One-time, one-quarter-and-a-half-in-a-Thanksgiving-Day-game, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Clint Longley led the dreaded team to a victory against the Washington Redskins in ’74. He threw a game-winning 50-yard touchdown pass to Drew Pearson with 28 seconds left in the game in leading a comeback for the so-called America’s team. It was the only game Longley played in his all too short three-year NFL career. But the game he played was memorable, and not just for Cowboys and Redskins fans.

I’ve had numerous moments of brilliance in my adult life, sometimes surprising myself with how good I am at certain things. Graduate school was one period of my life where my academic abilities were both consistently on display and occasionally spiked beyond normal excellence. Today marks seventeen years exactly since I passed my master’s oral examination in the history department at the University of Pittsburgh, finishing in just under two semesters what should’ve taken me three to four. My committee had also recommended me into the PhD program. I was barely three months removed from getting my driver’s license, all of twenty-two, and finding myself in a doctoral program less than a year after finishing my bachelor’s.

That was April 14, ’92, but the story that made this triumph possible started a year earlier. I had gotten into New York University, University of Maryland and the University of Pittsburgh for graduate school. I had also applied to Berkeley and the University of Virginia — both rejected me — as well as Howard. They lost my grad school application. Meanwhile, NYU had accepted me, but I was required to commit myself to them before they would disclose their financial package for me. I didn’t want to move back to New York only to starve to death in my first semester of grad school.

The University of Maryland was worse. They didn’t lose my application like Howard did. They misplaced it. Long enough for the deadline for forwarding my application to difference on-campus fellowship program to have passed. They accepted me as a provisional student, not because of my grades, but because they didn’t have any teaching assistant or fellowship slots to hand out by the time they found my application. Provisional wasn’t so bad, although I’d have to maintain a B+ average my first year to be eligible to get a fellowship or teaching assistant position during my second year. What was I supposed to do? Live off of student loans for a whole year? I still don’t understand how I got the short end of the stick for something a grad assistant or professor screwed up.

With the history department at Pitt, the main issue was that professors like Reid Andrews and William Chase didn’t think that I was grad school material. This despite my 3.82 GPA as a history major, my 3.4 GPA overall, my GRE scores, and my having taken a history grad course my junior year, earning an A in the process. I was accepted, put on a waiting list for funding, where I’d linger at the sixth spot for over a month while folks leapfrogged me on the list. This list was allegedly based on the relative qualifications of those who were accepted into the program, in that the closer a student was to No. 1, the more qualified they were for one of the department’s teaching assistantship stipends.

I knew that my having majored in history at Pitt was a factor, because the history department wanted the best possible candidates across the country and from other parts of the world. That I wasn’t a neo-Marxist only interested in working-class history might’ve hurt me also. Intuitively, I knew that race was also involved. No so much that the professors in the department didn’t want Blacks in the program, or representatives from any other group of color for that matter. More so this unspoken notion that someone Black couldn’t handle the rigors of a graduate program as intense as the one at Pitt, which occasionally came out in my conversations with veteran graduate students and with younger professors in the department during my two years there.

I had a decision to make. Did I want to stay in Pittsburgh, at Pitt, and earn a master’s degree? What would I do then? Teach as a social studies teacher in high school? Go get my doctorate? Go back to New York and get a job with a degree that isn’t of much use outside of the education field? I turned to my mother, who told me that I should come back to New York, to help her with my younger siblings. I had made that promise to her, back when I was seventeen, had no life outside of 616 and Mount Vernon High School, and expected to major in computer science. Now she expected me to live up to my promise like it was some kind of contract. So I decided to stick it out in Pittsburgh through the end of May before possibly packing up and moving back to the New York area.

For nearly two weeks in May, I heard a voice in the back of my head that said I should go and meet with Jack Daniel (I know, and I’m sure he’s known for years), the Associate Provost at Pitt and the administrator over my Challenge Scholarship for undergrad. I’d only met him once, in the middle of my freshman year. I didn’t exactly know why I needed to meet with him. I just felt that if I did, I might be able to get money for books for the fall or sometime.

After a couple of weeks, I finally went up to the eighteenth or twenty-first floor of the Cathedral of Learning and scheduled a brief appointment with one of the highest ranking Black administrators at Pitt. A few days later, I used my lunch break from my Western Psychiatric gopher job to meet with Dr. Daniel. I told him my story about Pitt and the waiting list and so on. He got this really pissed look on his face, then he picked up the phone, called up the history department chair, and proceeded to chew him out for about five minutes.

It turned out that the Provost’s Office had created a graduate fellowship in the arts and sciences to attract more female students and students of color to Pitt. It was a one-year fellowship, one that required departments in the arts and sciences to commit additional years of funding to these students once their one-year fellowship ended. Apparently the history department chair knew about this fellowship, but never disclosed the details to me or any of the other qualified students who looked like me. After he got off the phone, Dr. Daniel looked at me and said, “It’s all taken care of. You should have your fellowship packet in a few days.” By the second half of May ’91, I had a one-year grad student assistantship with a $7,000 stipend, health insurance and full-tuition coverage. This one I chalk up to Dr. Daniel and to the grace of God.

If the powers that were in the history department were ready to ensure my failure as a grad student, they didn’t show that side to me immediately. It wasn’t until a week before the start of the fall semester that I heard from my advisor Larry Glasco, the only African American professor in the department, who, by the way, didn’t look particularly Black. He told me in so many words that this program would challenge me intellectually in ways that he wasn’t sure I was prepared for. Glasco also expected me to fulfill my language proficiency requirement in Spanish, a language he had picked up in order to do comparative research between race relations in Cuba and those in the US. I told him, “Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll do my proficiency exam in Swahili instead.” He laughed for a good twenty seconds after I said that.

You see, I had a plan, one that I’d been working on since the beginning of my junior year at Pitt. Although I didn’t know all that I was doing at the time, I did know that the College of Arts and Sciences and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (the grad school version of CAS) had obscure provisions that allowed an undergraduate student the opportunity to take grad course that could then be applied as credits in a grad program. That was part of the reason I took Sy Drescher’s Comparative Slavery course in the spring ’90 semester. I knew about the language proficiency requirement long before my conversation with Glasco, which was part of the reason why I had taken both Spanish and Swahili my senior year. I also knew that I would need a research topic that would help guide my master’s work, which was part of the reason why I took up E’s offer (see my post “The Power of Another E”) to work on an article comparing multicultural education with Afrocentric education.

I still didn’t know all that I was doing, though, so I spent the first few weeks of grad school feeling out my classes, going out to parties, reading 500 and 600-page scholarly snorefests cover-to-cover and word-for-word. Sometime around the middle of September, between seeing my Swahili professor at the hole-in-a-wall bar Constantine’s with a woman under each arm and reading my third boring book in a week, I became a monk outside of Pitt’s campus. I realized that my grad student assistantship — which was advising history majors and assisting the departmental advisors with that task — would only take up about twenty hours a semester. Other than the occasional weekend get-together with folks like Marc and Michele (or Marc or Michele or Regis or a couple others), I went after my studies in a way that made what I did my last semesters of undergrad look like I hadn’t been trying at all.

I was taking an American history (to 1865) readings seminar, History of Black Pittsburgh, an independent study with my advisor to write my research paper on the intercultural education movement and comparing it to multicultural education, and my third semester of Swahili. Plus, I had turned my summer research project into an article for publication, used it to get a spot for a conference presentation in ’92 at Lincoln University, started working on my first book review for an obscure journal, and gotten the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to apply my grad course from my junior year to my master’s work. I was busy from one day to the next, as I learned how to skim 1,500 pages of readings per week, learned the nuances of present perfect in Swahili, and did oral interviews for my paper on the Civil Rights Movement in Pittsburgh. But by the end of that first semester, not only did I have straight A’s (not a terribly difficult feat — it’s grad school, after all). I fulfilled my language requirement, was only a semester away from graduating, and had proven, at least to myself, that I belonged on this academic stage.

I’d also run myself into the ground with exhaustion, which showed a bit my second semester, as I limped toward my master’s with an A, two A-‘s and a B+ in my four courses. I had failed in pacing myself, but I had gotten so far out in front through most of that year that my second semester exhaustion was of little consequence.

The larger issue for me was the politics around finishing a degree adorned with so many requirements so quickly and with such relative ease. I knew I was working harder than I had before. To my classmates and professors, though, it looked like I was hardly working at all. In the political world of academia, there are few things that are worse than being perceived as lazy or as someone resting on their laurels. That, and my obvious preference for race issues over class and neo-Marxist ones made me a gifted grad student without a strong political ally. Glasco was hardly it. After passing my master’s orals and giving me the news that I would be a doctoral student next semester, Glasco said, “we’re going to have to slow you down next year.”

I probably was moving too fast. There weren’t exactly tons of twenty-two-year-olds walking around with master’s degrees or beginning doctoral work. Certainly no one from my life and background was doing what I was doing, and at the pace I was going too. I just wanted to get my life going, to move as far away from the Donald I’d been prior to the fall of ’88. I was both old and young, thinking that life was too short to take a stroll and study the swirling academic forces around me. I’d come to understand this all too well by the time Joe Trotter became my advisor at Carnegie Mellon.

Former Cowboys offensive tackle Blaine Nye described Longley’s twenty-one minute performance that Thanksgiving Day in ’74 as the “triumph of an uncluttered mind.” For a few months in ’91 and ’92, my mind was uncluttered, and it needed to be, as it made the road to my academic future that much easier to travel, at least for a while.

This week starting Passover Wednesday evening and going through Easter Sunday marks twenty-five years of my becoming a nondenominational Christian. As I said in my posting last December, the spiritual travels in which I’ve embarked since April ’84 have taken me many places. My relationship with The One is more complicated yet as simple as it was the day I gave up being a Hebrew-Israelite.

To think that it was only three and a half months before my conversion that I had stood on a bridge overlooking the Hutchinson River Parkway and connecting Mount Vernon to Pelham contemplating suicide. I didn’t do the deed, possibly because I heard God speaking to me, just as likely because I was still too full of myself to let my stepfather, my in-school tormentors and life push me over the edge. But I wasn’t happy, knowing in large terms what needed to happen for me to get out of 616 and Mount Vernon and to move on with my life to college and beyond.

It was this period twenty-five years ago that led me to Christianity. I’ve gone into the details of using my ninth grade classes as a entry point into other religions in the first months of ’84 in a previous posting, and covered how I eventually concluded that Christianity and Jesus was the way for me to go. The beginning of that final decision was on Passover evening ’84. It was a rather unremarkable evening of candles and raw horseradish, kosher leg of lamb and parsley, matzos and badly-spoken Hebrew about “the Lord our God the Lord is one,” or something like that. It wasn’t that the evening of sweet Manischewitz mixed with my tongue on fire again was particularly vexing or brutal. It was that I simply no longer cared one way or the other about Yahweh or Pesach or about the existence or lack thereof of the Lost Tribes. I wanted out, and more importantly, I wanted God in.

Once I made my decision, I went through a period of covert Christianity. For five months I was the only person who knew that I had done the prayerful deed. I bought my own first Bible, had started to not wear my kufi in public, and no longer considered the sabbath day from Friday evening to Saturday evening. It was only after my first day of tenth grade, when I went to school minus the kufi, that my story was out. It was only then I felt like I could say that I was a Christian and defend it with all that I believed in.

Then I went through what some folks call a baby Christian stage. I dedicated myself to being as devout as I could for about seven months. I took my Bible wherever I went. To school, on the Subway, to whatever watering hole I found my father Jimme drinking at. I proselytized at times, reinforcing my standing with a few former high school classmates in the process. But most of all, I held out in hope and prayer that God would somehow hit me and my life with a bolt of divine wisdom and intervention, transforming me into the strong person I hoped I could become and giving my life meaning beyond measure. It took the end of tenth grade and my rollercoaster Regents exams week to snap me out of that notion.

For about four and a half years after June ’85, I went through a period when I prayed, but only when I had to, and read, but more out of monotony that for understanding or peace or praise. There were too many conflicting ideas and images, too much to sort out or catch up on, for me to approach God and Christianity in a child-like manner. I only talked to God about the big questions or when I was in crisis, like during my homelessness ordeal in ’88. Otherwise, I took on what I faced in life pretty much the same way I had when I was a Hebrew-Israelite, as if it was me, and only me, against the world.

With my mother’s divorce of my stepfather final in September ’89 and my academic struggles the first half of my junior year (I barely pulled out a B average that fall, so don’t feel sorry for me), I decided to get more serious about being a Christian. I started praying more, reading more, and writing on my own. But not just about God or Jesus. I started asking God for wisdom about what to do with my so-called gifts. Despite a couple of my former classmates’ witticisms, I knew that I wasn’t put here just to play Jeopardy and win the Tournament of Champions. I realized, no, I more fully understood that it was as much up to me to seek wisdom and to put myself in position for opportunities, for God’s wisdom to touch me or intervention to make a difference. Seeing myself as more than just an emotional eunuch with a big brain allowed me to both walk with God and actually enjoy life for the first time.

That didn’t mean that I didn’t see the contradictions that were in my life. It would sometimes shock me how imperfect I was, my life was, even with my walk with God. Despite my academic success, the climbing of a steep learning curve that took me from an emotional twelve-year-old to twenty-one in less than a year and a half, I still didn’t feel comfortable as a Christian. Not fully. Not with my mother, now herself a Christian, constantly reminding me of the sinfulness that was a secular higher education, about the wrongheadedness of abortion, gay and lesbian rights, evolution, interracial marriage, and so many other pitfalls that I now must avoid. I did practice avoidance, partly through my first couple of years of grad school, where debating about the social construction of race was far easier than looking at the social construction of late-twentieth century Christianity.

It dawned on me that in my first seven years as a Christian that I’d only been to church twice. It wasn’t until August ’91 that I joined my friend Marc at his church in Wilkinsburg (just outside Pittsburgh). This place would become my church home for the next seven years. At first, I only attended about once every three or four months, during the holidays or in between semesters. Then, after another financial crisis and crisis of confidence in the summer of ’93, I decided to dedicate a significant portion of my social life to spiritual affairs, to learning how to be in God and in academia at the same time. It was a period of change, as I had transferred to Carnegie Mellon, no longer was racing back to New York and Mount Vernon for summer work, and was otherwise a full-fledged adult in every conceivable way. Yet just like Bono sang — or at least as I’m paraphrasing it — I still hadn’t found what I was looking for, as Christian as I was.

The church that I attended did provide a lot of what I was looking for. Emotional release from being in a stressful environment like lily-White Carnegie Mellon. Fellowship with mostly like-minded Christians. A pastor who didn’t just scream and holler and blather about speaking in tongues every other minute, but actually explained scripture like a good theologian. It was far better than much of what I’d cobbled together from my own studies and from the TV evangelists that were on every Sunday morning. I really got into this church. I became part of the men’s choir, tutored high school students there for a year and a half, went to Wednesday Bible study, tithed in a literal sense, and got to know about a hundred members on a first-name basis.

It was my last two years in grad school that made me realize why I was attracted to Christianity in the first place. Jesus’ willingness to forgive when most others couldn’t, and his corresponding capacity for compassion and love. Jesus’ socialistic, anti-oppression and poverty message. His standing in the breach for the downtrodden and otherwise untouchables in his life, in his world. It was in ’95 that I finally prayed and formally forgave my ex-stepfather for his abuse, not to mention my mother, my father, my former classmates, myself, for sins committed or omitted. That particular prayer gave me the release I needed to see myself as spiritually worthy, not because of anything I’ve done, but because I believe that God sees each of us that way.

It was understanding the two basic principles of Christianity — having no other gods other than God, and to love others as you love yourself — that led me to eventually leave my church home even before we moved from Pittsburgh in ’99. If there are any words in the Bible to be taken literally, the ones I just paraphrased would be the ones. Yet I saw Christians who were far more religious about their Christianity than I who’d violate these principles at every turn. I saw how the gospel of prosperity was the only sermon we’d get every Sunday. Or how gays and lesbians were to blame for Pittsburgh’s long-term decline as America’s ex-steel city (they never explained why New York, Washington, DC and San Francisco were doing so much better even though these were alleged gay meccas). Or how our lives were in disarray because we didn’t know how to live in “perfect” faith. It made me realize that the brand of Christianity practiced at my church was different enough from how I practiced it in my own life that I needed to move on.

So I did. By ’98, I was without a church home. I went to my wife’s church in Pittsburgh until we moved to DC. For the past decade, I’ve been to many a church, not finding exactly what I’d like to see there.

I’ve realized that my spiritual self is more than just this innocent, wanting-myself-and-the-world-to-be-better-than-it-is core. That even my spiritual self is far from perfect. That while there is such a thing as perfect faith, that it’s like nuclear fusion, in that we can only achieve it in a moment. That most faith, supernatural or not, is our ability to overcome the fears that exist in all of us. That spiritual, unconditional love is a choice, and that forgiveness is a choice that we need to make regularly if it’s to mean anything. Most of all, I realize that all of the perfection, balance and wisdom that is in this world but not of it isn’t the monopoly of Christians or even folks who seek spiritual guidance from a higher power. That I as a Christian have to be open to other possibilities if my choice of Christianity is to mean anything at all. That’s a lot to learn in twenty-five years.

Speaking of which, the last Seder I attended wasn’t in ’84, it was in ’95. I was invited to one by a group of first-year history grad students at Carnegie Mellon, who were amazed at how much I knew about Passover. If they only knew… Still, it was nice to go and to realize how much more orthodox Hebrew-Israelite practices were compared to this Passover commemoration. I wonder what I’ll learn in the next twenty-five years, or at least, the next twenty-five months.

Water. Earth. Fire. Air. Race. A few days ago, I decided to check on the progress of the ’10 movie The Last Airbender, the live-action version of my all-time favorite animated series, Avatar: The Last Airbender. As many other fans had already known or discovered, M. Night Shyamalan and Paramount had been putting together a cast that flew in the face of what helped make the animated series so popular in the first place. That there were White faces in the cast for The Last Airbender isn’t so surprising. That there were mostly White faces in a pan-Asian/indigenous people conception, at least until recently, was surprising.

Maybe I’m overreacting again. Maybe it wasn’t possible over the past two years to find Biracial, Asian or Native American actors to fill some of the more distinctive roles. I mean, with Russell Means, Jet Li and Kal Penn too old or unavailable, the director and producers for the film would have to find unproven or unknown actors to fill the roles of Aang, Sokka, Katara, Zuko and the other characters from the original show. Despite having about two years to do research and planning for The Last Airbender, Shyamalan and company came up with a mostly White cast by the end of ’08. There were a bunch of protests over the initial casting of Jesse McCartney as Zuko, who was replaced with Dev Patel only a few weeks ago. Because I have a kid and do watch movies made in this decade, I actually know who these actors are. None of them are Zuko, at least in look or face. Apparently no one Japanese was available to play that part.

It’s not that I would expect any studio or director to be able to go out and find Biracial folks who are Indian and German, Native American and Irish, Japanese and French, Chinese and Black, and just so happen to be good actors for this film. But I would expect them to at least try. Even in my small world of teaching, writing and nonprofit work, I’ve had students in the past years who look the role and are young enough to play these characters, assuming their acting chops are more than sufficient. So what gives?

What gives is the same old model of open, blind casting that Hollywood uses to find the best actors for a particular project. Except that open or blind casting really isn’t open or blind. It’s a way of allowing relatively unknown actors to get a role normally reserved for the more successful or famous ones. But it hardly guarantees that actors of color get a role that they would otherwise fit. Black actors have been aware of this for years. So have Asian and Native American actors going back to the days of the Western shoot ’em ups and Hollywood’s first forays into “Asian” films in the ’50s. To think that after the groundbreaking success of Avatar — not to mention films such as Slumdog Millionaire, The Last Samurai, Memoirs of a Geisha and Apocalypto — you would think that the folks involved in The Last Airbender project would use a different formula. But of course not. It took pressure from fans and critics for the Shyamalan and the cast directors to find folks like Cliff Curtis, Jessica Andres, and Aasif Mandvi.

Some bloggers and critics have said that with the casting of Dev Patel as Zuko, that the film decidedly has White actors playing the “good guys” and the darker cast members playing the “bad guys.” If the movie goes the way the casting process has gone, they may well be correct. I have a bit more faith in this end of the process than in the casting end. With the creators of the animated series (DiMartino and Konietzko) involved in the writing process for the film, they may be able to break out of the Hollywood archetype mold and build in complexity with these characters. We all know that Zuko and Iroh were complicated characters, not purely good or evil. Aang himself was both wise and naive and made lots of mistakes as Avatar. If that somehow stays in a script that these actors can somehow follow, I don’t think it would come off as White good guys versus multicultural bad guys.

Some bloggers and critics have said that the casting shouldn’t matter, since almost all of the voices for the animated series were White. Not quite true. Yes, most of the main characters’ voices were White. But Zuko’s wasn’t — Dante Basco’s Filipino American — and neither was Iroh’s, at least for two of the three seasons. So many of the other voices crossed ethnic and racial boundaries that to argue that the voices were distinctly White is a moot point. The voices matched the characters, who weren’t drawn as Whites. And to assume that a voice that isn’t White would sound “Asian” in some obvious way is about as ridiculous as blind casting for a multicultural film project like The Last Airbender.

What does all of this mean? Nothing, really, since the majority of folks who’ll turn out to see the movie will be concerned about three things: special effects — including martial arts moves — how closely the story lines follow the ones in the animated series, and whether Katara and Aang in the film live up to the animated series. For all we know, none of this will matter at all, and The Last Airbender will boom or bust Independence Day weekend ’10 because the fans will come out in droves or drips to support the franchise. As for me, I’ll wait for my trusted critics to give me a glimpse of what to expect before I spend a dime to go see it with my son. If any of the issues that have cropped up in casting or in the struggle over themes and archetypes seem to have had an effect on the film, we’re not going. This despite having become a fan because of my son. I’ll wait for DiMartino and Konietzko to create another series first. And if the worse case scenario occurs, Shyamalan will lose another fan.

I wrote last summer about a young woman named “E,” one who helped me make it through my heartbreak and obsession with crush #2 as I transitioned from high school to college between the summer of ’87 and the spring of ’88. She was someone I could’ve — and probably should’ve — dated, at least during my freshman year at Pitt. It would’ve been a long-distance relationship, though, and given her own issues with her former boyfriend, not to mention it being her senior year at Mount Vernon High School and that her parents were in the midst of a nasty divorce, our friendship was what it was. It couldn’t have been anything more.

Now I write about another woman named E, one who eventually became my third major crush in the ’82-’92 period. Unlike the other two, she knew — in real time and from my own lips — how I felt about her at one point in our deepening friendship. It didn’t work out, for a whole host of reasons, but that didn’t mean that my friendship and what I called our “oscillating relationship” didn’t have an impact on how I saw myself and the women who were and would be in my life in the future. Without a doubt, E was the most important woman in my life between November ’88 and August ’91. In that time, I made the transition from asexual emotionless Donald to heterosexually active and more open Donald, as well as from undergrad to grad school at Pitt.

It all started around the Thanksgiving holiday in November ’88. It was the day after Thanksgiving, as a matter of fact. I’d seen E on campus or bumped into her at Hillman Library any number of times that fall. I usually gave a weak “Hi” or just walked by with head-bobbing acknowledgment for most of the semester. I was too busy trying to make it through my semester of homelessness and near starvation to have much of a social life. So it wasn’t until my financial situation at Pitt was fully straightened out that I began to feel comfortable enough to meet more folks on campus beyond the circle I already had.

It all started with E. I was spending the day after Thanksgiving studying at Hillman Library, working on a paper for my art history class. Otherwise, I spent time daydreaming, contemplating about how I had made it through the past seven months at 616 and on campus with hardly enough money to pay rent or feed someone who was permanently homeless. I often got up from wherever I sat at Hillman to walk around, stare at interesting books in the stacks, or look outside, since I couldn’t sit still for more than an hour at a time without become restless.

It was on one of those ten-minute walks of contemplation on the first floor of Hillman in the African American stacks that I saw E sitting at a two-person table by the windows facing Forbes Quad (now Posvar Hall). Normally in my Boy At The Window years, I would’ve just kept going or talked myself out of saying anything of real substance to E. But after months of financial struggles, which followed a year of getting over crush #2, I had already decided to turn the page. I walked up, introduced myself, said something about seeing her all the time on campus and used the day after Thanksgiving as an excuse for getting to know her. That introduction turned into a two-hour conversation. About ourselves, our majors, Pitt, her family, a bit about my family. I didn’t realize it then, but E’s obvious quirkiness and sense of humor had attracted me to her before she had ever said a word.

She wasn’t as sarcastic as anyone I knew from the New York area, and certainly not as sarcastic as I could be, but we shared a sarcastic and ironic way of looking at life and people in our lives. I’d learn that she was a huge “Stiller” fan, loved basketball, and had an eclectic music library, though not as eclectic as my own — she liked The Beatles, for goodness sakes! That one long conversation did lead to a friendship, one that became closer with each passing semester.

By April ’89, this time twenty years ago, I’d gotten to know E well enough to also know a bit about her family. She had five siblings, just like me, except that her mother and father were still together. Her parents had named their kids in alphabetical order, making E the fifth of six children. Her immediately older sister had helped her get a job at Hillman Library, which was one of the reasons why I bumped into her all of the time. As a result, I also bumped into this older sister and one of her cousins within a few months of meeting E. Before the semester was out, we exchanged phone numbers and mailing addresses to keep in touch that summer while I was in New York.

Other than the occasional letter or phone call that summer and into that fall when I returned to Pitt for my junior year, not much new had happened with us. I spent the first half of that semester dating someone I couldn’t handle, while E dated some guy that would graduate that December and move back to New England. It was at the end of that semester, during a major snowstorm, that I started hanging out with E regularly. Out of all of the women I’ve ever been friends with or dated, E was easily the funniest one. She laughed and made me laugh so easily. At her, at myself, her at herself, and her at me. It wasn’t that everything was a joke. It was that we knew not to take ourselves so seriously.

The following year led to me having ideas beyond friendship with E. We hung out so much and did so many things together. We went to a PE concert together, Pitt basketball games, a Pittsburgh Pirates game, a bunch of movies, a bunch of lunches and dinners. She helped teach me how to drive, in a broken down blue ’78 Chevy Nova no less. I got to meet her mother and father and other siblings at her parents’ home in Steel Valley country, on several occasions. It was the first time I noticed how light E was, as her mother and father were light and dark-skinned respectively. I think that she was the only woman who ever visited me when I lived in my beat-up room in South Oakland. There were moments there where I thought one or both of us could’ve but didn’t cross the line into deliberate physical contact all during ’90. That made it all the more confusing, probably for her, definitely for me.

It wasn’t that I didn’t notice the other women on campus besides E. There were more attractive women, and some did express interest, especially since it appeared to them that I was dating E. But E had something about her that touched my mind, and since I spent so much time with my head in the clouds as I pulled myself back together in those years, it was easy to see her as the person I wanted to spend all of my free time with.

It all started getting weird toward the end of ’90. I made my move at the end of October, asked her about moving beyond friendship to really dating. I told her that I knew that she was attracted to me, which she didn’t try to deny. She told me that she was still “hung up” on the New England guy that she hadn’t seen since the previous December. It was her only excuse, a lousy excuse as far as I was concerned. We didn’t talk for a few weeks after that — surprise, right?

Then she called me at the end of the semester for help, as she felt that she was in trouble in her ethnolinguistics class. E had switched majors again, and being someone who had trouble making up her mind, was in over her head. I had just finished my last final for the semester, and was looking forward to a week or ten days of rest before going back to Mount Vernon and 616 for the holidays. At first, I wanted to say, “Why don’t you ask your ex to help you?,” or “What do you need my help for, since we haven’t talked in six weeks?” But I didn’t want E to end up with an F in her new major. So I went over to Hillman Library that evening to help her with her research paper. I had no idea that I would be there and at David Lawrence Hall for the next twenty-four hours, editing and re-editing various drafts of a paper that I would’ve graded a D long before I started teaching a college course.

To use E’s language, I thought that this whole episode was an example of her “triflin’ ass” ways. Even though I don’t think that she meant to, I felt that E had used me, my sheer analytical, writing and editing powers, to get out of a major jam. She ended up with an A- on a paper that looked at the use of language in rap/hip-hop and the various themes that could be communicated through the nuanced use of language in the genre.

E did say that she’d make it up to me, and she did. We were back at our old ways in the first months of ’91, hanging out and going out as if we were dating but not. I tried to make a point of drawing some lines, like no holding hands, no back rubs, no hugs, but that only went but so far. By the end of the spring semester and undergrad — E was still a year away from graduating, even though she had piled up nearly 200 credits — I was caught up in the rapture of infatuation, again. She picked up on it, and deliberately or not, tried to take advantage.

E wanted to work on a joint piece for publication that looked at the issue of multicultural education and Afrocentric education that summer. It had gotten her attention because of the New York State report on multicultural education that had come out in May ’91. It was controversial, causing educators to choose sides between a more Eurocentric and a more Afrocentric educational paradigm. No need to go into more detail that than for those not interested in the so-called Cultural Wars of the ’90s. Despite my qualms about E and her reliability, I decided to go ahead with the work — it gave me something to focus on besides my mind-numbing work as a gopher at the Western Psychiatric Institute & Clinic that summer.

Wouldn’t you know it, two weeks later E stood me up for a date? It was the third time that month that “something had come up,” either with family or a friend, preventing her from meeting me. We were to see Godfather III and then go out to eat. I was as pissed as I’d been since my second semester at Pitt, when I was pissed with myself and with crush #2. I made myself see the movie anyway, and then went home without eating.

As I struggled with what to do next, I talked about this weird situation with one of my married Western Psych colleagues. He laughed and told me to move on, that I should ignore her and her calls for help or a dinner date for a while. And that’s what I did. At first, it was torture. E was still about the only person I could talk to about almost anything — except my Humanities years, abuse and welfare poverty, of course. But I realized that our friendship had become dysfunctional, that if we weren’t going to date as a couple, and because I still wanted that, then the friendship wouldn’t work either. For the next seven weeks, I ignored her phone calls, didn’t attempt to see her on campus, and started doing my own thing, which included a series of one-night stands. By the time I started hanging out with E again, at the end of July ’91, I no longer wanted to date her. I no longer saw her as a friend.

It was in the interim that I also realized why she was noncommittal to dating me. I was younger than her by about fifteen months, hadn’t had much dating experience before her, and my body had yet to fill out. I mean, she had a near life-sized poster of Utah Jazz great Karl Malone hanging in her room at home! I was just about six-three (and about to go through my last growth spurt — at almost twenty-two), and weighed 175 or 180 in the summer of ’91. And I might’ve come off a bit needy at times.

For her part, despite how much she talked about others as “triflin’,” she was a bit triflin’ herself. She had majored in political science, Spanish, English Lit (I think) and linguistics since she started college in ’86. Her father, the chief of police on the Greensburg campus, gave her financial cover, so she took classes year-round. She lacked focus and didn’t think or have to think about the long-term for her life. That made me too serious by comparison.

I still talked to E off and on after I started grad school that August. We even went out to see Oliver Stone’s bomb JFK that December. But it wasn’t the same. I felt sorry for E. I hoped that she would get her life and career on track. I couldn’t be the one to listen to her complain and dream anymore, though.

By ’95-’96, I had finally filled out, between weights and age, enough to where I knew E was attracted to me — again. The last time I talked to E was at Pitt’s bookstore, with then girlfriend (and now wife) Angelia in tow. She literally had gotten in between me and Angelia so that I couldn’t introduce them to each other, all the while talking away as if she wasn’t there. That was it for me. After she invited me out with her for some cultural event, it was my turn to let the other down. Until the advent of Facebook, I hadn’t talked to E in nearly thirteen years. I did keep some tabs, though, at least through the Pitt Alumni network and Google. I knew that E had pulled it together and graduated in ’92. She eventually applied and got into Pitt’s School of Library Science in ’94 or ’95, picked up her master’s, and found a career as a librarian. I couldn’t be happier for her.

I learned so much from my friendship+ with E. From what to do and not to do in relationship to how to be friends with someone and disagree fundamentally with their actions and ideas. About how to see myself as Black without changing anything about myself in order to fit in. About the power of a wonderful family, which hers was. About getting out of my head and seeing my friends and the people around me for who they are, and accepting them for who they are. About the superficiality that we all possess and the imperfections that we all have. Most of all, I learned the difference between different kinds of love and attraction. Other than my wife, I don’t think I’ve learned so much from one woman as I have from E. For that, if nothing else, I say, Mwah and many, many, many thanks.

April is a pretty significant month in my life and times, almost as significant as August and December. I finished my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in April, married my wife Angelia in April, became a Christian in April, watched my family become homeless in April. My first crush’s birthday’s in April, and I became friends with my first best friend in April. This particular April marks three decades for some of these events. This was the spring of Donna Summer, Billy Joel, Kenny Loggins’ “This Is It” and the emergence of Christopher Cross. A Snickers bar was 25 or 35 cents, a 12 ounce can of soda 25 or 30 cents, and chips 15 or 20 cents. Mind you, this was the year the inflation rate reached 14 percent.

But I digress. The first significant thing that occurred in April ’79 was that my father Jimme came back into our lives, mine and my older brother Darren’s. It was Saturday, April 7 to be exact. (Don’t think that my memory’s that good, I had to look it up — I thought it was April 5). We hadn’t seen my father since the end of March ’77, after my Uncle Sam had clotheslined him coming through the front gate of 425 South Sixth Avenue, our previous home, flipping Jimme in the air and onto his ass, and knocking a bag with a 32 ounce Pepsi in a glass bottle to the ground. It happened in slow motion for me, watch Jimme and that bag hit the ground at roughly the same time.

This was in response to a nasty divorce between my mother — Uncle Sam’s older sister — and my father. The divorce and my father’s drunken awareness of my mother’s infidelity led to a number of nasty incidents after she filed for divorce in July ’76. Jimme once destroyed a glass-topped coffee table by stomping into it—in front of my mother, Maurice, Darren, and me. This happened on my seventh birthday, and left me hiding in the corner of our second-floor flat. Jimme had also put about $3,000 worth of my mother’s clothes and shoes into a bathtub full of hot water, thrown a thirteen-inch color TV out of a window, and had repeatedly cut up the new furniture my mother had bought in the months after filing for divorce. The stress of these random acts of rage had left my mother in the hospital for nearly two months with a serious kidney ailment. So when Jimme kidnapped us from our babysitter and took us back to 425 South Sixth, my Uncle Sam, already in the process of moving us out, lost it.

That happened two years before. Since then, my mother had remarried, hooking up with the guy that she had been in an affair with in the last months of her marriage to my father. Who could blame her, given what Jimme was like? At the same time, marrying a known womanizer whose first wife had divorced him for his abusiveness and infidelities wasn’t exactly the greatest decision in the world either. I didn’t like Maurice, and ran away from home two months after he had married my mother to show it, in December ’78. After thirty lashes with the whip and six weeks of no TV and no time to play outside, I had transformed into a bit of a nerd, since I was only allowed to read as punishment. So my braininess took off. But even with Darren and school, I was also lonely.

When Jimme finally called us to see if we wanted to hang out with him, it did lift my spirits some. Of course, my mother constantly reminded me how unreliable my father was. “You know, he ain’t never paid no rent when we was together,” or “You like him more than you do Maurice.” I ignored her snipes, for the most part. I knew my father, with all of his drinking, was about as reliable as Mount Vernon’s Reliable Taxi in those days. But drunk or not, even at nine I saw him as a better person than the constantly lying Maurice. Back then, though, I didn’t know that Jimme was light-years better than Maurice.

Still, he wasn’t a good father by any normal definitions of father. By the time I was old enough to witness one of his drinking binges and hangovers, when I was five, he regularly acted as if Darren and I were his drinking buddies, talking to us in language most of us only hear when watching Goodfellas. Jimme went on an alcohol-laced benders that usually began on payday Friday and ended on Monday or Tuesday. As he liked to say, he “got to’ up” almost every weekend—”tore up” for those unfamiliar with Jimme-nese. This was even before my mother had filed for divorce. Jimme also had a habit of saying, “O’ bo’, can’t do dis no mo’. Gotta stop doin’ dis. Nex’ week, nex’ week. I’ll stop nex’ week.” All while shaking his head, his eyes down, ashamed of how he felt and looked once the binge had ended. He never said “now” or “this week.” It was always next week with Jimme.

Darren and I had the privilege of witnessing this on a semi-weekly basis once Jimme came back into our lives from April ’79 until someone attempted to put Jimme’s head in orbit two years later, we spent time with our dad about once every three weekends. He’d call every Saturday to say that he was on his way, usually from a phone booth or from a bar, but usually didn’t make it over to 616. It got to the point where I could predict the next time he’d be over, either by date or by how he sounded on the phone the night before.

I looked forward to the times that we did go out with Jimme, though. Despite his deepening addiction, Jimme was fun to be around most of the time. He went out of his way to take us to Mickey D’s, to take us down into the city, to show us where he worked and the “big shots” that he knew. He’d take us over to his drinking buddies’ homes, including our one-time babysitter Ida. When Darren and I first started hanging out with our dad, he’d take us to visit his brother Michael, who also lived in Mount Vernon (he later moved back to Atlanta). Jimme would sometimes attempt to cook us dinner, would tell us stories about growing up on the Collins family farm in rural Georgia, about his work and all of the things he saw in Manhattan.

The last time we spent time with Jimme before the baseball bat incident was somewhat memorable. We’d gone down to the city to see the movie Popeye with Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall. I didn’t have the late Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert to watch beforehand, but then again, I didn’t need them to tell me that this movie really sucked. It was so horrible that we left in the middle of it. My dad had brought some beer in the theater with him, so he was to’ up by the time we decided to leave. After taking the Metro-North back to Mount Vernon, we stopped off at a one-time restaurant on the corner of “The Avenue”—downtown Mount Vernon—to pick up some roasted chicken parts and fries for a late-night dinner. We went to Jimme’s place, a sleeping room in someone’s house, ate and watched Eddie Murphy on SNL. It might have been his “Buckwheat” episode. Who knew that a few weeks later I’d read about my dad in the obituaries, only to find out that he’d only technically died for a few seconds before coming back to life?

Jimme ended up in the hospital because he’d made fun of another, bigger drunk, calling him a “po’ ass muddafucca” at what Darren and I called “Wino Park” on South Fulton and East Third. So much was the humiliation that the man marched home, grabbed a baseball bat, and returned to repeatedly smash my dad in the head until he was unconscious.

Jimme recovered eventually, but he was out of commission and out of our lives from April ’81 until August ’82, the longest I’d go without seeing my father until I went off to the University of Pittsburgh. It’s funny to write about all of this now that my father’s been sober for a decade. He’s literally spent more time around Noah sober than he spent with me between ’79 and ’96. Better later than never. Even drunk, those two years of time with Jimme did help me see, long before Humanities and the Hebrew-Israelites, that there was a whole big world out there. And though not mine, it was bigger than anything my mother or Maurice had experienced. Jimme was as important for me understanding that I had possibilities as my teachers and World Book Encyclopedia in the spring of ’79.