- and once snapped at me that he had zero chance of becoming an NBA player because of his color.  Not true, but it was his teenaged truth; he was occasionally the only white boy in the better leagues.  His friends are racially diverse in a way that should be normal here in our country.  He was raised just a few blocks from Harlem, and I often walk the streets of my James Baldwin world, remembering and fathoming.  The idea of being a cultural icon in those difficult days, where incarceration and physical threat was a constant-- where inequality and injustice was so ingrained no black person could walk safely down his own street.  Where-- then as now-- white authority represented the biggest threat of all.  Life-stopping.

Last week in the rain I went to cash a check at my bank on 126th Street.  They insisted I remove my hoodie... for the cameras.  Me-- an old white lady.  I retorted I had a hole in my head that would make the customers wretch.   In the end, they let it go.  I showed my ID.    I don't know where this fits in, but it sits there on the pile of racial profiling nonsense we all walk among in this century.  If I'd been a young black man I would have kept my mouth shut-- or I might have given the security guard a reason to put me in a fatal chokehold.  I thought about this on the way out-- how I had the freedom to make a disrespectful quip at what I found a ridiculous and inappropriate request.  

Tension has lightened a bit in the 21st century, but it's still there.  It was still there Friday night when I walked uptown to buy groceries and a kid was shadowing me on the street for whatever reason.  I apologized, in my heart, but I crossed the street.  One hour later on my way back, he was handcuffed and bent against a cop car.  Was he guilty?  Was I guilty? Me and my stupid James Baldwin and my compulsive apologies and my love of blues and black men in white T-shirts...