Happy Belated Birthday, Dr. King

Today is a different day than yesterday. It is not angry or sarcastic, although those things are as much of who I am as anything else, even envy, joy, heartbreak, worry, and passion.

Today is overcast. It is a lazy day where whirl-a-gig gardens in the front yards of homes explode with color and renounce the cold, damp, gray. It is a day where I appreciate the cerulean blue of a "bowling ball" sculpture, that I notice the skinny letters that read "Mick's Plumbing" on the side of a box truck parked at the end of a cracked, blacktop driveway. Today, the hum of the dishwasher is efficient, so that I don't need to be.

Inside, it is bright. We are making a cake, a birthday cake for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Once it cools, Mac will use a cheap plastic ketchup bottle, the kind that you find at Summer barbecues or greasy diners, to carefully ice the initials, MLK, across the top. We are making cards, too, cards alive with detail--purple, brown, orange, and blue boys and girls holding stick fingered hands, with lopsided grins and bursts of jagged hair. In Mac's pictures, the children are always smiling, and they always have big ears.

This is a day of listening to my 4 year old tell me the story of people who aren't allowed to sit where they want to on a bus, of people who are put into jail for drinking from the wrong fountain. "You've got to use your mouth, Mom," he advises me, "Not your hands," and it only takes me a second to figure out what he's talking about.

I close my eyes and I think: Stay this way, Mac. Stay myopic and simple and hurtless. But that contradicts how I feel, too. Those aren't the right words. There is the smell of the cake, rising and growing in the oven, as I also think: see, reach, jump, listen, learn. Think. Act. Make a difference, Mac. Be a difference.

We will do the best we can. We will eat cake and examine cards and talk about people and their stories. We will talk about right and wrong, about rich and poor, about people who turn the other way, about people who are too eager to fight. We will talk about good reasons and wrong reasons and all of the ones in between. That, today, right now, will have to be good enough.

"We did not hesitate to call our movement an army. But it was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity, no uniform but its determination, no arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience." Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, Why We Can't Wait, 1963