I Forgot My Mother’s Birthday Friday Round-Up

It’s 10:30 and there is a car with a bad muffler idling in front of my house. I think it’s the girl next door getting dropped off by her boyfriend. They are really into long goodbyes. It’s interrupting my precious little motivation to write my round-up. Can I yell, “Just turn the car off!” or is that too much? It’s now 11:36 and two people careened by on scooters having a yelling conversation. It is very urban here.

It’s my mother’s birthday. This is a picture of her standing on the back stoop of her family’s home in Hastings, Michigan, probably around 1932. It was the Depression. Coming of age during that time shaped her whole life and mine, too, I think. Making do was stitched into the hem of her dress.

Swirl is declining. The dents in his head are deeper and there is often a bad discharge from his left eye. He still trots ahead with his tail in the air, but quickly slows until he is behind me most of the time. I hang back to walk with him, and we move so slow my watch asks if my walk is over. He sniffs nearly every leaf at the dog park like he wants to inhale the smell of each dog that’s ever been there, like he’s collecting them all up to remember when he’s sleeping. I don’t talk about it much but I worry about the winter for my beautiful old sled dog.

Twice in the same week, what I saw one way as a white person was turned on its head by a Black man. The first was at a community panel about civility during which a Black pastor cracked open the discussion by talking about how white expectations of behavior and ‘civility’ served to perpetuate stereotypes like the ‘angry Black woman.’ The second was at the Project 2025 event when a Black colleague responded to the lecture by saying that Project 2025 was just a continuation of the oppression that had been going on for decades (the new Jim Crow) but was just causing alarm now because it would affect white people. This reinforces what I was taught a long time ago – you don’t know what you don’t know. I didn’t know. Now I do.

People are so unexpectedly interesting. At meal prep a few days ago, the young woman shoveling egg bake and sausage into containers for homeless outreach while I tucked in a muffin and hot sauce turned out to be an Operations Officer for the U.S. Coast Guard, meaning that when somebody was in distress on Lake Michigan and the Coast Guard was called, she was the one who figured out how to go save them. Then yesterday, a diver who’d gone missing while exploring a shipwreck was recovered from the bottom of the lake and I wondered if she’d done the recovery. You know, when I was younger, I never wanted to talk to people but that’s all changed as an old lady and it’s very cool.