"It's Full of LESBIANS"?

One time while I was standing in line at the supermarket, an acquaintance hailed me to ask where my child was in the college application process. Then, in a loud voice, she began naming the schools her daughter was considering.When she got to one of the finest women’s colleges in the country, she called over, “Oh, but we don’t want her going THERE! The place is full of lesbians!”The remark was unfair on so many levels I found myself  willing her to stop, even just for her own sake. I hurried over to her. It was all I could do not to cover her mouth with my hand. I was that sure she didn’t mean to speak so carelessly.This exchange took place in that late 90s but I had one like it just recently, when I brought a malfunctioning lamp to the one store in the county where a real lamp guru was said to work. Sure enough, while four stores had said they couldn’t help me, this man had a different response:“This is nothing!” he said pleasantly. “I’ll take it home tonight and have it fixed for you by Thursday.”We got talking then, and it came out that he hailed from Roxbury, the same section of Boston where I myself spent the first decade of life.“Isn’t it beautiful though? The broad streets, and the brownstones, and that wonderful park designed by Frederick Law Olmstead?”“It WAS beautiful, before it changed,” he replied gravely.He was such a nice man; the last thing I wanted to do was embarrass him. Or maybe I was embarrassed for myself, because of what I took to be his implication. In any case all I could do was repeat his word:“Changed?”“The people. Everything. I can’t drive in there anymore!”“Ah, that’s just because we’re old!” I said. “Sometimes when I go there, all I can think is, ‘Where are the trolley cars? The butcher shops? The little delis on every corner?’”But it was as if I hadn't spoken.“I can't stand their music!” he blurted. “Or their... food ! Or the way their voices sound! I really can’t stand the way their voices sound!”Did he mean black folks? Latinos? The growing Asian or South Asian population?I didn’t know, and I didn’t stop to ask because of a sudden thought that made start laughing.“But that’s what they said about US when we came!” (He had told me earlier that he was Irish by descent.) “Those old Yankees said the same things about us, and then WE said them about everyone who came after us!”“I suppose that’s true,” he said, smiling again.“For a long time I didn’t go back either, but now I’m in Roxbury every week and I wish you could see it: The new townhouses. The children tumbling out of school buses with family members waiting to greet them. The great little restaurants. Now, every time I go I see less of my own dead past and more of the vibrant life there before me.”He smiled and patted my arm. “OK then, come back Thursday.”I think of these stories now as we remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who yearned for the day when people would be judged by the content of their character.I believe I have made enough mistakes since I first heard those words that now my task is to cover my own mouth, lest I speak carelessly myself. And I also believe that under our fear we yearn for a day when we might stop judging altogether and instead get close enough to see that in truth we really are all one family.

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This is Roxbury is it looked to my camera one day last June. The field is the site of the former Notre Dame Academy, just down the street from the 826 Boston,  a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills .  NDA was the school in whose whispery corridors I moved, with my starched uniform, my Baltimore Catechism and my Hopalong Cassidy lunchbox. 

And these below are the streets and driveways surrounding that old convent school where the children and grandchildren of that whole untidy wave of immigrant Irish came to get an education.

"It's Full of... LESBIANS": On Judging Not Lest We Be Judged

I have felt so ecstatically happy since Election Day that I look back at the column I wrote the week before and can’t believe how sorrowful it seems. In fact so very different in tone it is from the way I have been feeling for these last two weeks I couldn’t bring myself to post it here at the top where it says 'This Week’s Column' so let me copy it below where it will live forever as a post and not disappear and be replaced as the column is each week. It’s not that much fun but it had God in it and also my wonderful old friend and fellow blogger Milton. Here it is:I once bumped into an acquaintance who asked me what college my daughter was hoping to attend the following year and so I told her. “Oh, I would never my daughter go there!” she exclaimed with delicate horror. “It’s full of lesbians!”It’s funny but I felt a wave of kindness toward her and so went and put my hand on her arm: “You must know that isn’t true, Sarah.” (I will call her Sarah.) And even if there are lesbians here and there in colleges, they’re our daughters first aren’t they? Our own young people?”I was calm in those days.I was less calm last week after my conversation with the Postal clerk I will call John. I was sending something to one of our honorary sons, a young man we have long loved and a brand-new homeowner. I asked him if the letter would get there fast; I was worried because it held important documents.He read aloud the name of the city and shook his head. “Tough area,” he said unsmilingly.“What do you mean?”“Full of minorities” he answered with lowered voice.“HE’S A MINORITY HIMSELF JOHN,” I said with a voice not at all lowered. I embarrassed him – made an awkward moment - but for the first time in my life as a careful and courteous female I didn’t care.And so a silence hung between us until our transaction was complete and I had thanked him and turned away.But ever since I’ve been wondering: What is wrong with us all? An hour earlier, in another place of business, a man passing the time of day there said to the shop owner and me, “Barack Obama was handed through college, same as that WIFE!” For some reason tears sprang to my eyes and maybe the shop-owner saw them because self-proclaimed McCain man though he is, he led me aside, and put a hand on my shoulder.“Don’t listen to him; he’s not himself today” he murmured, thus showing kindness to us both.And later he told me that he too is troubled by the high feeling we have seen in this political season now just ended.I think of something I just read by Milton Brasher Cunningham, songwriter, ordained minister, student of history and professional chef. He writes a blog called Don’t Eat Alone where he cites the Biblical verse “Be Ye Kind One to Another” as the idea he most needs to keep in mind.“I would love to say I have mastered the art of kindness and moved on, but it is not so,” he writes.His favorite station was having its fundraiser one day and so he turned the dial to hear something other than the appeals for money and landed on the local talk radio station. “I felt as though I had crossed into a parallel universe. That they presented a view farther to the right of NPR for me was not a surprise; the level of volume and vitriol was, however. These are guys who command huge audiences across the country, or at least that’s my perception. How can anger that severe be so popular?”That is his question. Mine is, What can we do about this?Milton says we can remember this: that “regardless of our political preferences, our fundamental allegiances are to God and to one another. “Not to country. Not to party. Not to ideology…. Not to class or race or even religion. “To God,” he repeats “and to one another.” And that’s a truth I mean to remember from this day forward.