: lower black pain.

this week my daughter rose from bedand put a colander on her headsince we don’t have a family rule“you can’t wear kitchen tools to school”she did so, proudly. Metal hat.(Stop her? Why would we do that?)

it’s a pretty even bet thatsome of this could be geneticher voice, walk and choice of clothesseem to cause intrigue with thosewho don’t believe that it’s all real –then WE show up, and seal the deal

she spent the day attending class:as her friends and teachers passedthey’d ask, of course, in low voiceof her non-traditional clothing choiceshe just smiled, most patientlytold them one and all “You’ll see.”

through jeers from jerks, thumbs up from buddiesEnglish, Science, Social Studiesshe walked the halls, head high with prideour giant strainer by her sideuntil the end of school arrivedand in Math class, they went outside

strange and sudden twilight skythis week’s eclipse was passing by

in the courtyard, while the massesall looked up with paper glassesshe held her “hat” out and founda crescent galaxy on the groundthe waning sun shone through her bowland every tiny little holebecame a cool projecting lens.

It really freaked out all her friendsand not-so-friends, and teachers too;weird science fact that no-one knew.it’s fair to say they were impressedas no one could have easily guessedthe function of her curious fashion“How did you know that would happen?”

“It’s one of my grandma’s tricks…we did it back when i was six!”

we recognize that confidenceand don’t demand that she “make sense”just hope to guide our clever spawnblinders off, but seat belt onthe one to always bell the cat

(Stop her? Why would we do that?)

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I began this experiment nearly two years ago, and as I explained in a reply to a recent comment, did not expect it to go on this long. Originally there were to be 12 columns, a number I enjoy for various reasons, but then this sort of became a habit, and I didn’t want to stop for any specific reason, so I kept going; setting new goals, none especially significant. I made it a year, which was fun, and now this is the 100th column, and I know exactly what I want to write about.

That being said; it isn’t very… monumental. I don’t know why, but I’m driven to tell the full story of the paper towel dispenser at work.

I work in a building built 130 years ago in New York City, that shows its age much in the way I do… it makes oddly unrecognizable sounds, and is always a little too hot or too cold. While it appears surprisingly solid, the building is somewhat immune to cosmetic enhancement, as full cleaning rigs have been scaling the sides for over a year and a half, yet all windows still provide a sepia soft focus view of the world outside.  In contrast to the constant change of Manhattan’s landscape, this building has defined its spot since 1894. Its spectacular view of the Brooklyn Bridge, only 10 years its senior, has been seen by nearly five generations of New Yorkers.

The bathrooms, though, are a bit bleak. This is not a complaint, nor a judgement: I was once lucky(?) enough to actually visit the bathroom at CBGB’s: plumbing’s Heart Of Darkness, the very last place one would want to be vulnerable enough to engage in any kind of bathroom engagement. In absolute contrast, the bathroom at work is kept incredibly clean (and is in no way dangerous), it even has a full length mirror, a slap of reality I don’t necessarily require twice a day, but appreciate, from time to time.

The bleakness is mostly in the lighting, florescent tubes of a hue that suggests a drug deal is about to go down in an action movie. The red-shift glow that has been engineered to soften modern versions of this affordable illumination has not yet been added to the bulbs in these fixtures, as evidenced when I look up while washing my hands to see an elderly ex-rodeo clown with deep circles beneath his eyes staring back at me. And then, of course, there is the full length mirror.

In the bathroom, the paper towel dispenser is to the right of the sink. To the left, two urinals, then a wall with a window leading to a 13 story lightwell - two stalls are on that wall. The paper towel dispenser is less than a foot away from the right wall holding the bathroom door (to the right of the door is the full length mirror).  Architecture-wise it’s a bit of a pickle, as the person washing their hands must always keep an ear out for someone rushing in too quickly and smashing them into the sink with the open door, but New York is a fast-moving and challenging place to live.

The paper towel dispenser was broken, after efficient service for almost a year to my knowledge without incident. Its design requires the pushing of a vertical angular lever on the front to produce the towels beneath it, a little wedge you have to press, which I noticed that most people accomplished with their right forearm as, of course, their hands were always wet when they needed a paper towel.

My rhythm is a bit more complicated, fueled entirely by my post-COVID Cirque du Soleil acrobatics regarding all situations where public objects must be touched. This is not merely reactionary, but carefully choreographed for each exact space.  When I first arrived at this job, I made the mistake of using my ring finger to touch the elevator buttons, then scratched my eye with the same finger because I instinctively avoided using my ever suspicious index finger. Rookie mistake.

In sharp contrast, my work bathroom exit routine is a polished modern dance.

I turn on the water (no qualms here, as anyone turning the water off has no doubt just washed their hands)

soap up my hands

glance in the mirror and remember better days

wait for my watch to tell me that I have not yet allowed myself a full (and overtly luxurious) twenty seconds of hand washing

turn off the water

press the gray lever two times with my right forearm

retrieve the brown paper towel underneath

dry my hands

use that same towel to open the door

use my right foot to hold the door open

transfer the paper towel to my left hand

toss the paper towel into the wastepaper basket beneath the paper towel dispenser

open the bathroom door with my right hand by pressing the middle of the outside of the door just enough to

walk out of the bathroom.

I’m crazy. That’s established. But this reparatory theatre performance is sometimes the height of my workday.  And to fully appreciate the experience, one must imagine the sound of the dispenser, a “SHUNK-CASHHONK”. It’s the same sound as the old postage stamp machines, where you put a few quarters in a metal slot and then pressed the metal blade in and pulled out a flat cardboard envelope of postage stamps. You don’t remember that? You’re young? Well, it’s still like that.

In short, the lever got stuck. The plastic wedge was depressed and wouldn’t pop back out. Attempts to manually pull the paper towels from the bottom of the unit were met with the row of sharp metal teeth meant to cut the towels.

Of course, everyone tried to hit it. After three days, I actually kicked it, just once, with the side of my shoe, to no effect. I then limped back to my desk, got my pocketknife from my bag and headed back to the bathroom.

On the top of the unit was a turn-ey latch thing with a slot in it. Using my “can opener” tool, I turned the thing until the unit popped open, then jiggled the wedge until it released, and examined the inner workings.

It was more sophisticated than I thought, with seven white plastic cogs and three metal springs stretching in different directions.  I tested it and, satisfied, replaced the covering, closed my pocketknife, and happily washed my hands.

It worked for two days, but by Friday was stuck again.

On Tuesday, it was replaced by a brand new one, of totally different design: black, sleek, no levers to touch - just a gentle tug of the paper and out it comes, pre-perforated. I do not necessarily miss the old one at all.

It was interesting, however, the amount of happiness that fixing it had given me. That I had made it work again.

It seemed that there was wisdom to be learned from this; that what I should have wanted was a new one, but it had never occurred to me as a possible option; that I had temporarily restored its function but had not actually repaired it; that whoever designed the thing with plastic gears knew it would eventually fail (and that “plastic gears” metaphor was perfect for so many situations requiring operational improvement).

The grizzled, leatherfaced rodeo clown in the mirror stared back at me, eyes filled with weary wisdom, shirt too hot, belt too tight, knuckles creaking as he rubbed his hands together.

I offered him a respectful half smile, then took a luxurious full twenty seconds to finish up washing my hands.

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I adore the periodic table. To me it’s a larder containing everything that makes up everything. I also feel that way about the dictionary, the full spectrum of light, the audible wavelength range of musical notes, and the giant menus at diners in the Northeast where you can get both waffles and lobster.

Einsteinium is the element you get when you combine 99 protons with 99 electrons, which is difficult to do because it requires a hydrogen bomb explosion, which we are absolutely blessed with a dearth of.

(I’m thinking about 99s because this is my 99th column, and yes of course I thought of the ”red balloons” song first, but I translated the lyrics and boy is that dark.  Yeeesh.  Trust me, we’re better off with the element angle.)

Discovered in 1952, Einsteinium is named after Albert Einstein, though key research on this element occurred in 2021 at the height of the COVID crisis; as the element is very radioactive and decays quickly there was no time to lose, and they only had 250 nanograms of the stuff.

(I’m not pretending to know what a nanogram is: the New York Times calculated it as less than 100 millionth of an ounce. I would drop it, definitely, or put it in the wrong pocket or sneeze or something. I am not a scientist, and even those who wish me well would not say I’m that brand of detail oriented.)

They were studying Einsteinium to discover a clinical or practical use, but it wasn’t easy: the weight of the element meant that the electrons traveled at speeds that reached “a sizable fraction of the speed of light” (a funny Einstein coincidence, if you’re into that sort of thing).

If you were to measure Einsteinium it would be 2.38 angstroms wide (an angstrom equals one hundred-millionth of a centimeter).  Apparently the scientists were super surprised because they had expected it to measure 2.43 angstroms. Can you imagine? It was 5 angstroms shorter. Wow.

Our own elemental tables, charting that we each find essential to who-we-are, grow as we live our lives. For instance, I never knew that the album “Surfer Rosa” by the Pixies was going to be so important to me when I was seven years old, but it’s now on the same list as soap bubbles and yo-yos, which I’d added back then.

Then there are the phrases I always say and clothes I like to wear which are a direct result of interactions and bonds with specific people; those are my elements too. It’s social chemistry; we all live at least part of our lives in volatile combination with others, reacting and even dissolving a bit here and there.

Nothing on my periodic identity table is as dangerously complex as Einsteinium (probably), but I’d like to think that I’m made of somewhat elegant juxtapositions of simple pleasures and hard lessons. The paper towel dispenser in the bathroom at work was broken for three days; the fourth day I fixed it with my pocketknife, which people seemed to be surprised that I just had in my bag all the time.

That’s the thing, in science and in life, what we’re made of may be impossible to see with the naked eye, but that doesn’t make it any less essential. Deep inside, everyone really does contain Walt Whitman’s “multitudes”. Thus we move ever forward through experience, quietly mocking those myopic enough to underestimate us.

In NYC right now there is an advertising campaign celebrating Women’s History Month; it is on every digital subway display in the stations and on the trains - a 15 second film illustrating female inventors.

“Women invented mint chocolate ice cream, the trash can lids that open with a foot lever, and the tiny plastic “table” thing that keeps the lid of a pizza box from touching the actual pizza.”

I think we’re supposed to say “wow”,  but that’s what one says when surprised, and I’m not surprised, exactly.

I don’t believe that’s the depth of information they were hoping to share. Two minutes of internet research revealed that they could have chosen the invention of windshield wipers, GPS, Kevlar, caller ID, Vitamin E, the life raft, chemotherapy, central heating, disposable diapers, the game “Monopoly”, computer programming, electron microscopy, the dishwasher, CRISPR gene editing, or the flat bottomed paper bag to display. Mint chocolate ice cream is delicious, but the bigger story is that a woman invented the ice cream maker.

Wow. Now there… that’s a little more appropriate. But still, it’s not surprising.

Not that the inventions listed on this advertisement weren’t cool, but I’ve been the recipient of a specific kind of “wow” that is usually placed after a short-sighted person learns a pretty pedestrian fact about me: where I work, or where I went to college, or how well I can speak the English language. It’s not a compliment, but it is an admission of surprise that my actual life has surpassed the size of the box this person has put me in due to their, y’know, short-sightedness.

To me, that ad says, “Look what women are capable of achieving!”, but if they’d listed pulsars, the fire escape, and carbon dioxide would that that be ok? Would anybody feel bad about that? I think we all know the answer to that question - YES : various dudes and broheims would burn their thumbs off looking up whether or not it was true in the spotty cell service between stations.

Today, when you face underestimation, remember that you are made of stars. You are whirling magnetism and walking electricity, elemental circumstance that can only happen one time, a singular time-space event, no matter how you felt this morning or looked like in the bathroom mirror today. You are a miracle, wearing shoes, combining what exists into what’s never been imagined, always capable of great things.

“Wow!”

Now that’s more like it.

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Yesterday my dentist and I ended up talking about Pokémon cards.

He had started playing the Pokémon card game in ninth grade, and collected quite a stash of them, which he was still very proud of, though a few years ago he had given the bulk of it to two of his nephews.  “I found out they traded them for some snacks at school.” he told me. His voice didn’t quaver, but it wasn’t steady. He changed the direction of the conversation.

“Did you ever collect them?”

“Just a few.” I replied (my mouth was still a bit sore) “I never played the game because I didn’t want to lose any of them. I passed them to my kid but she didn’t want to lose them either, so they’re still in the house.”

“Did you have any hologram cards?”

Now, I don’t know how much you know about Pokémon cards, but here he had upped the conversational ante.

“…just a couple.”

“I kept all my really important ones. Which do you have?”

Well. Now it was on. He had finished the procedure, so there wouldn’t be any physical challenge, all this was being said in the spirit of community fellowship, yet there was a warmth in the air that had not been there before…an imaginary breeze blew between us. (Was that a… tumbleweed off in the distance?)

“Well, I do have a blue eyed dragon one, not the really rare one or anything, but my favorite of all time is my Jigglypuff.”

“Oh. Very good.”

He stepped back. My pedestrian response meant that no blood would be shed here today; well, no more blood than I had already lost down the spit sink.

It is time for Spring Cleaning, and if you ever knew me, well, I’m even more like that now.  The sheer density of books alone is a challenge to the eye, but then when you push the books back you have SHELF SPACE in front of them, handy for useful items like mason jars filled with pencils. Also useful as a home for a super detailed action figure of Ben Grimm from the Fantastic Four.

I only have stuff displayed that makes me happy or I need. I’m a simple guy, I don’t need much, but apparently many things make me happy. A vintage radio, another radio that’s supposed to look like a vintage radio,  a LEGO version of AntMan’s van from Avenger’s Endgame, a working Polaroid camera (also vintage) and a Tardis (I think there’s one of those in every room now).

I have a personally autographed black and white headshot of Honor Blackman from the old tv show “The Avengers”, as well as one from Dee Wallace who played the mom in “E.T.” (she’s from Kansas City - I got that one when I was a kid). My favorite headshot of all time is from a woman I knew in high school, an awesome alternative artist kid who somehow got the chance to do a bit of local newspaper modeling for Macy’s. Hers is cheekily signed, “I hope you’re as famous as I’m going to be.” which, in fact, has come to pass.

I’ve won a couple of awards for things, and my wife said I should put them behind me on ZOOM business calls and job interviews because she thought they’d give a clearer message than the sewing machine and pictures of her playing roller derby. I said I’d try it, and swung my chair around placing them on a shelf behind me, nestled amongst the flotsam. The interviewer was indeed intrigued with the cornucopia of objects, asking enthusiastically about my microphone and guitar, but before they got to the awards noticed the (vintage) Ginger Spice doll and stopped small talking with me, and then shortly after stopped all sizes of talking.

Look, if you can’t take that, I probably shouldn’t be working for you. It’s not like I’m likely to bring it to work and put it on my desk, but I am gonna do that, definitely, so yeah. Things worked out.

The most prized objects I used to have were CDs. Albums were so large and heavy, and tapes were just weird, they never stacked well without the cases and always had that exposed part at the bottom that made me nervous. Now music is ethereal, and most often borrowed on some digital rental plan. I still purchase music I love, but there’s no physical place to put it, just hard drives.

Which is actually great: no CD cases where one of the little hinge ends cracks off and then can’t be repaired so you settle the front cover where it would go in a kind of act of faith but it never stays on and somehow scotch tape doesn’t help either.

And what I can do with music now… just call out a song and a genie plays it for me. Magical. I stood in the kitchen last night doing the dishes and sang a series of 80’s rock songs, those really dramatic ones where the guitars were like strings in an orchestra and the singer with huge well-conditioned hair was spotlit alone on a stage.  Most of those tunes were impossible to dance to at a prom or homecoming because they all had little “dream ballet” music breaks after the second chorus (see: “Come Sail Away” by Styx). For some reason there were a lot of songs about outlaws on the run, bandits who’d finally been captured, pining about their fate in perfect 4 part harmony.

I played about ten of those songs, using the new lyric function on my phone to sing along with an accuracy even liner notes couldn’t deliver. My family, in either solidarity or deeply embarrassed pity, stayed away from the kitchen until the last chuck-a-chung power chord died down, and it was dinnertime.

I did win the conversation with the dentist. I was telling him about my comic books, how I had collected them forever but then, in a classic American tale, went to college, and how my mother had found them when she moved that fall to a new house, and…

Here I paused. I’m not confrontational, by nature, but here was a man in a power position who had offered kind of challenge when I was unable to fully respond, suspended in a reclinable chair with a mouth filled with utensils. I stood up to my full height, which, y’know, didn’t really take long.

“…when I got back home at Thanksgiving, she had bagged and boarded all of them, even got long boxes.”

Let me explain: this is not how the story goes, typically.

Typically, a mom sees comic books as clutter, useless; but my mom had watched me read these for almost a decade, and heard something about how they could be valuable someday, so she went to the comic book store alone (I would have paid to see their faces) to get individual polystyrene bags and support cardboard inserts, then spent a day preserving them.

I am, by every account, very lucky; some of them are worth something now.

“But you can’t sell them.” my dentist said.

“I mean sure, I could...” I replied. His eyes were wide with wonder at my story. “Maybe if the new X-Men movies are really popular they’ll be valuable… get my daughter some money for college.”

Heh. Yeah.

I’d rather work nights than do that.

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By the time Winter gets here, the voting will be over.

You’ll have most of your holiday presents wrapped and the tree will definitely be up, if that’s a thing you do. You’ll be done with pumpkin spice and will have probably seen that Dune sequel since it came out for download in June. You’ll have bought warm new pajamas that aren’t fraying around the hem

and no matter what you were worried about or how many newscasters or late night comedians communicated general chaos

you’ll be sitting somewhere with not enough time to get everything done before everything is supposed to happen, worried about food and ribbons and scotch tape

rather than everything.

In a year projected to contain so much uncertainty, the fact of Winter being just around the (very large) corner is a comforting milestone. We know what to do in Winter, the rhythm is clearly defined: Spring and Summer aren’t nearly as grounded, and Fall is great but always feels a bit like the end of something.

Winter is where the year begins, where what happened melds with what’s going to happen, and what we did dovetails with what we’re planning. Winter shakes the proverbial Etch-A-Sketch™, providing a canvas for us to dream upon, all bundled in bed or snug in our pre-warmed car.

“Good riddance…” we mutter to shoveling, but then we remember how bad our allergies are, and how much we dislike the smell of air conditioning.

By Winter, you will have realized that instead of worrying this year you could have knit yourself a dynamic and luxurious scarf (and maybe a few extra)

or ordered the new coat you said you’d get last winter (and the winter before), back during the summer (when it was on sale) as it is always more threadbare than remembered when pulled from storage

but it is still warm,

which is good because they’re saying it might snow.

But those new electric Amazon trucks are super sturdy; and those last minute packages show up, and you relax in the knowledge that the doomsayers and nayscrollers were just winding us all up, inflating the cost of commercial space.

Not that it was easy: it has all a bit of a blur, but there you are. Warm drink in hand. Winter Solstice. Tiny lights and Mariah Carey, everywhere. Back to the time of year when everything reminds us what actually matters.

only two hundred and seventy six days away.

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“The end of winter” is not “Spring”.morning light still powder bluea chill at sunrise

leafless branches

lack of birdsong

bed so warmmost certainlythis iswhere we’re supposed to be

but alas alarm (three snoozes); winter wins(sigh)

comfort, loses

day beginsso very slow, push push and push and barely godrawing superhuman power to make coffee, take a showergo from here to here again

but that’s the point of when this isthe destination lies aheadall efforts leading back tobed so warm

until we hear the birdsand see the leaves againand allergies begin

in Springaround the cornerfifty feet aheadnext stopjust give us five more minutes

bed so warm

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I have always considered the “African” part of “African-American” a bit of a mystery. Some Americans grow up surrounded by the language and culture of the first part of their hyphenated nationality, be it Irish or Chinese or Russian, and have been told stories from their grandparents about a faraway place that one would have to cross a body of water to visit which the entire family sometimes refers to as “home”.

For my family, that place is Kansas. At some point before that, it was certainly Africa, but that’s a continent. “American” is also a continental term, not nearly as specific as Jamaican or Japanese. I’ve never actually heard anyone refer to themselves as a “European-American”; I suppose it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.

With no deep and meaningful family history linking me to an offshore Elsewhere, I always considered the United States home. I didn’t know the correct term for being a “States-er”, but I knew that if Texans were Texans and Californians were Californians and New Yorkers were New Yorkers, I was Kansan.  Kansas is the origin of my culture and traditions, comic books and “Cool-Whip” and KC barbecue and the pound cake recipe that goes back for generations… well, two generations, because my grandmother made it up. Then there’s the confusion brought by the immense amount of cultural appropriation we always practiced: wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day, spaghetti and taco nights, saying “gesundheit!” when anybody sneezed.

The word “American” instantly flashes a very clear picture to me; an open road, an old red pickup truck with the windows down drivin’ along in the summer heat with the radio playing a song. The song is indeed a country song. Half a century of Living Otherwise has not updated that image, yet as a younger man I very closely resembled that description: the truck was a little car, but it was red, but the rest was pretty much just exactly that, save that after the country song you’d hear Frank Zappa playing.

I had no African clothing; African food (as described through my research in the World Book Encyclopedia) was described as “goat and yams”, and my only hints at African language were the break chant in Lionel Ritchie’s “All Night Long” and maybe the sounds Michael Jackson made in-between lyrics. For most of my life I’ve felt like Black History Month was a makeup class for me, an exercise to correct my disconnect with a heritage I clearly reflected. But this week I realized something obvious, yet significant. 

I feel much, much better.

History is a bit of a game of TELEPHONE. Something happens, somebody sees it and tells somebody else. They might get a little of it wrong, but nobody knows because they weren’t there either.

My grandparents used to host the big family dinners, and there would be fancy china and too many glasses and candles and four desserts and pink champagne. I was always too young to drink it, but it seemed elegant and fancy and was the only alcohol my grandparents touched, just a handful of times each year.  We said grace when the food was ready, but once we had all dished our plates my grandfather would stand before the group assembled and give a topical toast. The adults would hold their champagne glasses high while the kids, like baby ducks, tried to follow along with their paper cups of soda pop. At the end of this speech my grandfather would always say, “Avo Swais!” and we all repeated it, and then clinked (or in our case tapped) our glasses together.

No one knew what that meant. My grandfather said he’d heard it at a very formal dinner party years ago and just thought it was cool.

Many years later I invited everyone from my work over to my little San Francisco apartment for an impromptu dinner party (we all took turns), and the Belgian fellow brought wine, and poured everyone a glass, and then pronounced loudly, “A vos santé!” which everyone echoed and it occurred to me that THIS is the phrase my grandfather heard, years ago, in an echoey ballroom somewhere while wearing a tux.

Rather than being embarrassed, he would have been incredibly proud of the fact that it came from France, where we’d all visited once.  How classy was that? To him, even if the words were wrong, it meant the same thing, and yes, now his version is our family toast of choice: it will move forward through time carrying its own significance and this very story.

It’s the stories that connect us, through time and space and circumstance. I always understood that any thread connecting me back to Africa would have to truly narrate my core identity, whatever that was. Let’s see, who could I pick out as the key formative icon of my lifetime, someone there from the very beginning, who I’ve always related to?

Quite honestly, it occurred to me in the middle of the night a few days ago. I got right out of bed to do research, and I found this quote:

Zomo The Trickster is a character out of Central and Eastern Africa who was smaller than his oppressors and turned the tables on them through cleverness, always in control of the situation, ready to put anything over on his bigger, usually dumber, antagonists. Africans, brought to America as slaves, carried these trickster tales with them - Zomo merged with Nanabozho of the Native Americans: these stories were collected and passed as the adventures of Br’er Rabbit, and later the animators at Warner Brothers Studios. Like jazz, Bugs Bunny is rooted in black culture.   

And that’s how Bugs Bunny, arguably my strongest identity influence, became my strongest tie to my own African American history. I’d been trying to read everything epic and serious, but I am neither of those things. I’d gone about this culture thing all wrong, with the 400 page books about oppression and injustice, which are my history, but not my origin.

I am from resilience and wit, kindness and cleverness, that is my tradition, and the people who wove the tales illustrating these are My People. As a child I recognized myself in this character who never seemed to have all that much, but in every situation seemed to have exactly what he needed, who could weave a solution out of thin air, and though afraid never held back from moving forward.  Sitting in front of that television every Saturday morning I was secretly being told tales from a thousand years ago, of “intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.”

And now I live in Brooklyn, so my accent finally makes sense.

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I have only one picture of my great grandmother. It is sepia toned, with blue dip pen notes on the back. She’s wearing old fashioned clothing. She is not smiling. It’s difficult to assume anything about her life except that she was staunch: her eyes look into the camera and beyond it with the power of one of Bruce Lee’s punches.

I have maybe 80 photographs of my grandparents, only on the one side of the family, since that’s the side I know. Five large albums with photos displaying the history of home photography, from black and white through Kodacolor. These images were captured on purpose, my grandparents pausing an event to commemorate it. A milestone at work (Grandpa with his judicial robes on behind the bench)A business trip (a Hawaiian luau) Relaxing (fishing on the pontoon boat)My grandparents appear diligent yet deceptively lighthearted for the times in which these photos were taken, but this is their story, passed on in shiny squares, and later rectangles.

I have two shoeboxes filled with shots of me and my mom, growing up. Most were taken with a 110 camera, this amazing cartridge film format popular when I was a kid, with cameras that looked like they were from Star Trek: you advanced the film with a slidey thing that your thumb pushed. There’s not many of us together, because there were only two of us, so somebody had to be taking the picture. Maybe 500 images in those boxes? There’s only so many because I bought a second hand SLR camera in high school and began taking random shots of everything, when I could afford the film.

Now, on a hard drive, our little family has (at last count) over 87,000 photos. Enough to print out as a flip book and experience the past in real time, which there’s no point in doing because there’s also gigabites of video, days and days of it.

History used to be eleven inches tall, three feet wide and weigh about seven pounds. Back then, Everything That Had Ever Happened could be found in a good set of encyclopedias.

I was not so dull a child as to believe that if I read every volume I would know all there was to know, but I did grow comfortable at how vast yet containable the near entirety of human learning was. I could clearly see Everything That Had Ever Happened from the left side of the living room couch, neatly arranged on one and three quarter bookshelves across the room.

Now, history has no shape, form, weight or substance. It is impossible to display, and we are allowed to only access tiny pieces, one at a time.

the length of a day on Mars the capital of Madagascar the inventor of soup in a can

Unburdened by space and context, history has dissolved, it is liquid, a solution of fact within information. Every search for knowledge now begins not at the beginning but from the very center of knowledge itself, the answer to every question a vast list that must be sifted through to find what we wish to learn.

…this mysterious fruit will lower your cholesterol (sift) …shocking celebrity gossip (sift) …look, there’s a sale at Penny’s (sift)

Aha. Here is how to reset the Apple TV remote.

When history was held in print there were cookbooks for recipes, journals for personal information, and newspapers as the home of daily events. Now technology is obscuring history within itself, like the Library of Alexandria after the siege…every page of everything ever written unbound and placed in an ever expanding pile.

And I’m not helping. Along with my tens of thousands of digital snaps are three hundred cassette tapes from my 4-track recorder days spanning over forty years…What nugget of musical theatre may lurk within the clackety depths of this pile of non-degradable plastics? Not to mention the notebooks, filled with what I will still defend as “ideas”…isolating those into their own box seemed to multiply them like rabbits.

In general, there seems to be a lot more history than there used to be. Not only because so many things have happened between Then and Now, but because so many new details are coming to light to fill out the shadows of Way Back When. There’s so much more past than there used to be.

So I’m a little behind on my historical research. For Black History Month, I had about seven books to read and four movies to watch. But then I accidentally discovered the music of William Grant Still, the first American composer to have their opera performed at the New York Opera House, and then Beyoncé dropped a country single, and now I’m overwhelmed.

I appreciate that history is supposed to chronicle what is significant, and that I have more power than ever before to discover and determine that for myself, but with Everything That Ever Happened still technically happening, it’s hard to know where to begin. And I believe that within the tens of thousands of selfies and digital flotsam I’ve amassed, there is probably one truly significant photo, one that my great grandchildren could see that would sum it all up, where they could look at my eyes and instantly know where they came from.

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I went to college in one of the poorest cities in the United States. I believe it was number seven at that time. The college itself was a Hogwarts style oasis, complete with gothic clock towers and leaded glass windows. To be honest, I felt more immediately at home in the city part, as it reminded me of home somewhat, and was the only place I could get my hair properly cut.

I only had to wander about three blocks off campus to find an actual barber shop, with actual men sitting around talking about fights on TV and neighborhood gossip, but no one knew about the place because it was off-campus – and we had been instructed with gusto to remain on campus. No one mentioned specifically why, so as poverty levels and societal disparity were never brought up, I think most students assumed that trolls lurked in the dark urban woods just beyond the gym.

I’d been told about the barber shop from the other black guy in my class, the one whose name everybody called me (and vice versa). I was a long way from home, trying not to make any stupid mistakes, so I used my neighborhood smarts and kept my eyes open along the way and everything was just fine.

At home my mother cut my hair, because barber shops were expensive enough to be considered unnecessary; my classic hairstyle growing up was even all over, with a sharp line around the back sometimes accomplished with the help of a Cool-Whip™ bowl. I’d wait patiently in the folding chairs opposite the barber chairs for someone to call me over, and got a fade with a #3 guard length on top, which for me was super fancy.

I went off campus a lot. There were real grocery stores, hardware stores, and places you could still get shoelaces for 49 cents. It was great having this secret resource for practical items. Eventually I moved off campus, and kind of commuted back to Hogwarts.

But one night I was walking home from a party of some kind, maybe 2 AM, and weirdly found myself alone on the streets. It was late fall, I had a coat and hat on, walking briskly, keeping my eyes open, when I saw a figure in the distance, coming toward me.  I minded my own business and kept walking, but the figure kind of loped forward, one hand inside their coat, leaning sideways. It took about a half a block to tell that the man was black, and by that time I had kind of adopted my own tough walk, less authentic from street culture and more reminiscent Martha Graham choreography - head tilted / shoulders forward / uneven steps. I kept wiping my nose for some reason.

Quite seriously, there were only two solutions to this scenario: I would meet his eyes and tip my head sharply up in the traditional greeting, or he would not return the greeting and there would be trouble.

I didn’t even have a spoon to fight with. I also didn’t have any money… I may have had a Walkman in my pocket, but it probably had a cassette of the Police in it. I wasn’t going to win a fight, so I had to win this walk, I had to convince him that it wasn’t worth it to even slow down, that we were on the same team, everything was cool. If he thought I was from the city, I’d be fine.

His hand moved further into his coat.

There was no point in trying to cross the street, there was no one over there either. I tried to look taller. I bobbed my head super slowly as if acknowledging the fact that I was a badass, but inside I knew I was 22 steps from being a victim if I was lucky, and a statistic if I wasn’t.

18 steps.

15.

9 . I remember inhaling and holding my breath. 

About five steps away, I recognized that it was the other black guy in my class.

“What are you doing??”

“What was I doing? You scared me half to death!”

“I scared YOU? Why were you walking like that?”

“Because YOU were walking like that!!”

Thus ended my last experiment in code-switching.

There’s not really enough of me to be more of me, so I’m just the one me I am, everywhere. Rather than change my tune, I just fiddle with my volume and tone knobs – adjust the brightness and contrast on the same show. Pretending to be more authentic results in a weirdly self reflexive form of cultural appropriation.

Which brings me to Sting. As a midwestern teen in the 1980’s, the music of The Police was my first introduction to reggae. Cringingly, I sang all the songs on their first three albums in Sting’s (singing) accent. Loudly. In my car. With the windows down. Only in college did I learn about Bob Marley, Steel Pulse, Eek-A-Mouse, and Black Uhuru, and the guy who introduced me to those bands was from Long Island, not The Islands.

It was through the lyrics of Sting that I was introduced to The TAMI Show, mentioned in the always relevantly titled song “When the World is Running Down, You Make The Best of What’s Still Around”. The TAMI Show was a film capturing a live concert in Santa Monica, California in 1964. The audience was a full auditorium of teenagers, and artists included Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, The Supremes, and The Rolling Stones. This was a fully integrated concert of both artists and audience, held three months after the signing of the Civil Rights Act; same stage, same show.

It was James Brown who delivered the standout performance, a 17 minute no-holds-barred incendiary blast that in many ways feels punk rock even though it was pure soul.

The Rolling Stones had to come on AFTER him.

They didn’t want to. Much of their music was inspired by the very music James Brown played. If you watch the film, they look deeply nervous; Mick Jagger’s trademark swagger is entirely muted by the immediate echo of a man who helped inspire it. But they played anyway. It takes about 13 full minutes for Mick to get his mojo fully back, and it is HIS mojo, you can see the influences but also the originality there.

Until YouTube, it was almost impossible to find a copy of this, and again, I owe my knowledge of it to Sting, cultural ambassador and yoga enthusiast. I don’t know if there’s a pure resource for history, like a cool mountain stream you can bottle it from directly. Even given his teaching experience, I wouldn’t pick Sting as a reliable Black historian…maybe an enthusiastic hobbyist.

The Police were “adapting original material”, but I didn’t stop listening to them because of that. Through their music I discovered their inspirations, including that concert, a rare piece of cultural history that still inspires me today.

To consider Black history only history with black faces offers a mere slice of how art and empathy work. For that reason, it’s important for me to be open to everything, not to distance myself from the world, pre-judge or categorize, because I really can’t see all that well from a distance.

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Yesterday at 5 PM, my daughter called me at work on FaceTime, which is how I could see how visibly upset she was.

“They murdered him!” she said.

“What are you watching?” I asked.

“I’m not watching anything! I’m doing my homework!”

“What homework? Who’s dead?”

“The little boy…” and here she paused.

My daughter is not studying to be a detective, nor a coroner; she’s a seventh grader, and last I knew she was studying diseases. Her school has education units where a single subject is the focus of all her classes. They were currently focused on diseases; as she learned about both the yellow and dengue fevers she discovered how they began (reading class), how quickly they spread (math class) and the methods used to eradicate them (science class). I don’t believe it includes art. I’m not sure how that would work out.

But it’s Black History Month.

“They murdered him because they were racists.”

I quickly opened my laptop and connected to my daughter’s online classwork. The reading assignment was the story of Emmet Till, spelled out in detail, with directions on how to compare and contrast and recognize cause and effect, and list of new vocabulary words including mutilated and relented.

We visited the African American History Museum this year, and I chose to not make her go through the lynching room yet because she was eleven and I like her. I do want her to be aware, and want her to be safe, but laying that much weight of the past on her present seemed like putting a tire swing on a sapling. I was saving that for 13.

“Why are you reading this?” I asked.

“It’s my reading assignment… I think it’s for Black History Month; there’s another article about Rosa Parks… that one is fine, but they didn’t even tell us the reading was going to be different and we hadn’t talked about this in any class and it was just there…”

To her credit, she had finished the work; answered all questions, including:

What do paragraphs 2-4 reveal about Black life in America in 1955?Which statement best describes Mamie Till-Mobley's reaction to her son's death?

“Good grief, Sweetheart. Um, we’ll talk about this more…I have about 10 minutes left here and I’ll be home. Why don’t you just watch something on TV until I get there.”

I didn’t realize how many “Talks™” I’d be having as a parent, from traffic safety to playing fair to the birds and bees and the big one about the realities and circumstances involved in being a black person.

My wife and I approached the birds and bees as a seminar course over several summer weeks - there were books and open discussions and tasteful classic film references.

I’d already had the being black talk, long ago, but specific details were summarized as “bad things happened”  because, again, youth / innocence / the preservation of a sense of hope in a dark universe, etc.

Being a parent includes dropping a really great deal of Bad News, but I believe is a core element of the job to provide context to the facts, allowing navigation.

I exited the subway, picked up a couple of ginger ales at the corner store and headed up to the apartment.

I’m not going to bore you with what I said. I talked about compassion, and that this incident emotionally bonded distant social classes of people, much like Jacob Riis’s photographs of the Lower East Side of New York City in the 1880’s. I did not show her the picture of Emmet Till, and told her not to look it up online for any reason; it was as bad as she could possibly imagine, and imagining was enough.

We drank some ginger ale. I may have had a shot of alcohol in mine.

Anyway, what I said was ok. I tried, but admitted that there was not good side to this story, even though it inspired people to support the Civil Rights Movement. But my daughter said something more interesting.

“Why is this black history? I don’t understand. Other history is about people going to the moon or inventing something or discovering something, but this is a story about a boy walking down a street, and a woman getting on a bus, just ordinary people living their lives until something bad happened to them.”

“I see what you mean.”

“Those black people were brave, but these stories are really the history of racists, those are the people doing something, murdering people and stuff. Where are the artists and scientists? Why can’t black history be about black people without white people even coming into it?”

My daughter said the same thing about girls in stories when she was five or six; then my wife introduced her to the Bechdel test where female characters must speak about something other than men.

This time we told her that she was right, that none of us, no matter what our age or background, should be defined solely by survival, and that, specifically for African Americans, even though we started from the bottom, now we’re here, and have created joy and beauty and science and laughter and innovation, both independent of any opposition and in spite of it.

And to prove that, I played her a video of Duke Ellington with his band performing “Take the A Train”; of particular significance because his star trombone player, Lawrence Brown, is her great-great uncle.

“This is jazz. We invented this. And see that guy in the band? There’s your joy. That is YOUR RELATIVE, making joy, in the middle of pretty bad times, but not because of them. That is black history.

In fact, that’s YOUR black history.”

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