Last week I finally saw the movie Love Actually, this weird and quirky British indy film covering about ten different vignettes of love, lust, romance and all that comes with it. I liked it so much that I watched it straight through a second time, watched the deleted scenes and then went back to scenes that I needed to make more sense of, all in two-days.

I was already in a semi-romantic mood, thinking of V-Day (or VD Day as I used to call it in the 80s) and trying to do something with my wife and son. So I made dinner that day (of course, I almost always make dinner), one that I hoped would be at least a notch better than fried chicken, roasted chicken, spaghetti, pork chops, or any of about a dozen meals I make over and over again. I made NY strip steak, slow broiled at 235 degrees and coated with spices and a butter and oil combination. With the steak, I made four-cheese mashed potatoes and steamed green beans. I went to a local bakery called Cake Love for Raspberry-Chocolate and other cupcakes and Double Chocolate V-Day cookies for dessert. I even broke out the Beringer’s White Zinfandel and mixed it with our family spritzer of 85 percent Seagram’s Ginger Ale. I even made Noah a steak, one much smaller than ours.

It’s amazing how something as small as a sit-down dinner at the dining room table can make a family more relaxed. Noah ate most of his steak, amazing considering how finicky he is about almost everything. It was easily the best steak I’ve made since before Noah was born — at least four and a half years ago. The dinner was great, we were all in a good mood. The only snag was that Noah ate all of the icing off of the raspberry-chocolate cupcake that I had set aside for my wife. What can anyone do with a four-year-old when it comes to sweets? Still, even with Noah at the table, it’s the most romance I’ve experienced in a couple of years.

The fact that I have a romantic side at all is as amazing to me as it might be to anyone that knew me between seventh grade and my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh. It’s always been there — in some of the music I listened to, even in some of my writing — but the harsh realities of my life made it hard to express for a while. Plus, as a late Black Pittsburgh journalist said on numerous occasions, “romance without finance is a nuis-ant-ce”. I would’ve been hard pressed to do anything more romantic than take someone to a movie or Mickey D’s prior to ’90.

I think that one of the lingering effects of my unrequited “love” for my first crush was the inability to express myself in terms of romance for fear of failure, hurt, embarrassment, humiliation, not to mention the loss of emotional control that comes with being in love, or at least, head over heels over someone. My second crush-turned obsession, of course, made all of these emotions possible anyway. So many years later, I realize yet again that it’s sometimes the simple act of giving and trying that makes romance possible and actualizes our love for a spouse or a loved one.

On the flip side of things, I have to say some more about the loss of love I experienced with baseball, as illuminated by Congress, Clemens, and others last week. There were many incidents that led to me becoming an ex-baseball fan between ’87 and the early ’90s, some of which I discussed in a blog post in December. But more than anything else, the constant obsession with the purity of the game and its vainglorious records and neo-con columnist George Will’s insistence on the game complexity and genius pushed me away from the sport. As far as I’m concerned, there never was anything pure about baseball except for the fact that for 47 years, it was a professional sport that only allowed Whites to play, manage and own.

So when I read, watch and hear journalists and columnists belly-aching about how tainted major league baseball is as a result of the steroids/HGH era, it really grinds my beans. The sport’s hallowed records are now tainted? Yeah, right! I know some folks have said this before, but it needs to be said again. Given the fact that folks like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard and “Cool Papa” Bell were never allowed to play — or at least not allowed to play in major league baseball until ’47 — the purity of any records up until then are pretty questionable.

Babe Ruth only faced pitchers like Paige during exhibition barn storming events in the ’30s. If Josh Gibson had been allowed to play out his career with the New York Giants, would he have more home runs than Ruth? Let me put it like this. Since the good folks running major league baseball and the Hall of Fame saw fit to allow the home run, pitching and other records to stand and have allowed folks like Ty Cobb into Cooperstown, why should we care about Clemens, Bonds or anyone else? Until major league baseball confronts this tainted past and officially acknowledges the fact that it’s tainted, it matters not what they nor the sports writers do in the present or near future.

So I guess I’m saying that while I’m a hopeful romantic in general, my romance for a game whose time has long passed will remain in estrangement.

Given the amount of time I’ve spent talking about domestic violence and abuse over the past seven months, it would be safe to assume that I don’t condone violence on general principle. I don’t believe in pre-emptive strikes against people or nations unless they pose a true and eminent threat. I believe that folks should take the high road and exhaust all reasonable means of resolving conflict before turning words into fists and negotiations into guns and missiles.

But not in this country, and not just in Iraq or Vietnam, nor in Cuba or the Philippines (Spanish-American War, 1898 and its aftermath, 1898-1902). Our everyday activities in this country when it comes to conflict vary from the litigious to the malicious. Conflicts that were settled by guns prior to the ’60s usually involved racists, police and organized crime — sometimes a combination of all three — have involved kids as young as nine or ten for at least a generation.

As far as my growing-up years in the ’80s, despite or maybe because of the violence I saw and felt at home, I did find myself in fights. Most of my fights involved facing down muggers and potential muggers in Mount Vernon. Three involved girls, and two of those were with my first crush. I wouldn’t call the fights with girls fights though — two of them stopped because I realized that I was punching breast instead of chest, and the other one occurred in the middle of my first crush infatuation.

There were other fights that involved my identity as a Hebrew-Israelite (and as an intelligent human being) and whether I would survive in my uninviting, multicultural and cut-throat academic environment. One involved a gang-like attack two months in the gifted track, at the beginning of November ’81, when a group of Italian boys grabbed me after school and jumped me. It was ten-on-one, and with other classmates watching in laughter, I simply had to take it.

Ironically, it wasn’t a particularly humiliating moment, unlike the fight I had with my best friend from elementary school at the end at sixth grade. Upon my becoming a Hebrew-Israelite — symbolized by my white kufi — he stopped talking to me. Given that his father was a preacher man and he was his father’s son, it didn’t entirely surprise me that he didn’t accept this change. What did surprise me was that he refused to even talk about it, only saying, “you made your decision,” as if at eleven years old, I had a choice in religions. He won that fight, and even though we’d both end up in the gifted track program for the next three years, we only spoke once after that. Now that was humiliating.

But one fight from those tweener years that defined how I would respond was with my first crush’s eventual high school/college boyfriend. He symbolized early ’80s preteen White cool for any number of folks in our nerdy group. He was well traveled, spoke other languages, took Karate and played tennis, wore Osh-Kosh and sported a Sting-like (of The Police back then) hair cut from time to time. I was too naive back then to be jealous, but folks like him forced me to realize how poor my family really was. Between the cool factor, my other humiliations and the slights I faced because of my kufi and my not-so-smart mouth, and my academic struggles the first half of seventh grade, I was in need of an emotional pick-me-up.

The week before the mid-February winter break, our seventh-grade English teacher was home with the flu. Our substitute’s idea of managing a classroom was reading a newspaper while the class engaged in verbal and physical combat. It seemed that no one was safe from strife that week, including me. Mr. Cool decided that it was his turn to give me a hard time. A ten-second scuffle took place on Tuesday over the usual tweener issues of communism versus capitalism, or to use more sophisticated language, neo-Marxism versus Keynesian economics. He also didn’t like that I had corrected him the month before about Australia’s official language, which he said was “Australian.”

When I walked into the boys’ locker room for gym class that Thursday afternoon, I was greeted with two punches to my chin and face. He walked away and went through the double door to his locker, arrogant enough to think I wouldn’t respond. He muttered “stupid” as he walked away. I think it was the combination of being caught by surprise and being called “stupid” by Mr. OshKosh that got the better of me. Or maybe it was five months of enduring public humiliation combined with the sense that things at 616 were spinning out of control. Whatever it was, I finally snapped. I stared blankly at the red lockers, green doors, and depleted beige-colored walls for a couple of seconds, and then my mind exploded in violent colors. I threw my entire being into the boy as he had started to undress at his locker, knocking him to the floor. I choked and punched him until I had bloodied his mouth and made his nose turn red. He attempted to fight back to no avail, as I kept my weight on his legs while I head-locked him with my left arm and wailed away with my right hand. Just as I began to run out of energy, the gym teacher came in to break us up. He yelled at us and asked “Do you want to be suspended?”

I went into the break with an emotional boost, one that I hoped would lead to better things for me at school. I don’t condone fighting in general, but there are moments when fighting is necessary. Twenty-six February’s ago, that fight wasn’t just one to correct some of the humiliation I’d suffered over the previous year. It was a fight for my identity, as a boy becoming a man, a seventh-grader who needed to believe that he was as smart as any student in his gifted program, and as a human being capable of defending himself. That fight reminded me that I was still capable of feeling emotions and responding to those feelings in remarkably proactive ways.

I apologize to those of you who look for my blog posting every Monday. I’ve been busy with travel, interviews, and with ending my employment at the nonprofit I discussed in a blog at the end of October. Hopefully I’ll have more time to discuss all things related to Boy At The Window and other things from my life and times.

Today’s my wife’s birthday. She’s forty-one, or, as she would say, “nine years away from fifty.” I’ve been with her consistently as friend, boyfriend, fiancee and husband for more than twelve years, and have known her since she was twenty-three. We’ve earned four degrees, raised one kid to within a few months of kindergarten, been to the emergency room seven times, traveled from Seattle to Orlando and many places in between, and otherwise watched each other grow into this tweener age. We’re both too old to be young and too young to be old, and don’t look our age at all. In my wife’s case, she could easily knock thirteen or fourteen years off and most people wouldn’t question it.

There’s no doubt, though, that we are getting older. I’ve spent most of my life wanting to be around folks with a sense of experience and wisdom, which usually led me to befriend or date or “pick up” women older than me or often become friends with guys as much as a generation older. Now that I’m within two years of forty, I realize that I’m old enough to have little in common with folks past their early fifties. I still play basketball and can still guard guys in their twenties. I still have energy to teach my son how to run and catch a football and workout on the same day. My views of the Baby Boom generation and the Civil Rights era are a hybrid of ’60s liberalism, ’80s realism and ’90s multiculturalism. I haven’t bought a brand-new CD since the middle of ’06, the longest drought I’ve had since I started buying music (which was in ’85, by the way). Even when I’ve been on the verge of eviction (in ’91, and ’93) and been unemployed (in ’97), I’ve found money to buy music.

I haven’t gone so far as my wife to start counting the days and week and months until the next decade. You’re as young as you feel and think about yourself, or something like that. I know that I feel younger now at thirty-eight than I did at thirty-one or thirty-two, in part because I’m less inclined to serve as family advisor now than I was before the family intervention in ’02. But I also know that without a jump rope, treadmill, weights and a basketball, I’d weigh at least 250 instead of a steady 228 or 230. My knees would likely have required surgery from the years of wear and tear due to basketball and years of walking all over Mount Vernon and super-hilly Pittsburgh were it not for consistently working out over the past decade or so. I’ve resolved to be in good enough shape to continue to play sports with my son, at least until he’s in high school. In short, I have to stay in shape until I’m fifty. No need to start counting down yet.

But I do know when and why I began to look to other, older folks for friendship and for relationships. By older, of course, I’m talking for the most part at least by two or three years — but in many cases, five, ten, even twenty years in age. It was in response to the fallout from my second crush and from my episode with my dorm mates in the middle of my freshman year. I made a concerted and deliberate effort to invite older folks into my life because I realized that everyone my age as a college student knew less about the scars of life than I did. At least I thought so at the time. All I knew was that I was eighteen years old and that most of my classmates in middle and high school and college dorm mates had no clue as to the real me. Heck, I wasn’t entirely sure who the real me was back then. So if it meant having my ego stroked by a twenty-four-year-old woman or hanging out with guys who were twenty-seven and twenty-eight in order to learn more about myself, my likes and dislikes, then I did it. Most of the time, though, I’m sure my questions about school and dating and graduate school and life stroked their egos as well.

My marriage to my wife is in part a result of these first attempts at becoming a whole and more mature person. That’s not to say that I married her because she’s almost three years older. I married her because I love her, and the fact that she’s older says something about our relative lots in life and about our mutually shared goals for our lives. Still, I’ve learned that regardless of age or maturity, that we all are prone to moments of petulance and goofball kinds of behavior, especially if our lives have always involved serious crises and circumstances. And we’re both guilty of performing at children at moments in which acting our age would have been more appropriate.

If there’s anything I could give my wife besides a new car or a new house, it would be a new sense of herself as a youthful person. Even with our relationship and our shared duties as parents, eight years of marriage and a whiny four-and-a-half-year-old can take its toll. If she saw herself as two years away from her thirties or as young as she looks on the outside, I’d guess that she would have more energy for herself and for our son. That said, she’s also not moving around like she’s in her seventies. My wish is that she finds herself feeling younger as she gets older.

On another note, I’m happy to say that my Giants won on Sunday, another sign that games (and life) are won on the field of play (or battle) and not on paper. Like a birthday celebration, watching your favorite football team win the Super Ball does provide a youthful spring in your step. It certainly has in mine.

I talked a bit a few blogs ago about my eclectic (or bizarre as the case may be) music tastes and my need for music as an escape and a pathway to seeing the small miracles in my life. Paul Carrack’s (former lead singer for Squeeze and part-time singer for Mike + The Mechanics) “Don’t Shed A Tear” served both roles for me about this time twenty years ago.

This wasn’t just my angry response to allowing a former crush to mess with my future, my status as a student, my understanding of myself as a young and albeit naive young man. Sure, when I sang to the refrain “Don’t shed a tear for me/my life won’t end without you,” I did it because I was pissed and because I knew I needed to move on. But the song was also reaching another part of me. It fit my need to find a silver lining even in the middle of what felt like heartbreak at the time. The song’s refrain was also me affirming that I would get back on track, find my way, succeed despite how hurt I still felt.

Of course, I combined “Don’t Shed A Tear” with my other form of escape — sports — as a message that even in po-dunk Pittsburgh I could expect life to have a soft side, even a side of small miracles. Super Bowl XXII served in that role of small miracle. And though I see the silliness of this now, that game stood out as a symbol that anyone can have a perfect day at some point in their lives. Doug Williams, the first and so far only African American quarterback to win a Super Bowl — this with the Washington Redskins — was supposed to be on his last legs, having spent so much of his talent with the hilariously awful Tampa Bay Bucs of the late-70s and early ’80s. The media spent most of their time on Denver Broncos’ John Elway — “The man with the golden arm” as one broadcaster had said — and discussed Williams mostly as an afterthought. I sat in the common room area of my dorm eating a plate of spaghetti and meat sauce that I had prepared (my first “home cooked” meal since I came to Pitt) as Williams threw four touchdown passes in the second quarter. I could only laugh as the Broncos had managed to give up 35 points in a little more than ten minutes.

It wasn’t so much that I felt pride in Doug Williams’ accomplishment, although I did feel that. It was more the realization that I needed not to listen to the things that others said about me. It made me realize that it was more important to listen to myself, to see myself as successful. That I could overcome anything and anyone in order to be the person I wanted to be. That’s the lesson that I took from that game.

Songs like “Don’t Shed A Tear” and games like Super Bowl XXII had also taught me two other important lessons. One, that just because someone’s been anointed a winner or successful doesn’t mean that their victory is guaranteed. Elway and the Broncos had lost two Super Bowls in a row, including the one to my Giants the year before. They would lose another one two years later, an embarrassing 55-10 to the 49ers. I feel the same way this week with the Giants playing Tom Brady and the Patriots. With people anointing the Patriots as the greatest ever in this watered-down era of the NFL seems somewhere between premature and arrogant. Win or lose, I think that we do each other a disservice when we put folks on pedestals.

Two is that not everything that I’ve had or would have to fight for in life would be impossibly hard. Some things will come with relative ease. Some of the things in my life that I value the most have come with work but with some degree of ease. Because of my previous experiences, the classroom side of graduate school actually felt easier than any other part of my education outside of elementary school. Dating became amazingly easy once I turned twenty-two and especially after turning twenty-five, I’m not sure why. But even in these, it takes patience and applied wisdom — either through experience or inspired epiphanies — to make the difficult into something that is easy to overcome. It’s hard to believe that I pulled this out of the lyrics of one song and from watching a football game, but people like me have to get inspiration from somewhere.

It was six years ago this week that two events occurred to forever change my relationship with my mother and family. It was the joining of these events in my mind, born of my desperation for relief from years of frustration, anger, resentment and emotional exhaustion. It was my family intervention, occurring the same week that my youngest brother Eri became a dad, at the end of January ’02.

The roots of all of this likely go back to when my mother was pregnant with me, but that’s a story almost as long as Boy At The Window itself. The more immediate context begins with one of my once-a-week calls to my mother at the end of July ’01. I called to wish my brother Maurice a happy twenty-second birthday, to encourage him to go back to Westchester Community College and finish his associate’s degree, to find out how the rest of “the kids” (as my mother still called them) were doing.

What I got was nearly an hour of stress and despair from my mother about my siblings. The “Judah babies” (my ex-stepfather’s Hebrew-Israelite name) were out of control, my mother said, with the exhaustion of someone who no longer knew how to parent or nurture. Eri “makes me sick,” she said as she went on and on about his girlfriend, the pregnancy, his defiance and threats of violence to her and to the other siblings. Of course, my other brothers Yiscoc (pronounced “Yizz-co,” an old form of Isaac) and Maurice were no good as well. They were “sittin‘ on their asses as usual,” my mother said. My older brother Darren, the only sibling other than me not living at 616 was also on my mother’s shit list for only coming over on the occasional Sunday to eat from her trough. By the time I hung up the phone, I felt stressed like I’d never been before, episodes of abuse included.

At this point I was on a regular phone call schedule with my mother. For nearly fourteen years, I’d spoken with her at least once a week, only to find that these conversations were mostly venting sessions for her. If I had any good news, her response was usually no response. If I had any bad news or not-so-good news, like during my days of underemployment (when I was only teaching part-time at Duquesne University in ’98 and ’99), that gave her the opportunity to talk about her employment struggles and how “West Indians,” “Spanish people” and “Orientals” were taking all the jobs in Mount Vernon. If I asked her how she was doing, she’d say “Tired” with a sigh that made me wish that I never asked. Despite this, despite the way she acted during my doctorate graduation at Carnegie Mellon, despite her never asking about my wife or about my career, I kept in contact. I wanted my journey to be an example of what was possible and real for her and for my brothers and sisters. That’s why I kept calling and frequently sent money, even when it was obvious my success had meant little to my family.

After hearing that Eri had knocked up his girlfriend and that she was do in January ’02, my mindset became less stable for a while (my wife can attest to this). Eri had recently dropped out of Mount Vernon High School after spending nearly two and a half years in ninth grade. He wasn’t working, wasn’t looking for work, and was offended by the idea that I would even ask him to do so. Yiscoc had also dropped out, was working (under the table, of course) and hanging out all hours. Sarai, the next youngest at 18, shared the same room and bed with my mother. The only thing missing from my sister’s infantalization was a chastity belt. And Maurice, my allegedly retarded brother who finished high school with a 3-something average in standard high school courses had stopped going to Westchester Community College after two part-time semesters. Between them and my mother, I became depressed myself. For the next seven months after the end-of-July call, I would have trouble sleeping, often getting only four or five hours a night. I was occasionally testy for no apparent reason, and my co-workers often got on my last nerve (that was more typical, but it lasted longer during those days).

The 9/11 attacked didn’t help matters. The terrorists, in fact, had delayed my original intervention plans. I had planned to go to Mount Vernon in September or October to visit and meet with my family. Being unable to leave Atlanta for three days and all the things that happened after that forced me to push my plans into ’02. Meanwhile, I still needed to keep up some appearances, continue to call my mother and semi-listen to her gripes and aches and pains. The fall of ’01 was total torture, with my mother forgetting my birthday (again) and trashing the Xmas gift I’d bought her. It was a book by one of her favorite pastors on racism and the modern church. “I already know all about racism,” she said with the disdain of someone who didn’t want to be bothered.

By this time I began making my plans. I contacted my Uncle Sam (my mother’s brother living in Mount Vernon), my older brother Darren and a couple of my mother’s old acquaintances to let them know that I would be in town and that I needed to talk with them. I talked with my mother about coming over for dinner on the last Friday in January. I put together a three-page chart of the critical errors our family (mostly my mother, of course) had made since the early-70s. And then I prayed. I prayed for the strength to do this, for finding some positive things to say to temper all of the negative ones I knew I would have to say. I prayed to make sure I wasn’t doing this out of spite or some warped sense of hatred toward my mother.

That week, the week of the intervention, was an exhausting one. I ran a conference for my job in Atlanta in the days before, as well as visited my father Jimme in Jacksonville for the first time since he had stopped drinking four years earlier. “You know what your mama gonna do?,” he warned after I told him about the intervention. At least he understood why.

I went up to suburban New York City, New Rochelle (which is only two miles from Mount Vernon and 616) and booked a hotel room. In the two days before, I ate dinner with my uncle and asked him to come to the intervention. I visited one of my mother’s old friends and told her as well. I learned a few valuable things about my mother’s past that gave me some food for thought about why she was the way she’d been over the previous twenty-five years. Then it was time for the intervention. I called my siblings to remind them that I was coming over and that I’d order pizza for dinner.

By the time I arrived, Darren and three of my four younger siblings (Yiscoc had left to hang out with his friends) were already there. 616. The place where beatings, muggings and a fire had happened to us. The place was a disaster of cheap, broken furniture, a petri dish experiment for the interior of the refrigerator, walls plastered and painted the colors of a jail cell. My siblings with the look and smell of poverty. I almost cried just thinking about what I was about to do. So for an hour, as the pizza, my mother and my Uncle Sam arrived, I tried to make small talk, tried but failed. At least the pizza gave me a few minutes to think before I went to it.

I started a few minutes after eight, about ten minutes after Uncle Sam got there. He would at least he my mother from attacking me. I went on for a few minutes about the family history, Darren being condemned to a school for the retarded, my own abuse, my mother’s horrible tastes in men and her consistently taking the path of least resistance in her decisions (including the one to move back to 616 in ’98), about my ex-stepfather and father and their stupidity, incompetence and violence. Then I started on each of my siblings, their laziness, close mindedness, petty jealousies and isolation from the real world. I laid hardess into Eri for making the mistake of becoming a father too soon.

That seemed to get things going. My sister attacked me for not understanding. “Look at you now! You have no idea what it’s like,” she said. I reminded her that not only did I know, I lived with the memories of “what things were like” every day. “You abandoned us! You left and went off to college and never came back!,” Eri screamed, as if my whole life should’ve been spent in the New York area watching over them. Darren and Maurice chimed in, both defending me by pointing to decisions about their education that my mother had made by not making a decision at all. Even my Uncle Sam came down on my side, only saying “Watch your language” a couple of times.

After an hour, Eri was upset, Maurice was crying, Darren was in some sort of delirious heaven, as morbid as he was, and Sarai was pouting, arms crossed while sitting on the bowing couch in front of me. Only my mother hadn’t said a word. She sat and stood in a state of shock, eyes teared and mixed with daggers of rage, face drawn, as if I’d slapped her in both cheeks. She hadn’t made a single sound. As I went on about how “fucked up our family has been,” I realized that as important a voice in the room as my mother was, it was more important to reach my brothers and sister than it was to reach her. So I left, shaking my head, promising not to show my head at 616 anytime soon, hoping that we “would get our acts together,” but realizing I couldn’t invest my emotions “in making all of our lives better anymore.”

I didn’t talk with my mother for three months, and only twice (once by letter) in the seven months after the intervention. I heard from Darren and Sarai how pissed she was at me, that she had said her famous “How dare I…” words after I left. Too bad she didn’t talk during the intervention. I wrote her a letter to tell her that she showed all of the signs of clinical depression, that she should see a doctor and find a way to talk about all of things that she had suffered through in life, only to be read the riot act in a voice mail message a week later. In all of that, there was some good news. After being depressed myself for nearly a month, I started sleeping again. I wasn’t talking with my family every week anymore, and I had found a way to come to grips with the fact that I couldn’t change the course of life for my family simply by doing well myself.

But my intervention did have an impact. Five weeks after my visit, Eri went into Job Corps in upstate New York. Within six months, he had earned his GED, gotten his driver’s license and was earning certification as an auto mechanic. Two years later, he joined the Army Reserve and started school at Monroe College. Maurice started up his associate’s degree work a year after the intervention and moved out of 616 even before that. Sarai and I had to have our own mini-intervention regarding her taking care of my son a couple of years later. By the end of ’04, she had moved to Alabama with friends to live her own life. Only Yiscoc was unaffected by the intervention, at least in a direct way, as he is the only sibling still living at 616 with my mother. At least he has his a normal job.

Me and my mother still don’t talk like we used to when I first started college. I call about once every six weeks, and tend to stick to topics that I’m comfortable talking with her about. I don’t talk about writing or teaching or work, refuse to talk about Mount Vernon in terms of race or ethnicity, and won’t allow a discussion of religion or sexual orientation, because my mother’s bigotry and seemingly blissful isolation bothers me. It means that the phone call typically doesn’t last more than thirty minutes, just enough not to end up with a headache. I’ve learned, tragically, that just because I love my mother doesn’t mean that I have to like her or like what she does. At the same time, I still hope that she finds a way to let out her pain and suffering so that she can deal and heal, making her remaining days ones that she can truly enjoy.

Well, it’s not officially Martin Luther King Day yet, but since Dr. King was born on January 15 and would be 79 years old tomorrow, better to talk about him today than next week. What a legacy. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of the great American patriots of all time. Yet his generation of civil rights activists and righteous protesters have done as much harm to his legacy as have conservatives evoking his “I Have a Dream” speech to distract us from their bigotry and greed.

Yeah, that’s right. I said it. It’s something I’ve seen almost my whole life. One of the benefits — if you want to call it that — of being born in 1969 is that I’ve witnessed the devolution of the Civil Rights Movement and its leaders and followers into a gauntlet of gatekeepers who expect everyone from my generation to start every sentence paying homage to their sacrifices. I have no problems with that, at least in theory. But the reality is that most folks from the Civil Rights generation — at least the successful ones — made few if any sacrifices for the cause. They were in the right place at the right time with the right education and managed to find jobs, careers and positions of influence while the least fortunate of us all saw few material or psychological benefits from Dr. King’s ultimate sacrifice.

I’ve already talked at length about a former high school administrator whose statement about sacrifice and the Civil Rights Movement was supposed to make me feel bad about letting Black Mount Vernon, New York down because I only graduated fourteenth in my class out of over five hundred students. There are others, former and current teachers, professors, librarians, politicians, writers, producers, editors, pastors, politicians, bosses and charlatans who’ve made a point to discuss their elitist notions of the Civil Rights Movement and generation with me, as if I should’ve been born at least ten years earlier. On April 4th, it’ll be four decades since Dr. King was executed on a motel balcony in Memphis, but we’re still discussing the Civil Rights era as if “We Shall Overcome” will truly carry us to the Promised Land.

What’s happened in those forty years? For college educated, middle class African Americans, life has gotten better, even with bigotry, glass ceilings, DWB, a less stable economy, and the conservative backlash that has gone on unabated since the three years before Dr. King’s assassination. For Blacks not as fortunate, almost nothing has changed, at least not for the better. Some of it, to be sure (and to cut Bill Cosby some slack), is because of individual choices and poor decision-making. Folks, however, can rarely make decisions outside of their own context and circumstances — think outside of the box, in other words — without a significant amount of help. Poverty in all of its forms is just as grinding now as it was four decades ago. To expect people from the generations since Dr. King to suddenly forget their poverty, abuse, neglect and exploitation and give praise to a generation where many but far from most made sacrifices for the Movement is ludicrous.

I’m certain that had Dr. King lived the last forty years, he wouldn’t have stood by to allow his generation to constantly criticize the under-forty as slackers and immature and unfocused, as folks more concerned with money than equality, as people more willing to give up rights than fight for them. He likely would’ve made the point that the post-Civil Rights generations are merely a reflection of their upbringing, of their parents and teachers and mentors’ nurturing and training. He would’ve made the same point that others from his generation like law professor and scholar-activist Derrick Bell has made over the years. That fighting racism, educational neglect and economic exploitation requires more tools than the moral high-ground, protests, marches, a sympathetic media and obvious redneck tactics. The Movement is a shifting terrain that requires new tools and tactics to achieve small victories over a long period of time, longer than most folks from the era are willing to admit or work for.

I actually don’t have a strong ax to grind against the Civil Rights generation. Without folks like Dr. King or Jesse Jackson, Medgar Evers or Ella Baker, I wouldn’t have found myself in a gifted-track program in middle school or high school in the ’80s. But let’s not act as if my life was a walk in the park. The legacy of the Civil Rights era never stopped a fist from being thrown into my face by my now ex-stepfather. It never kept us from going on welfare or kept two of my siblings from bring diagnosed as mentally retarded. It didn’t stop teachers and professors from putting up barriers to my success as a student or employers from putting up a glass ceiling in an attempt to slow my career advance. It’s never paid one of my bills, kept food on my plate or kept me from experiencing homelessness. It’s never even been a source of pride, because that would mean that the Civil Rights Movement and its legacy belongs to me as much as it does to the people who allegedly marched with Dr. King.

I can’t wait for those who cling almost in desperation to the idyllic legacy of Dr. King and the cause to retire and fade away, for the ’60s to truly be over. Maybe it’s then that folks from the post-’60s generation — folks like me who care about economic and educational equity, social justice and spiritual transformation — will be able to make an impact on our nation’s sorry state of consciousness without pouring libations to folks who gave up on Dr. King’s work ages ago.

There have been moments in my life where the only decision I could make was either to give up or fight for whatever I wanted at the time. Some many of those times have occurred right at the beginning of the year and right after I’ve made a decision to turn a situation around.

One example of flight-vs.-fight immediately comes to mind. One was twenty years ago tomorrow, the beginning of my second semester at Pitt. After battling my obsession with my second crush and my homesickness through most of the previous fall, I made the decision to never allow a woman to steal my sanity and confidence like that again. Then on the day I was to fly back to Pittsburgh, my grades from the first semester came in. I earned an A in Astronomy for athletes, a B- in Pascal, a C in Honors Calculus (no surprise there) and a C+ in East Asian History. The grade in that course was a shocker, but it shouldn’t have been. I missed two-thirds of my history classes in November and December, and just under half of all of my classes overall in the last six weeks of the semester.

Some may say, what’s so bad about having a 2.63 GPA in your first semester at Pitt, or any other university for that matter? I had an academic scholarship that depended on me finishing each school year with a 3.0 minimum overall GPA. If I didn’t, then it was bye-bye academic scholarship. I needed to have a monster of a semester to push my GPA over a 3.0. Plus, I felt a sense of shame, of not wanting this part of my life to end in failure. I started my undergraduate career the same way I ended my days at Mount Vernon High School — underperforming and in need to turn things around. I didn’t want to spend my undergrad years constantly coming from behind — like an underperforming athlete — just to earn a halfway decent grade.

I had already plotted my comeback when two obstacles immediately came to my attention. One was my Pitt bill, which was nearly $1,300 in arrears, a lot of money for me. I had to stand in a line wrapped around Thackeray Hall in minus two degree weather for nearly two hours and make a call to my former employers at General Foods (where they held $1,200 in trust for my college tuition) to get my Pitt bill straightened out. That was the easy part.

Obstacle number two involved my dorm mates, half of whom were on Pitt’s basketball team (not the nicest sort), the other half the folks I usually hung around (geeks who would make most of my high school classmates look like socialites by comparison). They had spent most of November and December binge drinking and occasionally taking me along for the ride. One of them had begun to build a pyramid of Busch beer cans in their room, one nearly five feet tall by the time I returned from the holiday break. All I needed to do was to figure out how to co-exist with my immediate dorm mates, as they had aggravated my situation with their morbid, drinking ways.

The opportunity I needed happened a few days after I straightened out my Pitt bill. As usual, I left my door open and walked down the hall to the bathroom, did my thing, and went back to the room to call my mother. When I called, my mother kept saying “Hello . . . Hello . . . Who’s there?” She apparently couldn’t here me. After my third attempt, I checked my phone to see what was wrong. One of my idiot dorm mates had unscrewed the phone and taken the transmitter piece out, which was why my mother couldn’t hear me. I couldn’t even make a call to report what they did. I set out looking for the Busch beer pyramid guy in his room. When he saw me, he ran and immediately closed his door, almost breaking my hand as I kept slamming my body into his door and put my foot between the door and the door jam.

I thought about telling our RA, who was too busy screwing his girlfriend to notice that he had no control over our floor. So I took matters in my own hands. The next day, the stupid ass was next door in a mutual acquaintance’s room, bouncing balls off my wall and laughing like there was something funny about it. My anger turned into a rage I hadn’t felt since my fight with one of my classmates six years before. I grabbed my dust mop and unscrewed the handle, walked next door, and proceeded to smash the drunk ass and one of his stupid ass friends on top of their heads. “I don’t hear anyone laughing now!,” I yelled. “If I don’t get my phone piece back by this time tomorrow, there’s going to be a fight, and I don’t intend to lose! We can all get kicked out of school!” I’d never seen three White guys so scared. I knew I had crossed a line, but so had they. To make sure they knew that I meant business, I smashed my dust mop handle against the wall as hard as I could and said, “That’s what’s gonna happen to your heads if I don’t get my phone piece back.” They sent another dorm mate — the only other person of color in our group — as an emissary with the transmitter by the end of the day.

I didn’t allow myself to feel bad about going psycho or, from their perspective, “Black” on my dorm mates. With only a couple of exceptions, I saw everyone on my floor as the enemy for a while. And for the next couple of weeks, whenever I left the room at night for the bathroom or for something else on my floor, I took the dust mop handle with me. I wasn’t crazy. I was as sane as I’d been in a long, long time.

The result of my decision to excommunicate almost all of my first semester friends was that I could start with a clean slate. This was especially true on a campus with nearly thirty thousand students. In my resolve to become more serious about school, I also became more serious about whom I wanted to befriend or hang out with. With few exceptions, most of the friendships that began that semester were with folks at least two years older than me. I knew I needed to grow up, and fast, if I expected to make it through the end of the semester and year.

Still, as I’ve talked about in other postings, I didn’t trust myself enough to maintain contact with my new friends and the few people in authority I knew. Even after a semester in which my GPA rose to a 3.3, bringing my overall GPA to a 3.02. My resolve to change things in my life came out of anger, and could only be a short-term solution to the long-term problem of my life, of trust and faith in myself and others, a willingness to risk failure in order to have success, to allow myself to like and love someone, risking deep hurt in the process. Still, I had to start somewhere, and anger channeled into the only thing I knew how to do well — being a student — was probably the best starting point of all.