Sometimes love goes missing.  When it does – go find it! 

• Did it get trapped in the pages of yet another book you’re reading?
• Is it stuck in the keyboard of the computer that’s become an appendage to your fingers?
• Is it hiding among the kids and their demands?
• Will you find it at the board meeting or volunteer event you’re at?
• Is it at the church or the club?
• Does it live in the television programs you watch so frequently?

Love can go missing not only because of infidelity or major disagreements.

• It can go missing because of simple neglect – it is easy not to be demonstrative. 
• It can go missing because you think it is always there and so don’t nurture it, name it, or claim it.
• It can go missing because it is easy to take for granted ‘cause you think “My love lives here.  It ain’t going nowhere.”

Ha! Ha!  Better think twice.  Love doesn’t have to explode away it can fritter away, eroded by all the other things that life demands.

My advice is to stop all the other things you are doing and do love!

Do love!

Add it to the list and you just might keep the bliss.

The hills are alive, okay, not really hills, it's one hill and if it feels alive because it seems to change or at least my experience of it changes.  Read on. 

I face the same hill nearly every day that I leave my home on my walk to Ashmont Station.  At the top of the hill, there is a small church, Calvary Baptist Church.  Whenever I make it to the church, I always think, “I made it to Calvary.”* 

Some days I bound up the hill almost unaware of the experience because I'm emeshed in my thoughts and not concentrating on the walk.   Other days, every step is felt as the church and the hill’s crest seem to recede no matter how many steps I take toward them.  Still other days, the hill is a sensory adventure as I look at the flowers and vegetables blooming and growing in front of the large Victorian houses that line the street.

There are decisions to make: 

• Shall I walk on the left side or the right side of the street today?
• Shall I continue past Peabody Square and walk all the way up to Washington Street then come back down to the station?
• Shall I avoid the hill altogether and take a detour – going left on Florida street and walking four streets over, then up to Dot Ave., then back right and down to Ashmont Station.  (Going this way will take me pass the small tub filled with gold fish in front of one of the brownstones where I always pause and count the fish.)

Most days, I do not avoid the hill – my legs have gotten stronger as a result. 

There are days when I am aware of each breath I take; days when I cannot breathe through my nose because the air is so cold that it hurts; days when I breath so heavily that I am angry with myself.  (Why is the hill such a challenge today?  Why is this hill ever a challenge, goodness knows I’ve walked it enough times that it should be a piece of cake!) Still other days when I do meditative breathing – in through the nostrils (2, 3, 4) and out through the mouth (2, 3, 4).

No matter what the experience of the hill has been on any given day, I embrace the feeling of accomplishment I have every time I’ve made it up that hill again.

A few times each year, I expand the challenge and walk the opposite way down Ashmont Street over to Neponset Ave.  Turning right, I walk a few blocks down to the Pope's Hill neighborhood to S. Monroe Terrace, which has a monster hill that starts immediately from Neponset and gives no grace until you’ve reached its top and magnificent views.  Walking that hill is always a bear for me:  will I make it?  Turn back you fool!  Nah, I can do this!.  I keep my head down, focusing on each block of pavement until I get to the top.

Another challenge is to walk over Adams Street to the playing field and up the sixty-plus steps to Train Street (I think that’s the name of it).  I pretend to be Rocky Balboa.

Having managed these hills for the past six years, I was surprised, last summer, when I walked  the path around the golf course in Franklin Park and breezed up the slopes.  Years ago, when I walked Franklin Park almost daily, I hated those slopes.  I used to kick nuts and/or rocks all the way to take my mind off that part of the path.  Now, those slopes have become minor (or at least they were last summer. )

Minor or major, the hills and slopes don’t change.  What changes is my perspective, my stride, and my learning not to avoid them but to take them one step at a time.  I can’t have the incredible feeling of accomplishment or the view from the peaks** unless I complete the climb.  And so it is, with other areas of life.

Related links:

Dorchester Atheneum
Ashmont Hill Neighbohood
Dorchester Historical Society

(*A few strides past Calvary across the street and there’s the magnificent architecture of All Saints Church of Dorchester.  I hear that the All Saints’ Choir of Men and Boys is magnificent.  I will go hear them one day.)

(**Hey, I know you true hikers are laughing at my mini-jaunts.  You have your mountains and I have my...my, hills, slopes, whatever.)

 If you love this post, you may also love an earlier one I wrote, "I Love Walking in Dorchester."

I admit it.  I’ve often avoided facing history.  Especially history from the period of  African-captivity known as American Slavery.  I’ll read history but avoid seeing history, especially this period, because of the pain that it conjures up in me.  So, it was with some trepidation that I went to see the play Harriet Jacobs, presented by Underground Railway Theater, playing until Jan. 31 at the Central Square Theatre in Cambridge (Massachusetts). The play is inspired by the autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs.

I went because it was written by playwright Lydia R. Diamond.  I know her.  I’ve seen and read other plays by her. She is a superb playwright with keen intelligence, substantial wit and a technician with having the emotional center and central points of her plays sneak upon you.  She’s not a wham-bam playwright like August Wilson who never lets up.  He pummels ideas with language that is so fiercely, so cleverly rooted in Black urban culture that its like the walking bop that many Black men used to do (before this generation got into wearing their pants below their asses). Ms. Diamond is not a wizardly word smith who plays with words and images just for the fun of them whether they make sense, have a point or are in any way important or necessary*, like Suzi Lori Parks.

She graciously taught a playwright mentorship for ACT Roxbury when I was director there.  So, I went, knowing that this play, based on the incredible life of Harriet Jacobs was gonna have some pain.  (I don’t like to feel pain in public spaces, hence my refusal to see Precious in the movie theatre.) 

I also went because my dear friend, Mary, one of the playwrights who’d been mentored by Lydia wanted to go and so I knew I had someone I could lean on if the subject matter got too deep.  (Once there, I discovered to my delight that another of the students in the Playwright Mentorship program, Denise Washington, was Assistant Director of this production.  Thanks, DW, for giving a shout-out to ACT Roxbury and the mentorship in your biographical statement.)

Harriet Jacobs, the play,  is deep and difficult.  It pulls you low-down.  It shows the inner-lives of the slaves and the ordinary moments they managed née dared have despite the oppressive situations in which they lived.  It shows the myriad costs of the institution.  That some slaves could have the fortitude to triumph through the institution is important to broadcast again and again.  So despite the tears and anger it brought up in me, I am glad I saw it and recommend that you do, too.   It closes on January 31, so there’s not much time to see it.  (The actors are magnificent working wonders in the small space with an appropriately minimal set.)

Having gotten through this one, I plan to go 'head on and see another play based on the more recent history of the Civil Rights era, next week, The Good Negro.  Written by Tracey Scott Wilson and directed by Summer L. Williams of Company One,. It will end its run on February 6.

I guess I have to grow up, toughen up, and achieve balance between remembering and honoring history versus wallowing. and getting stuck in it  It seems to me that, unlike my Jewish friends, African-Americans don’t plumb and revisit our history with the same depth or frequency.  It is one of the reasons that certain films, like Rosewood, Amistad and Beloved bombed.  Many of us don’t care to look at that painful history.  But think of Schindler’s List,  which was widely heralded.

I have matured to the point that I now know what to do with the pain – not only of the physical hardships but of the lingering psychological scars, societal wounds and what it means when one group of people feel innately superior to another.

I know that Black people do not have a monopoly on pain. The ability of human beings to be cruel to one another whether they are  brethren from the same culture or strangers from different cultures never ceases to amaze me.  It is difficult  to bear witness but bear witness I must (in manageable doses). If Harriet could live through her pain I can certainly witness it and learn from it.

(*I know this is pointedly judgmental but hey, it is my blog, my opinion after all.  I am one of the few people who didn't like or respect the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Top Dog, Under Dog, by Ms. Parks despite it's admittedly riveting dialogue.)


<><><>
FYI - Another of Lydia R. Diamond's plays will grace the Boston area when Stick Fly, directed by Kenny Leon, runs at The Huntington Theater from Feb. 19 to March 21, 2010.

“Sufferin’ succotash,"  Sylvester the Cat said when he was  distressed usually after having  failed, once again, to catch Tweety-Bird.  He said it with a stutter and plenty of spit.  (Daffy Duck also uttered the phrase but it was Sylvester’s originally.)

I’m stuttering, sputtering and shaking my head in dismay at the outcome of the special election to fill the late Senator Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts.

Unlike Tweety, Martha Coakley, did not outrun her nemesis, Scott Brown.  In fact, she didn’t even run a campaign.    I wonder why:

• Was it arrogance?
• Did she believe the poll numbers and think they were written in stone?
• Was it merely  that she is not a people person and therefore didn’t think she needed to get out and campaign among the people?
• Did the other Democratic candidates in the primary fragment her political base? 
• Were they too invisible in  their support after she won the primary?
• Did they fail to campaign for her?
• Did she have the I wrong campaign manager?
• Was she too broke to mount an effective campaign a few weeks ago?
• Did the Democratic machine take her winning as an inevitability?   

Perhaps it was all of the above reasons.

I do know that she messed up, no, a stronger word is needed, she effed up this campaign.
I do know that, until last week, I didn’t get a piece of mail from her campaign and was only invited to one event the week before.  (I got plenty of mail and emails from everybody else, except the Kennedy guy.)  I even got mail from the Brown campaign!

The lessons resonate beyond politics:

• Don’t ever get comfortable or complacent when running for any office or pursuing any job.  (You don’t have it until you get it and even then the rules can be changed along the way.  Just check out what happened to Conan.)
• Don’t take your constituency for granted.
• If you’re going to run for public office you got to deal and be among the public, in all sorts of settings even those that aren’t comfortable.
• Whenever progress is made, there is inevitable backlash and backsliding.
• Don’t underestimate the power of social media to garner support.
• Never under-estimate how far media recognition and good looks can go.
  (Having a daughter who has a bit of fame, i.e., Ayla Brown who competed on American Idol and is a basketball player for the NCAA, can give you traction.)
• The Republican Party used to represent conservative and upper-crusty, classy – no longer.  Can you say WWT?

I would like to have the option to vote NO when I hit the polls – as in, none of the above.  Please give us some better candidates.  As far as I’m concerned, neither Coakley nor Brown are worthy successors to Senator Ted Kennedy’s legacy.

Oh well, 24 months until we can undo this debacle.

It Ain’t All About You – Communication Issues with Friends

My friendships with a couple of long-term friends are in an inactive phase, either because we are no longer physically located near each other or because we’re in a different phase in our lives so that the things that brought us together – a job, children, hanging out at the same places – is no longer providing glue for the relationship. We just grew apart.  It happens.

This distance doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t still care for them.  I do and so I try to be in touch on a regular basis.

With some friends this is managed easily.  A phone call every couple of months or so, an annual lunch date, a touch-base birthday or holiday card.  With others, it is quite difficult to connect.  They are the ones to whom this blogpost is written.

I email.  I don’t get a reply.   I leave a phone message.  I don’t get a return message.  I leave another email and/or another phone message.  Nothing.  I send a card or book or article.  I don’t get a thank you or acknowledgment.

One friend I finally reached  when I used the old ring code we used to use when we were dodging bill collectors or boyfriends. 

“Did you get my other messages?” I asked.
“Well, yes,” she replied.
“And you didn’t call me?”
“Well, no.  I’ve been a little down and just didn’t feel like I’d be good company. Blah, blah, blah.”

We talked about the “blah, blah, blah” for a few minutes. And then I pushed back.

“Did it ever occur to you that maybe I needed help?  That maybe I needed to talk to you?  When I reached out, more than once, in more than one way, it never occurred to you that I might need you to respond?”
“Well, no, it didn’t.”

I exploded (a little bit). ‘IT AIN’T ALL ABOUT YOU!” I exclaimed in a tone of voice just short of a scream.

“Oh.  It never occurred to me that you might need to talk; I thought you were just checking in on me.”
“Harrumph,” I uttered.
“Don’t give up on me,” she asked.
“Even though you’d given up on me?”

I won’t give up on her but I’m telling you, it is so exasperating.  It’s so easy for us to get so caught up in our own drama, day-to-day lives, that we can’t see an SOS.

She’s not the only one, she’s just the second one of my friends I finally got to come up out of her funk/life issues for a minute and engage in dialogue.  My long lost friend Etta, well, I don’t know what planet she’s on.  I just know I'm not a part of it.  While the friendship has effectively been let go, my feelings haven't.  (She would be my longest friend aside from my sister.)

These are people I used to hang-tight with.  One harkens back to high school. Another lived next door to me; we were compadres through our pregnancies and through our children’s daycare years.  She knows my first husband when few people do.  She knows some secrets.

Oh, well.  Some friendships survive a lifetime, others are severed along the way.  The severances are usually clear.  They did something or you did something and now the friendship is kaput!  But the slow-leaking ones that have no precipitating event that would cause them to dissolve those are puzzling.

I say to you, my sisters (and brothers), if your friend reaches out to you, you might want to reach back, because sometimes, it ain't all about you!


*****
If you like this post, you might also like:
Year of the Friends
You're Not My Effin Friend

Wait for it, Wait for it*

Patience is a virtue, it truly is.  Sometimes, when I’m being wise, I know this.  I guess I had a wise moment over the holidays or perhaps I just so busy with work projects and the hustle and bustle of family, travel, cooking that I ran out of time to nag, nudge and cajole the young woman I’d been mentoring. I’d emailed her a part-time job opportunity and hadn’t gotten a response.

Instead of calling her on/about this, I decided not to contact her.  I decided to leave her be, to just give her a little time.

Lo’ and behold, just when I’d nearly given up and was about to call her, the phone rang. It was her, checking in.  She told me that she’d finished the volunteer project I’d found for her and that she was looking for opportunities to volunteer with a day care.  She asked if I could help her find some places.

She asked for help!  Out-loud!

I said yes. (Of course.)

As we continued to talk, I asked her if she’d written a thank you letter to the folks who’d given her the volunteer opportunity.  She hadn’t.  We then discussed what the contents of the thank you might say.  I told her to also ask if she could use them as a reference as she looks for work while she completes her GED.

I asked her if she’d seen my email about the job.  She said she hadn’t checked her email in a while.  I reminded her that we’d talked about email being my preferred communication method and that, since her email was on her resume and on various job applications,  she needed to check it on a regular basis.  (She doesn’t have a computer at home but has access at the education center she attends and at the public library.

Turns out, after further conversation that she had checked the email but didn’t know what an “usher” was.  (Sigh.)  I explained the job of usher to her (as opposed to the singer, Usher, lol)   Suggested that next time she didn’t know what a word meant – she look it up online, in a dictionary, do a search, or ask somebody.  I reminded her that I would only send her jobs that I knew she could do and that wouldn’t interfere with her primary goal right now – the completion of her GED.

Despite promising to check email and to send me a draft of her thank you, I didn’t hear from her for a few days.  So, in addition to emailing the volunteer opportunities I uncovered, I also printed them out and mailed them and a blank thank you card via postal mail.  And waited, once more.

Postal mail nets email (go figure!)
This afternoon, I got an email from her thanking me for the info, promising that she would begin to call places tomorrow, and informing me that she had sent her thank you letter to the organization with which she volunteered.
I got her attention and she got mine. (I would bet that she doesn’t get much postal mail.)
She followed-through!  (Shouting for joy right now.)

There was something in her face that made me connect to her from her visit to me in my recent stint as a job counselor.  I do believe she’s going to continue to grow and develop and that the chilly urban chick demeanor that she sometimes cloaks herself in will melt and her unnecessary walls will come down.  (Some walls are necessary for self-protection!)

She is reminding me:

It’s a lesson I should have remembered from my days rearing my two teens and the many teens I’ve worked with over the years.
I'm still learning and I'm still mentoring.

(*Comic Katt Williams uses this phrase to great effect in his routines, as in waiting for the other shoe to drop.  It's one of the few phrases he uses that doesn't have a bunch of curse words in it.)

I have a couple of blog ideas in the queue that are musings, rants, rumblings - \the usual stuff.  They'll have to wait to be posted later, however, because on this sunny Saturday in Boston, I've decided to share a small wonderful thing that I experienced this morning instead of keeping it to myself.

Here's what happened:  My husband ran out to unlock the doors of the school where he works, responding to a call asking him to do so.  A few minutes after he left,  I heard his cell phone ringing several times upstairs from his office while I was getting dressed.  I thought it must be his work phone* he’d left and maybe someone from the school was trying to reach him.  When I went upstairs, I saw there were several messages but couldn’t figure out how to unlock the phone to answer them. 

I went downstairs and began assembling clothes to do the laundry. His cell phone started ringing again.  I picked up my phone and called his personal cell phone number to tell him someone was calling him on his work phone.  All of a sudden I hear the phone on the third floor ringing again but with a different ring.   In the space of a few seconds, I realized the tune was A Love Supreme by John Coltrane.  That’s when I realized  that this was the ring-tone he'd selected for me, his wife  A Love Supreme!

I thought: He loves me!  He knows that we have a love supreme!  It made me stop , blush and grin.  It made me feel all warm and toasty . 

I’ve never particularly cared about ring-tones and have just been using what was already on the phone when I got it.  I think that will change this weekend especially for one special number of one special man, my husband.

A ring-tone of love, a small, wonderful thing.

(*When he came home later, I found out that he didn’t have a work phone any more in his new position.  I slept on that one..)

While having a quick bite at Au Bon Pain with a good friend, Mary, who is also an accomplished playwright, she paid me a compliment about my writing.  She said that she thought I was a good writer and that even when I got into deep issues, the writing always came back to a place of optimism and light.  She also said she liked my humor.  Her words meant a lot to me not only because of my admiration for her as a writer and a kind and lovely human being, but also because she got what I try to do with my work and how I try to walk in the world.

I sort for the good.

On the way home from visiting my friend and a subsequent errand and meeting, I read a brief interview in the Boston Globe’s G Section, with Benoit Denizet-Lewis, author of American Voyeur.  His writing seems to be the antithesis of sorting for the good.  He seems to sort for the fringe, the twisted, and the suppressed. The more fringe the better.

“Denizet-Lewis says that when he can keep his own judgments from surfacing, he can depict his subjects more accurately."

One of the groups he writes about has practices that are so despicable that I won’t even name it here.  They should be judged and eliminated.   If you lay down with dogs you will probably end up with fleas, the old saying goes (or some such approximation) like   There's a difference between writing about dirt or writing about soil.  Denizet-Lewis has penned several cover stories for the New York Times magazine, much of it celebrating the sordid.  

I do censor some of the images and ideas that I imagine.  When I’ve let myself go in creating images or recording negative things I’ve witnessed or endured, I carefully excise some of it that serves no useful purpose in being shared.. I just don't want to be responsible for putting more slop into the world!

For every tidbit of gossip I share, there are dozens more I swallow.
I try hard not to put a lot of negativity into the air.  Given air, negativity seems to blossom especially when in the hands of the media who will hop over 20 positive stories to get to one negative or who will pick out and magnify a negative thread in an otherwise positive event.

I’ve often heard that if you can name it you can heal it, however, I’ve come, at this point in my life, to feel that some stuff needs to remain unnamed and private  What’s the point in putting more junk into the consciousness of a world already saturated with negativity?

It’s not that I’m merely a  “best foot forward” woman.  (Although I do try to be my best self as much as I can be.)  It’s just that staying down in the muck and the mire isn’t helpful for me.  Reliving and remembering negativity leaves me exhausted and weakened.  Once having survived certain experiences, I don’t  feel a need to replay them or explore them ad nauseam.   (That’s why I only lasted four sessions in therapy.)  Rehashing the past didn’t help me getting over the situation and move on.  (I’m lucky that my mind will often close off and forget specifics of negative events.  It does this with some positive one as well – and I can live with that.)

I’ve learned to selectively call friends and family members who bear doom and gloom.  I take them in small doses and will end a conversation when it’s gotten stuck on sorrow or woe is me, yet again.

I picked up Say You’re One of Them by  Ukem Akpan – one of Oprah’s Book Club Selections with great anticipation.  Sister, brother, was I let down..  I found this collection of short stories overwhelmingly depressing.  There is virtually no light in the book.  That it was written by a Jesuit priest is stunning to me.  Told from the perspective of children, the writing and circumstances draw you in but I kept looking for the redemption in these stories and it wasn't there.  There were tiny flickers of possible escape in some of the stories but what would be escaped to seemed as bad as the circumstances being escaped.  I know that children all over the world are going through violence, slavery, prostitution, war and other acts of betrayal by adults.  But come-on, couldn’t Mr. Akpan, a priest, give us some positive stories in between the tragedies?  Save the bonds between the children, there is little positive here. And I found this disturbing. 

I also haven’t jumped on the Precious bandwagon.  Having read the novel it is based on, Push, by Sapphire years ago when it came out, I felt no need to rush and see the movie.  I will watch it but it will be in the privacy of my home where I can absorb the shocks at my own pace, remote at the ready if it is overwhelming.  Precious is this generation’s The Color Purple by Alice Walker although not as well written and definitely more graphic.. 9I understand the director of Precious put in some fantasy and hope that wasn’t in the novel.

(For a better exploration of illiteracy and its impact on a young person’s life I highly recommend is A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines, an incredibly gifted novelist.  Despite the fact that the protagonist is on death row, there is redemption, growth, healing among him and the teacher his grandmother hires to educate him so that he will die like a man.  It is exquisite.)

I could cite other examples on both sides of the coin, books and movies that drag and those that are buoyant, but I believe I’ve made my point. Writers and other artists have the right to tell their own stories in their own ways, but I also think artists should think carefully about what they put in the world, what messages their work is sending, and what images they are leaving behind.

Meanwhile, I sort, write, listen out for, notice, and share the good.  I’d love to hear what y’all think.

2010** is going to be the best year ever for me.  How do I know?

• Because I’m living to see it. 
• Because I will do my part to make it so.
• Because I embrace what it is not.

It is not any of the previous years I squandered in envy or fear.
Envy:  how come I don’t have a man, will the man I’ve been dating be with me on New Year’s Eve (or do the disappearing act that other-brothers had done before)?*
Fear:  how will I pay this or face that?

It is not any of the years I wasted waiting.
Waiting: for it to happen, whatever it was.  (A man, money, my adult children’s lives to sort out, an acceptance letter…)

2010 is going to be the best year because at this moment it is full of possibilities like every year that came before.  The possibilities of goals fulfilled, dreams realized fantasies experienced.  (It is also possible that it will be the same sugar/sour dressed up in a new decade.  Guess what?  It wouldn’t be so bad if it were the same.  A lot of good has happened in this past decade!)

2010 is going to be great because I was fully present and content on its eve.  I celebrated in my home with my husband: 

• good food,
• good music,
• candlelight,
• champagne,
• love expressed in words, silence and actions,
• a home reverberating with love,
• calls made to and received from loved ones,
• glimpses of celebrations around the world.

Unlike many other years, I wasn’t wishing I was doing something else or worried about what I might be missing.  I did not trouble myself over a brother or friend who chose to be alone and did not even plan to stay up to witness the moment the New Year began.  Their lives, their choices.  Who am I to judge?  What would my worrying do except intrude on my good time?

I put on dangling earrings, a glittery blouse, velvet pants, silver sandals, swept my hair up (except for a few locks falling seductively down my right cheek) and had at it!

I remembered various ways I’ve ushered in the New Year:

• Doing First Night activities.
• Throwing a big party for friends and strangers.
• All dressed up for a ball (in St. Louis and in Boston).
• At a private, catered dinner (Chicago).
• As the official babysitter (ch-ching).
• On the phone reaching out to not be alone.
• With a bunch of girlfriends.
• Saturated with angst.

How delicious to face 2010 squarely, celebratory and satisfactorily.  It’s going to be the best year ever.

Happy New Year every one!

(*I started dating my husband in the month of September.  It quickly became apparent to me that he was the one for me.  I wasn’t sure if I was the one for him.  My sister told me, “If he is with you on new year’s eve,, that’s yo’ man.”  He was, and he is.)

(** Dear Reader, I just discovered that I had drafted but never published this entry.  I apologize for the delay.)

Heroes are people and people are human, this is a distillation of the various thoughts I've had as the Tiger Woods drama has unfolded.  It was the topic of a dinner party I was at.  My husband updates me regular.  My son left a comment on his Facebook page about being glad that Tiger did not lay one finger on his wife.

What I think after the jumble of thoughts I’ve had and comments I've heard is this:
 
Stop...looking...for...heroes.
Stop expecting humans to be saints. 
Saints and angels are in the heavenly realm.
This is the earthly realm - were people dwell.

There are heroes among us
but they are not usually those the media choose to spotlight (except in one tiny segment on the nightly news or occasional print articles.

Heroes are ordinary.
They are your mother, your father, your uncle, your son.
Your daughter, your niece, your neighbor, your friend.
Your pastor, the barista, the janitor, the cook.

Heroes are among us every day.
The security officer. The guy who collects the garbage.
The social worker, nurse, doctor on call.
The builder who makes the structuresthat do not fall.

Heroes are people who just do their jobs.
The fire-fighter, police officer, pilot.
The farmer who plants and the farm workers who harvest.
The teachers, coaches, daycare workers who care for our young.
The activity directors, ordelies and volunteers who unburden those nearly done.
The train, bus and cab drivers who get us from here to there.
Heroes exist every where.

Heroes have integrity.
Doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do.
Without fanfare or applause.

Heroes  answer the call
to serve others,to serve our country.
Heroes are the emergency responders who risk their lives to save the thrill-seekers who engaged in folly.
Heroes are the strangers who answers other strangers' calls of distress.

Heroes are not athletes,
although athletes can do marvelous things.
Heroes may not be rich,
although the wealthy can give heroically.
Heroes need not be famous,
although entertainers can elevate issues in the public eye.

Heroes are fully human:
They sweat, cry, make bad decisions, and, like all of us eventually, die.
A human can be a hero and do magnificent things.
Heroes can be foolish, stupid, dishonest and vain
In other words flawed and therefore fully human
.
The most important heroes are there when you need them in small and large ways,
Not usually sanctioned by the media, often noticed at all.
Don’t prop up your heroes too high.
Don’t be astonished when they fall.

I can enjoy Beyonce and Blige, Mr. Wonder & Jay-Z.
I can support Obama & admire his family.
I can aspire to the deeds of Mandela, Malcolm or Martin.
I can be inspired by Oprah, Geoffrey Canada or any number of people doing great things.
But I recognize that their achievements are the achievements of human beings
and that as human beings they have failings and frailties that stand beside with their triumphs.
This does not cause me despair (although it sometimes hurts and creates dismay).
 
I admire the special ones and heroes among us in spite of and because they are human.
As am I.  Perhaps there is a hero in me.
Maybe I can be a hero for myself.
Maybe I can be a hero for somebody else.

Heroes are people and people are human, no more, no less.

(Note, I cannot put my hands on my Collected Poems of Langston Hughes.  When I do, I'd like to quote from his poem,
Crowns & Garlands, which came to mind when I started thinking about the topic of heroes.  It ends with this line, "Yeah, I like Ralph Bunche,* but I can't eat him for lunch.")

*Ralph Bunche won the Nobel Peace Price in 1950.  For additional information, go to:  http://www.ralphbunche.com/

ADDENDUM: A friend recently wrote a piece about Tiger Woods addressed to his fans that I highly recommend, Tiger Mauls Owner. 

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