I understand that we’re in the middle of a global financial crisis and recession that could leave millions of us out of work. But no one has explained to me why our leaders — including President-Elect Obama — have reserved a special place for the American auto industry. The long-term prognosis for the so-called Big Three is horrible. They have done little to keep up with alternative technologies, to build in new levels of efficiency, and to avoid the crisis in which we all find ourselves. The question is whether the American auto industry is worth saving.

Another question that no one has address is what constitutes the American auto industry. After all, many of the Big Three’s operations are in other parts of the world, not just in the US. For that matter, Toyota and Honda have operations, including factories, right here in the US, and Honda passed Chrysler in terms of production several years ago. Why aren’t we talking about these companies when we talk about the “American auto industry?” Wake up, folks. This isn’t the ’80s anymore. Our world is so interconnected that to discuss loans for companies on the brink when there are substantial assets of overseas auto companies here in the US that would be more successful with those loans (if they needed them) is simply dumb. Our government could give GM, Ford and Chrysler $100 billion, and at least one of them would still go out of business, and at least one other will likely be merged with an automaker based in Europe or Japan.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think that we’re looking at the end of the “American auto industry” as we’ve known it since ’84 by the middle of the next decade. Why throw more dollars at this problem when it would be better spent helping American Honda and Toyota “make the cars of tomorrow right here in America?”

It’s been interesting watching the civil rights establishment coming out of the woodwork after Obama’s victory on Tuesday. On the one hand, it’s inspiring. More than a few of these men and — in only a few cases, based on media coverage (not my opinion) — women spilled blood, were killed and beaten and ridiculed so that someone like Obama could come along and win the presidency. On the other hand, there remains that retread narrative about the ’60s and protest and engaged youth, and yes, the promise of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s ironic, considering that it was Generation X and especially Y that put Obama over the top on Tuesday. With few exceptions, the mainstream media spent most of its time interviewing Civil Rights era veterans about the meaning of Obama’s victory. As if folks from my generation or my younger siblings’ generation couldn’t appreciate the distance that we’ve traveled since the end of the Jim Crow era and the Brown decision 54 years ago. Hopefully with the Obama Administration and what results from it, we can finally move past the arguments of the ’60s. I fully expect that some of you will disagree, and that’s fine. We can agree to disagree about this.

One other thing. We’ve come far but hardly far enough. Not when voters can take away the right to marry granted by their state constitutions merely because the people getting married are two men or two women. Besides the mantra of “Who cares?” or “It’s really none of your business!,” there’s the reality that in California at least, Blacks overwhelmingly backed Prop 8 and Latinos helped the Black margin. Some have argued that this is the first time in American history that people have been allowed to take a constitutional right away. Wrong! Anyone ever hear of Jim Crow? All during the 1890s, politicians passed and (in some cases) White voters ratified constitutional revisions that allowed for Black exclusion and segregation in public life throughout the South, including the right of Black men to vote as guaranteed under the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution. This isn’t the first time, and likely will not be the last.

Yet it’s a shame that people of color anywhere would vote in substantial numbers for a measure designed to take away the constitutional rights of gays and lesbians to marry. As if civil union laws are sufficient. It reflects a level of ignorance and homophobia that few are willing to talk about in the Black and Latino communities. That folks can’t separate their religious convictions from the secular realm is scary. I mean, we might as well do away with civil marriages altogether if folks feel so strongly that the state shouldn’t allow adults to marry.

It’s been an amazing week, but one that shows that we have a lot of work to do to bring American culture in line with our twenty-first century reality of a multicultural society.

I’m still caught somewhere between awe, disbelief, relief, and giddiness over Obama’s win last night and this morning. I figured that a person of color would be highly competitive for America’s highest office in our lifetime, but until this year, I wasn’t sure about someone winning it all. But what does it really mean? Are we really past race in America? Has Obama transcended race? Does it mean, as the great neocon Bill Bennett said last night, that there “are no more excuses” for African Americans and other folks of color when it comes to opportunity? Was this a truly post-racial campaign and movement that swept Obama into office?

One of my first book talks for my book Fear of a “Black” America occurred at my former job during Black History Month in ’05. About forty people turned out to hear me outline the themes around multiculturalism and American fears of such across race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I discussed the so-called Culture Wars of the late-80s and ’90s, including neocons like Bennett, Dinesh D’Souza, Newt Gingrich, their fears of multiculturalism and their skepticism of an increasingly diverse America.

It was a good talk, as the audience asked so many questions about multiculturalism in the twenty-first century. There were Blacks in the audience who, despite my talk, still thought multiculturalism was a philosophical Barney the Dinosaur song (“I love you, you love me …”). There were Whites who claimed that Blacks weren’t doing enough to overcome the steep socioeconomic and educational barriers that they’ve face over the past four decades. There were Latinos and Asians who, though they agreed with me, didn’t think that I spent enough time talking about other forms of diversity.

Toward the end of the talk, an African American woman in her late forties asked me, “Are we ever going to see the day when racism in this country no longer exists?” Although I could tell some in the audience were snickering at her question, it was a profound question as it was simple in my mind. For it showed someone who lived through the heart of the Civil Rights era who was still willing to hold on to the hope that Blacks and other groups of color would be fully woven into the American tapestry and able to exercise their rights without fear or expectation of discrimination.

So I answered the question, seriously combining my sense of realism and optimism around race in America. I said, “Sure, it’s possible. Look at what has happened with my generation — Generation X — and Generation Y and this new generation coming up now. We’re more receptive to each other in popular culture, more willing to date and marry. I don’t think that racism will ever be fully eradicated, as it will probably evolve into some other form. But I do think that even within our lifetimes, racism as we know it now will be significantly less than it is even now.” I went on to say that even if that didn’t happen, that we as a nation need to do our part in working toward this goal.

I didn’t have the presidency in mind specifically when I said this. I was thinking about my son Noah and the kind of country I want so much for him to grow up in. One where his possibilities aren’t limited because of race or my level of education (although I think I took care of that issue years ago) or because I stagnated in my job or career. I was thinking about the barriers that I had faced to get to my place in life at thirty-five. Between poverty, race, abuse, and actual barriers that I needed to overcome, including professors and supervisors who refused to believe that I was as smart, articulate, and talented as I presented myself to be. I was thinking about where I would want the country to be by the time my son would graduate from high school, the year 2021. I knew that a lot would have to happen for Noah to have the opportunity to go to college as his right, not a gun-slinging gamble like it was for me twenty years ago.

As I’ve said in previous postings, I don’t think that Obama and our election of him means that this country has moved past race. Nor that Obama transcends race. Nor that we’re in a post-racial nation. I can almost guarantee that at least one agent will decide not to represent Boy At The Window because of their calculations of race in their market analysis. Or that I won’t be considered for a high-level job in academia or in the foundation world because of race. Or that I’ll be followed around a book store or a cab driver won’t stop for my hail because of race. And all with President Obama at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But I also know as an academically-trained historian that a lot has changed in the past thirty or forty years. Folks in this country aren’t colorblind. Whites have warmed up to the idea that Blacks, Latinos and other folks of color are capable of anything, great, horrible and anything in between. Blacks have long since known that we possess the intellectual and spiritual resources necessary to break down any barrier. And younger Americans (and I still include myself in this category — I don’t turn forty until the end of next year) — if they’ve moved past anything — have pushed beyond the Black-White Civil Rights era and ’60s mantra of ideas on race and social justice in general. Obama’s victory opens up a more complicated discussion of race that the O.J. Simpson trials in the ’90s could’ve possibly permitted.

This election is an opportunity to make America’s ideals mean something to so many again, and to do it in everyday and practical terms. Nothing more, nothing less. We’ll know more about the meaning of it all in 2012.

We’re on the same calendar sequence as the one for ’80. Both are leap years, Olympic years (except for that US/NATO boycott of the Summer Olympic Games in Moscow), years that the LA Lakers went to the NBA Finals and the Phillies won the World Series. Both were tough years economically. I clearly remember the inflation rate being about 14 percent, a year after an 11 percent inflation rate (or was it 14 percent in ’79 and 11 percent in ’80? – it really doesn’t matter). It was a year of the Iranian hostage crisis and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. As a sixth-grader, I’d become more aware of the larger world of geopolitics, pop culture and ideology than I would’ve thought possible even a year and a half earlier.

At home, things were better than they had been in years. My stepfather Maurice had jumped ship a month earlier — that first Saturday in October — saying that he couldn’t take it with my mother anymore. He’d taken half of the meat out of our two refrigerators (we used to order meat wholesale to save money in those halcyon days) and the only working TV in the house. Luckily I had struck up a friendship with a kid in my building named Tre, who was a couple of years younger, but very smart. Most of the TV viewing I did between October ’80 and April ’81 was in his mother and father’s apartment on the second floor of 616.

Tre’s wasn’t the only friendship that I valued back then. My best friend in those days was a kid named Starling, who shared many of my interests in politics, pop culture, history and religion. I admired him as much as admired any person up to that point in my life. He would eventually end our friendship over the whole Hebrew-Israelite thing, as he was a Baptist who spent quite a bit of time attempting to get me saved (his father was a pastor).

But that wasn’t the main thing on our minds in October and early November. The ’80 election between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Wilson Reagan had us both concerned. We knew that Carter hadn’t done the best job, that the economy was reeling from high inflation, job stagnation, and high interest rates. We also knew that Carter’s desperation to solve the hostage crisis made him look like a wimp, and it showed in his debates with Reagan. In the back of my mind, at least, I sensed that Carter had lost the election when those eight special forces soldiers died in a fiery crash in southern Iran in a vain attempt to rescue the hostages in early April ’80. I fully remember the image of a downed and virtually crushed helicopter on its side on the cover of Time Magazine from the second week in April. I felt bad, for the people who died and for Carter.

Yet I hadn’t given up. Starling and I had picked up on the rumors started by some truly afraid of our nation’s turn to the right that Reagan represented the Antichrist. After all, each part of his name had six letters! It makes me laugh now, but I seriously believed that Reagan would destroy the lives of the people I knew in a tangibly direct way.

It was a strange time and time of my life really. I was just starting to get into music, listening to everything from Billy Joel, Donna Summer, Kenny Loggins and The Bee Gees to Stephanie Mills, Teddy Pendergrass, and Luther Vandross (even though I really didn’t know who he was at that point). In the weeks going into Election Day, I found myself intrigued by Pink Floyd’s The Wall, singing to Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust,” dancing to Kool & The Gang’s “Celebration,” and in attendance at a Sugar Hill Gang concert. There was a Disco backlash (fueled by anti-gay furor), an anti-Black backlash (fueled by affirmative action and economic uncertainty), an emerging fundamentalist Christian movement (represented in some ways by everyone from Pat Robertson to Jim Jones), and an anti-poor backlash (connected of course to race and ethnicity).

It was a time to be engaged in the political process, and I was. I asked every person I knew who they planned to vote for, argued with classmates about why Reagan was wrong for our country, and went to the polls on Election Day and challenged people with Reagan-Bush signs about their reasons for voting for “voodoo economics.” I sensed that Reagan didn’t represent me, didn’t care about people like me, and hoped that people like me would go away. I just didn’t think that there were millions of other people who wanted the same time.

To say the least, I was disappointed on November 4 of ’80 when Reagan obliterated Carter in the electoral college, ushering in the Reagan years. I’ve learned over the years not to see Reagan as the Antichrist. I’ve come to understand over the years that Reagan wasn’t the reason for the end of my friendships or for my family’s economic and social demise. I could no more hold Reagan responsible for the domestic violence I would experience in ’82 than I could my classmates. But Reagan’s trickle-down, supply-side, and anti-poor economic policies were never meant to help anyone falling into poverty, or for that matter, anyone not already highly educated and in a white-collar job. The Democratic Party couldn’t find anyone with the charm and optimism of Reagan, not in the ’80s. Nor could it redefine itself in a post-Civil Rights, post-New Deal coalition era. I only vaguely understood this during the ’80s.

What I knew immediately after the election, though, was that the optimism that I’d spent the first eleven years of my life growing up around was over. Our family’s attempt to cope turned into three years of Hebrew-Israelite bizarreness, a decade and a half of welfare poverty and seven years of domestic violence hell. It would be another twelve years before I heard anyone other than Jesse Jackson talk as if they represented all Americans, and by then, I was more cynical as a grad student than I am now. Slick Willie didn’t help matters.

My greatest hope is that tomorrow’s election does the exact opposite for me and all of the people I like and love that Election ’80 helped foster in my life in the ’80s. I agree with Obama. I can’t afford four more years of what I’ve lived through over the past twenty-eight, and I don’t think that the rest of the country can either.

At my former nonprofit job about three years ago, I came to know a younger female colleague, one whom I really grew to like in that I-can-see-her-future-through-my-past kind of way. But there was a part of me that felt uneasy about our conversations about pop culture and, invariably, about race. Admittedly, some of that had to do with me. I was and am a married man, after all, and more than a decade older at that. This wasn’t about those typical issues of attraction or temptation. For me, it was ultimately about authenticity. My understanding of authenticity, and my former colleague’s search for it.

Over the years I’ve gotten used to being around folks — male and female, Black, White, Latino, Asian, gay or straight, attracted to me or vice-versa or not — who ask questions and make comments that could be off-putting if I were, say, Ron Artest or Joe Pesci’s character in GoodFellas. I’ve spent time with acquaintances and friends who’ve questioned my Blackness or thought that I tend to overthink the things that are going on in the world. I’ve been around many a person who’s been surprised by my diction (and how it can or can’t change depending on my mood and location), my music, and my views on everything from the use of the term African American (I prefer it without the hyphen) to my disdain for Black urban romantic fiction (including Zane). It can be hard being different, following your own path instead of following the pack, especially when a part of you would like to take the easier option.

One of my first conversations with this former work colleague was about the music I played at work. I played it often and played it relatively loud — mostly to drown out the noise of my next door office mates. I also had about half of my total collection on my computer at work, which leaned disproportionately to the ’80s and early ’90s. Most people I worked with gave me weird looks, laughed with, ignored or actually stopped by to listen to my music. My colleague, who happened to be doing some work in a nearby cubicle one day, complimented me, saying that my music was “eclectic.” It took a couple of seconds for her to find that word, but once she did, she kept using it.

Eclectic. It can be like the way academicians use the word “interesting,” which can also mean “exotic,” “esoteric,” “bizarre,” “usual,” “weird,” “complicated,” “dense,” “off-center,” “eccentric,” “crazy,” “stupid,” “dumb,” or “interesting.” In my colleague’s case, I came to the conclusion that she simply didn’t know what else to say. I think that it was well beyond her experience to be working in proximity to a Black male who liked listening to U2, Journey and Phil Collins at the same time listening to Eminem, Maxwell and Luther. So I became a curiosity piece, not good or bad, I guess, but a curio nevertheless. Over the next few months, our handful of conversations covered various aspects of pop culture, particularly more recent and Black aspects of music and culture. I probed at times to find out more about why she seemed so interested, but to no avail.

At some point I decided that my former colleague’s interest in discussing these issues with me was because I was a safe person to talk to about these issues. I’m a married man with a kid, about ten years older and with a high intellectual bent. It was unlikely that I would hit on her or come on to her in some way or get pissed at her for asking me what some would consider inane questions. It was certainly much safer to talk to me three years ago than it would’ve been if I’d been in my late-twenties. Of course, if she had known me in my asexual teens, she could’ve used me as a sounding board.

But I also sensed a bit of desperation in her, one of needing to know how to relate to herself, to embrace herself and others in this world not like her. If they knew the full story, some might argue that she was merely looking for a man. I don’t think so. I’ve been there, maybe not as obviously desperate, but been there. There are times in our lives that we desire to have nothing to do with how things actually are in our lives, where we shut ourselves off to the parts of ourselves that we see as ugly, or too difficult to deal with, or want to embrace something new and different.

I did that to the Boy At The Window years of my life once the ’80s came to an end. For the better part of twelve years, I generally did not talk or think about those lonely and heartsick days except when I talked with my wife or with one of my closest friends. I certainly gave little thought to how out of sorts I felt in high school, or my steep learning curve in terms of my social skills once I started college. I might not have been desperate, but I was conflicted. I wanted to be myself, but I hadn’t figured out who I was yet. I also wanted to be part of a social circle, one that at least understood me, if not in agreement with everything I thought or believed. It took putting my misery-ridden past aside to achieve what I needed to happen while at Pitt. It was likely a key to me maintaining my sanity.

Funny thing is, I had just begun working on the Boy At The Window manuscript when I met this colleague. I was working on the second chapter, the one about my first crush, the one about our relative issues of desperation and my own issues of domestic violence at home. Maybe my getting to know this person helped me think a bit harder about what I wanted to say about my first crush and how I wanted to say it. I must admit, the chapter on my first crush and my abuse would’ve been far gushier if I hadn’t seen some similarities between her and my former colleague.

As for my former colleague, I may be overthinking things like I normally do. Maybe her interests in my music and my understanding of pop culture was just that. Maybe for a brief moment, she was interested in me. I do think, though, that she was and may still be in search for a place where she can belong, to herself, to a circle of sane, eclectic individuals, a place of peace. In the end, isn’t that what we’re all looking for, a place where we can be our authentic selves without also tearing ourselves apart in the process?

Perhaps more than any other sport, professional American football was what excited me about sports, making me the equivalent of a tweener or teenager for the first time. I needed an acceptable and accessible escape from the daily grind of the ’81-’82 recession and our free fall into welfare poverty. Not to mention my summer of abuse. In the midst of this comes the NFL’s first strike-shortened season, emblematic of economic woes across the country. I think — no, I know — that was the reason for noticing the NFL at all.

Then the nine-game season started in earnest at the end of October, and the occasional glimpses of football I did catch peaked my interest. Other than Mean Joe Greene, Earl Campbell or Joe Montana’s “The Catch ” drive against the Cowboys, I’d not given much thought to football. But watching what I could only describe as the combination of raw, brutal power and poetic, almost ballerina grace, I started to get hooked on the game. Watching John Riggins and the Redskins’ offensive line mow down defenders on the one hand, watching James Lofton make an incredible catch and running at breathtaking speed for a touchdown on the other. In what I saw off and on over two and a half months, I began to understand why so many loved, watched and played football.

After the so-called Class of ’83 draft that included quarterbacks John Elway, Dan Marino, Jim Kelly, Ken O’Brien, and several others, and after that season, I was hooked. I tried out for and made my high school’s junior varsity football team the summer of ’84 (only to quit — more on that in a future blog). For years I dreamed of throwing or catching touchdown passes as a metaphor for what I needed to do in order to climb out of the gigantic hole that I found myself in growing up at 616 and in Mount Vernon.

For the most part, I don’t dream in NFL metaphors these days. The game has changed, and so have I. I don’t get as much satisfaction rooting for underdogs anymore, because many NFL players and almost all starters are far from Horatio Alger stories. Teams that lose twelve or thirteen games one year can use the draft and free agency to win at least that many the next season. Owners make billions of dollars and pay players multi-million dollar signing bonuses. Players without guaranteed contract who eventually tear an ACL or break their bones could be stacked up like the Persian infantry was by the Spartans in the movie 300. It’s as much a sad tale of fulfilling one’s dream only to have it snatched away in one tragic moment for many a player, including the ones who experience success in the NFL. It makes it hard for me to watch it the way in which I did when I was thirteen or twenty-three.

What has also made it harder for me to enjoy the NFL has been the not-so-subtle sense of conservatism that permeates the league’s personnel and its ownership. In the case of owners, conservative political perspectives should be expected. Affluence and the desire to maintain a status quo that protects that socioeconomic status is as old as civilization. What’s different, at least from my point of view, is that the only current and former players who tend to sound off politically or ideologically speaking are conservatives. Elway, Kurt Warner, Matt Hasselbeck and his wife, among players I’ve rooted for in the past. Of course, these former and current players can support any political perspective they choose. The difference over the past couple of decades is that there isn’t a counterbalance. It seems that political and ideological apathy is the alternative to supporting a conservative agenda.

Why should anyone give a hoot about my perspective on this perception? After all, these players are starters who’ve become millionaires and as such would only want to protect their hard-earned dollars from so-called tax and spend liberals. But I would argue that this isn’t just about money. These players weren’t always rich, and in some cases, come from impoverished beginnings. In some cases, they embraced a politically conservative philosophy long before become millionaires with gigantic signing bonuses. For some players, like Warner I presume, it’s as much about religion and evangelical, post-millennial Christianity as it is about money (I have my mother watching the 700 Club to thank for some knowledge of Warner’s religious views). For others, I’m sure that the violence of the game can help them relate well to the typical conservative’s hawkish mentality about projecting the power of America’s military around the world.

I would also argue that it goes deeper than that. Unlike most professional American sports, golf, tennis NASCAR, and baseball included, professional football requires an unusual combination of discipline and conformity. It takes discipline to work out as many times a day or week as a good NFL player does, to play throw pain and injuries, to eat food that most of us would throw away first. It takes a mind that is trained to conform to play football, to follow the rules that make most NFL players anonymous and trained to perform a specific task a certain number of ways depending on down and distance. Years of training that allows for a high level of brutality and low levels of flexibility or rebellion relates well to being in the military. It also is consistent with a conservative agenda of unquestioning patriotism, inflexible spirituality, and status-quo-politics.

Again, reasonable people can adhere to whatever political beliefs they choose. That’s not the point here. However, having a league full of conservatives and apathetic players doesn’t lend itself well to changes that balance the needs of players, fans and owners. It’s why retired NFL players are suffering from lack of health care and insufficient pensions. It’s why there aren’t any guaranteed contracts in the NFL, even though the average player leaves the league battered physically or psychologically at the ripe old age of twenty-seven. It’s why the NFL Players Union is as weak as it is. It’s hard to represent folks whose political philosophy makes them somewhat anti-union or apathetic toward unions.

Beyond that, the NFL is in many ways a microcosm of American society. That a sizable portion of Americans believe that the rules by which we play American football are applicable to Wall Street and our economy, to America’s foreign policy agenda and statesmanship, to climate change and energy, even to education, is disheartening. Not every problem is as simple as lining up in a three-point stance to tackle the quarterback or throwing a post-pattern to a wide open tight end because two receivers managed to pull a safety to the other side of the field. I’ve learned over the years that there are other, better metaphors than football for overcoming situations that run from challenging to nearly impossible. We need to do the same in our thinking around policies and politics.

My mother turns sixty-one tomorrow. She only twenty-two years and two months older than me, so I’ve never thought of her as old, even though she’s acted older than her age for years. Still, despite all we’ve been through, her body remains a young sixty-one, and will hold up for years to come.

Now, I know that many of Boy At The Window postings tend not to show my mother in the best light. As many of you should be aware by now, there were only a handful of silver linings in the six years before I went off to college. But my mother did have moments, few and far between as they were, when she rose to the occasion as my mother. Those moments startled me. They were unexpected, like minor miracles after a long, horrible day at school or work. Or, more to the point, like my Giants beating the Patriots in the Super Bowl last February or me finishing my master’s degree in two semesters. Those were the moments that reminded me how tough and fair my mother could be when she embraced her best inner self.

Below is a Top 5 list of those moments when my mother came to the rescue, looked out for me when I would’ve least expected it.

1. Thursday, September 6, 1984 — It was the day I came out of the spiritual closet as a Christian, forever taking off my kufi and moving on from three years as a beaten-down Hebrew-Israelite. My ex-stepfather threatened to kill me after I came home from school. My mother stood in between us and said, “You lost, Judah (my ex-stepfather’s Hebrew-Israelite name),” and told him that she would kick him out before she would allow him to throw me out of 616. That would be the last time I talked about being a Hebrew-Israelite until graduate school.

2. Tuesday, December 6, 1983 — It was the day after I’d been mugged by four of Mount Vernon’s most wonderful teenagers, including one who I knew from 616 because his older brother had gone to elementary school with me. Instead of letting it go, my mother took me to MVPD’s juvenile division to look at mug shots and press charges. I found three out of my four attackers as a result. Under normal circumstances, my one-time stepfather would’ve beaten me up and no one would’ve done anything. Going to the police was always out of the question. That was until my mother decided that I needed to do more than fight off attackers while going to the store to buy food for the family late at night. Her doing that made me feel better, at least that day.

3. April 1983 — The month we went on welfare. It was the death knell of nearly two decades as a working-class wage earner for my mother, and more than thirteen years of seeing my mother as nothing but a dietary department supervisor at Mount Vernon Hospital. She handled it much better than I thought she would. Maybe it was because she was too shell-shocked to be angry or bitter. Maybe she was depressed. But it didn’t show. She handled my embarrassment well, too. Especially after she realized that I had refused to use the food stamps in public at first (that story involves my one-time first crush and the C-Town grocery story on Prospect). Still, after years of bad decisions, she made the best of really awful situation, and made an adjustment that I knew most people couldn’t make without completely going insane.

4. August 1987 — Unbelievably, my mother decided that she wanted to go back to school to earn an associate’s degree. Even though I knew that she would never admit it, I knew that it was no coincidence that her going back to school was influenced by my acceptance to the University of Pittsburgh and my decision to take their offer. Though she didn’t handle my decision well at first, she decided at some point in the summer of ’87 to find a way to get off of welfare, to get a decent paying job, and to distance herself from her idiot second husband. It took her a decade to earn her associate’s from Westchester Business Institute, but this was the month that she started down a path of independence.

5. May 1981 — Besides buying the ’78 edition of World Book Encyclopedia for me in March ’78, this was the most important decision she made regarding my education. I had tested in the 11th and 12th grade percentiles for math and reading respectively on the SRA tests (owned by IBM in the ’70s and early ’80s — had been part of Lyle Spencer’s portfolio before he sold it to IBM before establishing the Spencer Foundation in ’68 — talk about irony). Between that and maintaining straight A’s for three years, I was a shoe-in for this Humanities Program. My sixth grade teacher Mrs. Bryant pushed me to talk to my mother about it for nearly a week. My mother seldom seemed that interested in my education, and with my stepfather back in the picture after a six-month separation, I wasn’t sure what she would say. But with very little reservation, she did say, “Go ahead,” with a low-keyness that sounded less like disinterest and more like she was worried about me being in this program with lots of White kids. Or maybe worried that I would be less like her and see her as stupid or too Southern in some way. I’m glad that she didn’t stand in the way.

There are a few other moments. These are the most important ones, the ones that let me know that my mother still loved me even in the middle of our maelstrom life. She still had hopes and dreams, for herself and for me. Even though I know that my mother’s life hasn’t turned out anywhere near as well as she would’ve wanted, and our relationship not exactly where I would like it to be, I still love her very much. I hope that her sixty-first birthday day is a good and peaceful one, with about as much drama as watching paint dry, given all the drama we’ve both lived through.