this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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This week started off strong - forward motion with the seed library project, and I managed to get another person involved in the project. Our daughter had her four month appointment yesterday, and the doctor was thrilled with her progress and remarked at some of the developmental milestones she's hitting months ahead of schedule. Plus they gave us a super cute tote bag full of books - we've done a hundred or so of the "thousand books before kindergarten" challenge.
But last night I got a text from my best friend on this whole planet that his mother, someone I call mom as well, is in the ER. She's got pneumonia now, as though Parkinson's and touches of dementia weren't enough of a burden. Other tests are showing that her kidney function is falling.
Her first home was firebombed because she had the audacity to teach impoverished children of color how to read in Alabama at the beginning of desegregation. She kept doing it. After she moved north she started a program for children on the spectrum before it was as understood as it is today - my friend and I and countless other people wouldn't have been the same without her skills and understanding. She took me in when I was kicked out of my home, treated me like her own child, and taught me not just skills to manage my own challenges but how to do right in the face of what's wrong. I wish my daughter could meet her and know her, to have an understanding of what it means to be a true force of good in this world.
I've been thinking about this more and more over the past ten years. And I don't mean to diminish the importance this person had in your life and the life of others.
I believe most of us look up to people like her and Jimmy Carter for example. The mistake I believe most of us tend to make is we do not view ourselves as a positive force. To put it another way, we believe that we could never live up to all the good things these people have done. Basically, we beat ourselves up for not being like these people.
Generally speaking, we all can be a positive force in this world. It's just all the little things that we can do, in an entire lifetime, that adds up to a great deal of good. For example, when I'm out at the local grocery store I smile and say hello to random people. I engage in friendly conversation with the cashier. And then I say goodbye and have a great day.
I'm sure that we all can think of hundreds of other examples that seem small. However, when you do all of these little things over a period of many years it adds up to a lot of goodness and positivity.
<3 I have a hard time believing that a conversation between us would be intended as anything but constructive.
Despite being deep in the feels of the day, I agree with you; I try my best to be that force for good as well, and live up to being the person she and other people have believed me to be capable of. There are days it's difficult to see myself the way I view them, because of how well I can see my own faults and mistakes. That's not to say that they didn't have those same types of self perception, but those foibles seem larger when we're looking at ourselves, I think.
I have high hopes of being that kind of role model, dare I say, hero to our daughter. My wife surely feels the same drive in her own way. But there's something about having a grandmother figure who lived through desegregation and suffrage that seems, I dunno, grander (or at least more impactful) and it saddens me that she'll only know her through memories, rather than firsthand.