Sunday, April 13, 2008
African Proverb: It matters not what you call me, but what I answer to.
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I went to a luncheon today, and on the way home I had some fun with the GPS. I knew exactly how I wanted to go home, but the device wanted to take me up the Thruway. I didn't want to go on the Thruway, so I didn't take the turn. The supercilious voice informed me she was "recalculating", and she tried to take me to a U-turn back to the Thruway - three different U-turns, because I didn't take any of them, either.
Now, I could have turned it off, but it started to be fun. I wondered how long it would take her to give up. Since I was paralleling the Thruway, she kept trying to get me onto it, and got upset every time I refused.
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On the way, I passed the yellow house.
I go to a lot of the big fancy craft fairs, and there was a local guy who made tiny models of well-known local historic houses out of tiny bits of carved wood. He took pictures of the real houses, and then copied them. They were sturdy and beautiful, perfect down to the smallest detail, and if you lifted the roof off a house, it was a tiny velvet-lined box.
A few years before my mother died, I gave her several of the tiny houses for her birthday, each wrapped separately. Most of them were fancy mulit-colored Victorians with towers, but one was a rather plain white-trimmed yellow house with a wrap-around porch, multiple gables, and white gingerbread. She opened the gift boxes one at a time, and the yellow house happened to be the last.
She was shocked speechless by that house. When she could speak again, she asked me why?/where?/how? I had chosen it. I told her I knew it didn't match the others, but I picked it because it was on a road I frequently traveled, and it was one I was familiar with.
It turned out that all her life, since childhood, she had had dreams involving a particular house. Whatever else went on in the dream, the action took place on the sloping lawn, with the house in the background.
It was this house.
She had never been in this area, never on that road.
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Ok, maybe I'll get in trouble for this one, but it's real, and mine, so there.
There was a show on PBS today about how stress affects health, the eventual focus being on how racism creates constant stress, affecting even things like a high rate of premature births among Black and Hispanic mothers.
Ok, I buy that.
Then there was a group of mothers talking about how even little things affect them, lifelong, like when they take their child to the playground, and their 3-year-old runs up to a group of white children playing, and asks to play with them, and the other kids don't say anything, they just turn and run away, and how such racist attitudes can affect even a 3-year-old.
My immediate reaction was "Bullshit!" I wish I'd had such a convenient excuse when MY blond 3-year-old got
exactly the same treatment!
That just happens. When a group of little girls are already playing together, they don't open up to admit a latecomer unless they already know her. That's just the way it is. Color may or may not have had anything to do with it, and there's a fair chance it didn't.
I get really really upset when people immediately jump to assume racism. That's racist, too!
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Later: BTW, before objecting to my observation, take a good look at the photo up there on the top right.
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