"Mawidge...mawidge is what bwings us togewer today... Mawidge, the bwessed awwangement, that dweam wiffim a dweam..."
One of the best things about weddings is the way they bring together two completely different groups of people, who would normally never have anything to do with each other, and turn them into one big family. My family just got a whole lot bigger on Saturday with the marriage of my niece Annie to her new husband Tony. The wedding took place in Connecticut, in the quaint little town of Bethlehem, about a stone's throw from where my sister Cindy lives. But you would have thought it was just down the road from Buffalo, because that's where Tony's family is from -- and boy did they ever turn out for this shindig.
I had the pleasure of meeting Tony's family one Thanksgiving a couple of years ago. His brother Mike was working in Las Vegas and I drove out there from LA with Annie and Tony to join them all for the holiday. I had already met Tony's mother, Sue, since she had been out to visit LA a few times and had even come to see The Buzzards. In fact she was one of our most ardent supporters. So I already knew that meeting the rest of the family would be a treat.
With a mom as cool as Sue, how could you go wrong?
We had a great time in Vegas. Thanksgiving at Mike's was excellent. I met Tony's dad, Mario and his sister Christina and brother Nick. We watched football and ate turkey and I heard some inside dope on Tony. Later on, Mario, Tony, Mike and I played a little blackjack at the Hooters casino. We each managed to lose about twenty bucks. It was a little distracting in there. But not for the reason you would think -- the place was under construction and it felt like we were playing in battle zone.
At one point, Mario and I went for a long walk together. We strolled through Caesar's Palace, The Bellagio and a couple of other hotels. We must have walked at least four miles and almost all of it was indoors.
Vegas, baby!
The whole time I was with Tony's family, I felt like I had known them for years. It was instantly comfortable. Even just standing around waiting for the elevator was fun with them. Being so far from my own family, it was great to have such warm folks welcome me into their midst.
So, ever since I heard that Annie and Tony were getting married, I've been looking forward to seeing them all again. And this time they really would be part of my family. Bonus!
The wedding, which was completely envisioned, planned and executed by Annie, was unique and personal in every way, from the setting to the wardrobe to the catering to the centerpieces. Every aspect was marked by flair, intelligence and individuality -- just like Annie.
I was asked to do a reading during the ceremony, which apparently made me a lot more nervous than I thought. As I was driving my parents from the hotel to the historic estate where the wedding was being held, I thought I would take a "shortcut" down a road I thought I knew fairly well. See, some years ago, I lived in my sister's basement while working for the swimming pool company where Annie's dad worked. We used to drive all over the area, fixing pools and such. So, I thought I knew where I was going.
But I didn't.
Also, did I mention we were late?
So, as we headed down Flanders Road, plunging deeper and deeper into the bucolic landscape of Nowheresville, Connecticut, I began to get a sinking feeling. I imagined the whole wedding party standing there waiting for me as I rushed up to make my little speech, out of breath and barely able to speak.
But by some quirk of dumb luck, Flanders Road really did turn out to be a shortcut. Not the shortcut I thought it was, but a shortcut nonetheless. We got there in plenty of time. I was still so nervous that I literally couldn't speak -- but a nice bartender helped out with a needed gulp of water and then I was fine.
And as soon as I saw Annie, I forgot all about my silly worries. She was so lovely. And everything was so perfect. And Tony was there -- the luckiest man alive. And my family. And my new family. It was really one of the most wonderful days I've ever known.
Then came the reception. We had been worried about the weather for days, but luckily the rain held off for the ceremony. The reception took place under a massive tent, put up by the company Annie's brother Chris works for. With beautiful flowers supplied by Annie's stepmom, centerpieces crafted from fruit jars and raw wood, assembled by members of the family. In fact, the whole operation was a family affair, including members of the far-flung extended family who'd come all the way in from Los Angeles where Annie and Tony first met.
It was a testament to Annie's creativity as well as the love that holds this amazing group together. Annie and Tony's LA friends have made me feel as welcome as Tony's family did. And now, meeting even more of Tony's family and friends, I was struck by the realization that every single person I've met through Tony is one of the nicest people I've ever met. And that makes sense to me, because Annie is one of the nicest people in the world. And if anyone were going to be lucky enough to marry Annie, it could only be a guy as great as Tony.
But the magic of Annie's wedding didn't end there. It seemed like, in addition to bringing together the members of two new families, there was also a bringing together of some of the members of old families as well. Watching Annie dance with her father felt like a moment I had been waiting for most of her life. Once the greatest of pals -- now getting a second chance to remember the love that will always bind them.
As I listened to Tony's sister Christina, in a moving and heartfelt toast, refer to Annie as one of her best friends, and then my sister Cindy expressing the same feelings about Tony's mother, I realized that this wedding was so much bigger than two people. It was truly a wedding of families. Old and new. Literal and figurative. East Coast and West.
After the wedding, I got a chance to hang out and reconnect with my own family, whom I never get to see enough. I had some great talks with my sister Susan and learned how to grade English papers from Cindy.
Next comes a road trip to Florida with my parents. That may be a little too much bonding, actually.
But I will come away from this experience a richer man. Richer in friends and family and love.
Thank you, Annie and Tony, for sharing your miracle with us.
It seems that whenever any white person gets caught doing something overtly racist, the first thing they do is get in front of the nearest TV camera and say, "I'm not a racist." Because no matter what you really think, the one thing you can never do is admit to being a racist. In fact, I bet if you did a survey of all the white people in America you would find that almost none of them are racists.
But I am.
For most of my life, I didn't know I was racist. My parents raised me to to treat everybody the same, just like Jesus. But we really didn't know any black people we could treat 'the same.' My Dad had one black co-worker at GE, whose son Eric went to my high school. We weren't really friends, but we were friendly. I remember once my parents had Eric's parents over to our house for a party. Apparently this created quite a scandal in our all-white Louisville neighborhood.
Even in the 'progressive' atmosphere of Wesleyan University, I didn't meet many black students. There were none in my freshman dorm. In the dining hall, all the black students sat together in one corner. Many of them lived in a 'special interest' dorm called Malcolm X House. I spent one evening at Malcolm X house with my friend Mark, who was dating a woman who lived there. I felt kind of like a tourist.
I spent some time in Texas where I worked construction with a black guy named J.J. for a while. We got along O.K. I went to his house once. Felt like a tourist.
When I lived in Washington, D.C., the only black people I knew were the legal secretaries and the guys from the mailroom at the prestigious law firm where I worked. There were no black lawyers there. The part of D.C. where I lived, called Northwest, was where almost all of the white people lived. Even on the subway, I was pretty much surrounded by white people every day. I don't recall that this ever seemed odd to me. Although I remember going to a Grateful Dead concert at RFK stadium one hot summer day with some Russians who were visiting America for the first time. At one point, one of the Russians remarked, "the only black people here are working here."
Sometimes it takes an outsider to point out the obvious.
After I left D.C., I moved to Brooklyn and lived in a neighborhood that was 'in transition'. That meant that white people were moving in and buying up the old brownstones and the black people had to move out. I now had actual black neighbors, including The Rev. Al Sharpton, who lived one block down. When I rode the subway into Manhattan every morning, there were as many, if not more, blacks than whites on the train. There were also Hispanics, Asians, Persians, Russians, Jews, Muslims, Gays, Lesbians, Transvestites, Homeless People, Crackheads, and Panhandlers. I was a long way from Louisville.
The law firm where I worked, which was Rudy Giuliani's old firm, actually had one black partner. For a few months I even had a black co-worker. He told me he got the job because he went to the same college as the black partner. He spent most of his spare time calling up other black paralegals and lawyers on a list he got from his alumni office. He was a networker. He had to be.
One night, I was coming home late from a movie. I had stopped off for a beer or two, so it was pretty late when I got out of the subway, just a few blocks from my apartment. I started to cross the street and noticed a black man waiting on the opposite corner. For a moment, I got nervous. 'What's he doing hanging out on the corner this late at night? Is he going to mug me?' Then I noticed that on the other corner was another black man talking on the pay phone. I immediately felt guilty. The first guy was probably waiting for his friend to get off the phone. (Because all black people know each other.) How racist of me to assume he was a mugger.
I continued across the street and down the sidewalk. As I did, I heard the second guy hang up the phone and walk towards the first guy. A moment later I heard the scuffle of shoes on concrete coming from over my right shoulder. Before I had a chance to process that information, I had an arm around my neck and I was gasping for breath. It was a big arm, a muscular arm, a black arm.
A voice behind me said "Don't do nothin'." I wasn't about to. The second guy quickly searched my pockets and took my wallet. I think I may have tried to say something, but I couldn't speak. Or breathe. Suddenly, the lights went out.
When I opened my eyes, the world had gone cockeyed. There was a tree growing out at a right angle from the wall I was leaning against. My head felt warm. My glasses were gone.
It took a full minute for me to figure out that I was lying on the sidewalk. My attackers were long gone. My glasses were next to me, unbroken. I tried to stand up, but the sidewalk was tilting back and forth. I sat there for a while. The street was completely deserted. Eventually, I got up and walked home. My head was pounding from the huge bump I'd received from being dropped onto the concrete. But I was alive. And that was something.
I called the police and they took me to the hospital where I sat in the waiting room for what felt like hours. Then someone led me to a room with an x-ray machine and had me lay on a steel table. I was in there for another twenty minutes before they let me go. The technician kept pressing my head against the table to get the x-ray. I told him that the reason I was there was because I had a big goddamn bump on the back of my head and that when he pressed my head against the steel table it really, really hurt. He did not seem concerned.
By the way, for the record, the cops and the x-ray tech were white.
I had to wait for a white doctor to look at my x-ray before they let me go home. It was now about four a.m. I had no money and no-one to call to ask for a ride. I was deep in the heart of Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of the toughest neighborhoods in Brooklyn. That means that only low-income black people live there.
The two mile walk from the hospital through Bed-Sty to my apartment in the pre-dawn darkness was one of the longest journeys of my life. My only consolation was that, if I were to be mugged again, I had nothing left for anyone to steal.
So I had that going for me.
For the next couple of months, I was a little freaked-out. Apparently I was suffering from a mild form of post-traumatic stress brought on by the combination of the mugging and the head injury. Since, as a temp, I had no health insurance, I had to rely mainly on the advice and comfort of friends and co-workers during this period.
The good news was, I did get my wallet back. Apparently the muggers tossed it onto a rooftop after removing the twenty dollar bill I had gotten from an ATM less than an hour earlier. Someone found it and turned it in to the police. All in all, I hadn't fared too badly. Little bump on the head, loss of twenty bucks, replace my credit cards -- not exactly a catastrophe. But there was one lingering effect.
A couple of weeks after I was mugged, I was riding the subway. A black man got on and stood next to me. I was sitting and he was standing, so his forearm was right at my eye level. It was a big arm, a muscular arm, a black arm. The sight of that arm sent me into an instant flashback -- I couldn't breathe, my heart was pounding, I felt dizzy and sick. Not until he moved away did I begin to feel better. He was a complete stranger to me. And I hated him.
Months later I was walking down a gravel path when jogger came up behind me. I heard the scuffle of his footsteps coming over my right shoulder and I froze in fear -- expecting to see that black arm encircle my throat. But it passed.
That was many years ago. Fortunately, I no longer freak out when I see black men with muscular forearms. I do still get a little jumpy when I hear footsteps over my right shoulder, though.
So, the other night I was walking down Santa Monica Boulevard. Not late. Not deserted. Shops and restaurants were open, cars passed by. Just ahead of me was a solitary black man, walking in the same direction. I guess I was walking faster than he, because I drew closer to him as we neared the corner. But then, he stopped walking and moved over to the side, by the entrance to a tailor shop. I couldn't help thinking he was specifically waiting for me to pass, but I wasn't sure why. As I went by him and stepped into the street, I glanced back over my right shoulder and noticed he was walking again, right behind me.
The same feelings of suspicion overcame me. 'Why is this guy following me? Is he going to mug me?' And as before the suspicion was immediately followed by guilt. 'Am I afraid of him just because he's black? Am I really such a racist?'
And the answer is, "yes." I was afraid of him because he was black, just as he was probably afraid of me following him because I am white. No matter how hard I try to force myself not to prejudge people, I do it anyway. I do it all the time. I do it even when I think I'm not doing it.
When I saw the two black men hanging out on the corner in Brooklyn, I was nervous because they were black. Then I felt guilty, also because they were black. I made an error in judgment that night because I was so concerned about them being black that I forgot about the fact that they were TWO GUYS HANGING OUT ON THE STREET CORNER IN BROOKLYN AT TWO A.M.
Every time I tell this story, it is always the story of how I was mugged by two black guys. But that's not what happened. I was mugged by two MUGGERS. Why do I need to mention that they were black? Because, apparently, I see black people differently than I do white people. Whether they are muggers or lawyers or construction workers or secretaries or students or just some guy walking down the street. I see them as black first, people second. I do.
So, I think the first step in becoming a post-racist society is not electing a black president. The first step is realizing that we elected a president, who happens to be black. And we did it despite the fact that we are all still racists. Well, I am anyway.
Where's the TV camera?
"If you believed they put a man on the moon..."Somewhere, stashed away among the archives of my past, is the age-yellowed front page of the Louisville Courier Journal from July 20, 1969 featuring a color photo of astronaut Buzz Aldrin standing on the surface of the moon. I had that front page taped to the wall of my bedroom for years, along with my posters of Joe Namath, Peter Fonda and Raquel Welch. The posters are long gone, but I've been hanging onto that front page for forty years. I remember thinking that one day it would be a valuable piece of history. And I guess I was right, but not in the way I had imagined.
When I was a kid, space exploration was pretty much the coolest thing in the world. And it had nothing to do with beating the Russians or conquering the universe. It was about dreams and adventure and excitement: "to boldly go where no man has gone before."
Obviously TV shows like Star Trek and movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey played a big part in my fascination with space travel, but it was the reality rather than the fantasy that originally captured my attention. During one of our summer vacation trips to Florida, my family visited the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, then known as Cape Kennedy. We toured the gigantic Vehicle Assembly Building where the Saturn V rockets were assembled, and stood beside the massive 'crawler' that transports the rocket to the launch pad. The sheer magnitude of these engineering marvels gave rise to the belief that, in this amazing modern world, almost anything was possible.
That belief was confirmed on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong uttered those famous words, "One small step for man... one giant leap for mankind."
I had been following the mission with great interest, from the thrilling liftoff on July 16th, through the amazing 280,000 mile voyage from the earth to the moon. The night of the moon landing, my parents let me camp out on the floor in front of the TV with my blanket and pillow, to watch the incredible event. I must have fallen asleep a couple of times, but I do remember seeing Armstrong come down that ladder for the first time and kind of bounce down onto the dusty surface of the moon. It was like a dream come true. A man was actually walking on the moon! We had really done it.
The next day I couldn't wait to see the color pictures in the paper, even though I was still pretty bleary from my first all-nighter. I grabbed a pair of scissors and cut off the front page to hang on my bedroom wall in a place of honor. Today the moon, tomorrow -- who knows? That was the beauty of it. We could accomplish anything. And we would.
Less than a year later, however, our confidence was shaken by the nearly disastrous accident that befell Apollo 13. Although, as Ron Howard's excellent retelling of that event in the movie Apollo 13 shows, our ingenuity, intelligence and perseverance ultimately prevailed. But it was, no doubt, an object lesson in how dangerous things really were "out there."
But we kept learning and kept trying and, pretty soon, we were driving cars and hitting golfballs on the moon.
At some point during this period, on a trip to Washington D.C., my family visited the National Air and Space Museum. We got to take peek inside one of the Apollo command modules and stroll around a mock-up of the Lunar Excursion Module, the wacky looking bug-like contraption wrapped in gold foil that ferried the astronauts to and from the surface of the moon. And, of course, we saw the moon rocks. The fact is, the moon rocks did look a lot like certain earth rocks. Not like any rocks we had in Kentucky, mind you, but maybe like they had in Hawaii or New Mexico. But they were moon rocks! From the MOON! It was pretty amazing.
Of course it did not take long for the naysayers to start claiming that we had never really gone to the moon -- that the whole thing was just a hoax, a conspiracy. I never understood why anyone would believe that the moon landing was a hoax. First of all, why would you go to such lengths to fake a moon landing just to say you beat the Russians, and then repeat it five times? And why would you fake a failed mission to the moon?
But it was the era of Vietnam and Watergate and people did not believe in anything anymore. Anything good was phony and anything bad was true. It became cool to think that everything was a joke. Going to the moon was a big waste of time and money. What the hell did we want to go there for anyway?
Now of course, the idea of going to the moon seems quaint. Something dreamed up by a bunch of nerdy guys with crew cuts and short-sleeved oxfords. How silly. We should use our technology to make better phones and video games and stop wasting time on lame science fiction.
Yesterday, however, I watched the spectacular launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour from Cape Canaveral and I must admit it was still pretty thrilling. And as it turns out, those nerdy guys from NASA never have given up on the dream. In fact, my cousin Randy is one of them. He's part of the team developing the next generation of manned spacecraft, called Orion. They are planning to go back to the moon in about ten years or so. And then maybe to Mars. And after that, who knows?
I guess my old, yellowed front page from July 20, 1969 is a valuable historical artifact. Maybe not to the rest of the world. But it still reminds me of the importance of having a dream and doing everything in your power to make that dream a reality.
Because the real 'final frontier' is the imagination.
