Psalm 23 and Christian-isms I Don’t Understand

14 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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American Christians, American Narcissism, Bono, Christianity, God's Politics (2005), Hypocrisy, Jim Wallis, Psalm 23, Social Control, Social Justice, Social Revolution, U2

My iPod w/ U2, November 13, 2010. (Donald Earl Collins)

It’s Easter Week for 2017, and year 33 since I became a follower of Christ. I’ve written at length about my conversion and my evolution as a Christian. I’ve also posted about my problems with Christians and the way many impose — or at least, attempt to impose — their racism, sexism, misogyny, hyper-masculinity, heterosexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and anti-Black respectability politics on the world.

For me, it shows most American Christians to be hypocrites as best, and full of shit at worse, when it comes to following the two most basic rules of Christianity. To have “no other gods but God,” and “to do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” For most American Christians (if not Western Christians in general), money is god, Whiteness is god, and the two go together better than the chocolate and peanut butter in a Reese’s peanut butter cup. Both assert that others are but dirty pieces of gum on one’s shoe, that hatred, violence, and permanent superiority in the name of these gods supersedes following any important teaching or practice of Jesus and his disciples.

But that’s not all. After all these years, I still don’t quite get even some of the more mundane Christian practices and assumptions. The most basic one is Psalm 23. For the life of me, I don’t understand why pastors, priests, and parishioners seem to only read the psalm after a person has died. The psalm reads as:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul; He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

The Bajoran Wormhole screenshot (or the entrance to the Celestial Temple), Star Trek DS9. June 18, 2011. (Donald Earl Collins).

It has always seemed to me that the living have needed the verses around “I shall not want,” lying down “in green pastures,” and walking “through the valley of the shadow of death” far more than the dead. No one has explained what Psalm 23 has to do with wakes and funerals to my satisfaction. The way people use Psalm 23 assumes so much about what occurs after we die — something none of us could ever fully comprehend — and completely neglects the reality that the living need rest, peace, and strength in our walk through a corrupt world. Kind of like the way many American Christians value embryos, cats, and dogs over Black and Brown babies, toddlers, and adults.

In 2005, I picked up evangelical Jim Wallis’ book God’s Politics in an attempt to expand my knowledge of the intersection between social justice activism and Christianity. Wallis’ book was supposed to be a primer on how to fight for the rights of the most vulnerable while also standing for “traditional” American Christian values. The book was a hot mess, as it did little more than insist on the right of those who weren’t Christian or following evangelical values (e.g., openly LGBT, pro-choice, womanist, and anti-racist) to exist and to be tolerated. Wallis wasn’t exactly calling for a revolution in God’s Politics. Certainly not when he insisted that many Black play “the race card” in identifying American racism in its myriad forms.

Where I stopped reading, though, was in Wallis’ description of U2 lead singer Bono’s activism and religiosity. Wallis saw Bono as someone “who has become a serious and well-informed activist,” and as a “spiritual man, though not a churchy person.” That was a back-handed compliment. But then Wallis expressed surprise to learn that Bono would get “on his knees” to pray for guidance, as this image of this rock superstar for Wallis was “humbling and heartening.” That came from pages 198-99 of God’s Politics, and that was where I stopped reading. The self-aggrandizement and name-dropping. The assumption that Bono couldn’t possibly be thinking in both social justice and Christian terms because of his profession. And the most obvious fact of all: Wallis likely had never listened to or read a single verse of a U2 song going back to the October album (1980). There are enough Christian and biblical allusions in U2’s catalog to keep most preachers in sermons for a generation. But yeah, let’s assume that anyone other than a devout evangelical Christian is living in sin or isn’t serious about combating Whiteness or poverty or any host of manmade plagues!

Religion in general isn’t the issue. Christianity at its heart is a belief system based on forgiveness, reconciliation, embracing of diverse peoples and differences, and of course, eternal salvation. What people do with religion is what they do with everything else. It can occasionally become a catalyst for spiritual freedom and social change, even revolution. But, much more often, institutionalized religion is a spiritual yoke, a way to control the way multitudes of millions see themselves and the world around them. Funny, then, that American Christianity represents everything that America is, and very little of the basic tenets of Jesus’ teachings in practice. Promoting blind patriotism, a lover’s embrace of money changers — a.k.a., capitalism, a hatred of vulnerable populations, and a tendency to racially self-segregate. This is the American way.

American Christians have let me down in so many ways. We have let our individual -isms and individualism overwhelm whatever it is that supposedly makes us Christian in the first place. If evangelicals want to look for someone to blame for America’s decline since the 1970s, they need only to stand fully unclothed in front of a full-length mirror. Maybe Bono as quoted by Wallis was right when he said that maybe “God [was] on his knees praying” for us to get it together in eradicating poverty, systemic racism, homophobia, HIV-AIDS, and climate change. Too bad most of us aren’t listening.

How Libraries Got Me Through

07 Tuesday Mar 2017

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Books, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Charles Schulz, Hillman Library, Learning, Libraries, Montgomery County Public Libraries, Mount Vernon Public Library, MVPL, New York Public Library, NYPL, Peanuts, Pitt, Self-Discovery, Transformation

Mount Vernon Public Library’s east entrance, Mount Vernon, NY, July 2, 2016. (http://maps.google.com).

I’ve been enthralled with books since my brother Darren helped me decipher the code of the English language during Christmas ’74. Going to the library for most of my life — especially my growing up years — was always a break from the Grade II bone bruise that my life often seemed to be. I remember the first time my Mom took us to Mount Vernon Public Library, in August ’74. It was only a few blocks from our old place, 48 Adams Street, and about seven blocks from 425 South Sixth. I was too young to get a library card, though, and I started complaining. “May-wa! May-wa!” — that’s what I used to call my Mom (a combination of her name Mary and Mama) — “Why can’t I get a card?,” I cried on my way out the door.

A New Rochelle Public Library card (a close approximation to my first card from 1975), March 1987. (http://flickr.com).

I got my first library card in first grade. It was a class trip, as me and the rest of Ms. Griffin’s class walked to and from Nathan Hale ES to Mount Vernon Public Library. The librarians gave us a tour, during which a thunderstorm erupted. It was sometime in September ’75, a Friday I think. But feeling that small, round-edged MVPL card in my hand with that stamped metal plate on it made my otherwise rainy day. That it had my name typed on it helped as well.

I spend many hours at Mount Vernon Public Library over the years. I needed to. I had so much to learn, more than the 28-volume World Book Encyclopedia set from 1978 could teach me. And certainly more than what my parents and idiot ex-stepfather Maurice knew, much less what they decided not to share. MVPL got me through my spiritual crisis of 1983-84, because I had access to the Qur’an, Torah, and other spiritual texts from which I could make a decision and move on from the cultish Hebrew-Israelites in my family and life. I wouldn’t have considered majoring in history if I hadn’t been able to check out dozens of dusty World War II books between 1980 and 1982. My love for all things Charles Schulz and Peanuts couldn’t have developed without the help of MVPL’s weekly Bookmobile visits at Nathan Hale on Tuesdays or William H. Holmes ES on Wednesdays, usually between 1:30 and 2 pm.

But by the summer of ’80, I began to realize that not all libraries were like the enormity of Mount Vernon’s. Nearby Pelham Library was on the ground floor of Hutchinson Elementary School. It was the size of a small bookstore, with maybe two tables and six chairs to sit in (they didn’t move into their own building until 1995). New Rochelle’s library was 1970s-style modern, with ugly shapes and colors. But both had more air conditioning and bathrooms that didn’t smell or weren’t under repair half the time.

From high school on, I used libraries mostly as a form of escape from my then-idiot stepfather and a gaggle of younger siblings. Or to escape the desperate poverty and chaos that enveloped my life at 616, and to a lesser extent, parts of Mount Vernon and other parts of the New York area. I first got the courage to go into the vastness that was the New York Public Library’s main branch on 42nd and Fifth in the fall of ’84. I infrequently went to White Plains’ public library. At least once between 1984 and 1988, I went to nearly all of the libraries between Wakefield in the Bronx and the various tiny libraries in southern Westchester County. But no library outside of NYPL’s main branch had both the collection and as easy access to the stacks as the one in Mount Vernon.

Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Oakland (Main) Branch, front entrance, Pittsburgh, PA, April 5, 2008. (HoboJones via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-BY-SA-3.0.

I had more appreciation for one of the few pleasures offered by my original hometown during my twelve years in Pittsburgh. Within 230 yards of each other were the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library and Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s main Oakland branch. If it weren’t for their extensive collections and my alumni status after the spring of ’91, I couldn’t have attended graduate school. Pitt’s policies toward alumni alone saved me $3,000 in book and printing costs, as well as from an additional year of dissertation research. And as many times I could pick up a book, any book, go to the African American Literature section of Hillman, put two lounge chairs together, read, fall asleep, and read some more? The only other thing I could’ve asked for was a blanket and room service!

Since moving to suburban Maryland and DC in ’99, I have been struck by the lack of in libraries around here. Lack of books, lack of extensive interlibrary networks, and a lack of substances over style. The Montgomery County library system had two new ones built in Silver Spring and in Rockville. Each has enough space for a half million volumes, it seems as if their designers built them on the assumption that everyone uses a tablet or an iPhone to read books these days. If it’s nonfiction and a bestseller, they likely don’t have it. Though DC Public Library’s main branch in Gallery Place — the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library — has an extensive collection of DC artifacts and histories, and African American nonfiction and scholarly volumes, patrons cannot borrow these volumes at all. Like the Library of Congress, the MLK library is mostly a museum with books. And by the way, the main branch is now closed for the next three years for modernization, leaving the homeless, researchers, and book lovers like me with even fewer DC area options.

Silver Spring Air & Space Museum, er, Public Library, Silver Spring, MD, June 2016 (http://www.adtekengineers.com/).

Georgetown and Johns Hopkins both have wonderful main libraries with friendly security guards and extra-helpful librarians. But they’re not Hillman. Even as a professor, if I fell asleep in a lounge chair, I’d likely get kicked out. Plus, in our era of smartphones and tablets, most patrons are stuck in social media in between hectic moments for exam cramming and last-minute paper writing. This, though, is still way better than George Washington’s main library, or NYU’s and Columbia’s, for that matter. You can’t walk into either without a form from a staff or faculty member giving you permission to walk through the door.

The building that houses MVPL, built interestingly enough with Andrew Carnegie’s money between 1897 and 1904, is in serious disrepair. The men’s bathroom is nearly always out-of-order, and the collection of Mount Vernon history materials has been closed for years. A friend recently commented on the fact that an older man relieved himself in the snow after leaving the library before going back in to do his whatevers. The money is simply not there to build a brand-new home for one of the largest collections in New York State.

Still, I know how good a library Mount Vernon has. It carries the first three of my former advisor Joe Trotter’s books. I have to go to a university library for that around here. It also has my memoir, and it may have Fear of a “Black” America as well (not so sure about that). I just know that the affluent of Montgomery County have never put that much in resources into the library system I frequent now. I hope and pray that the folks raising the money MVPL so desperately needs for a major renovation, maybe even a new building, are able to meet their goals before my son is old enough to remember when libraries actually held bound books in their collections.

Yes, I’m A Sexist Feminist

27 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Black Masculinity, Chivalry, Contradictions, Dahlia, Damsel-in-Distress Syndrome, Father-Son Relationship, Feminism, Masculinity, Misogyny, Mother-Son Relationship, Nice Guy, Owning Imperfection, Patriarchy, Phyllis, Sexism, Womanism

Hostile vs. Benevolent Sexism, March 10, 2015. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk).

I finished up a chapter in Boy @ The Window with the closest approximation to my contemporaneous thoughts about Phyllis (a.k.a., “Crush #2” at times on this blog) in August 1988:

I must’ve rewritten these two paragraphs at least a half-dozen times before putting the book out for limited consumption. The thought process that I went through at eighteen years old bothered me then, and looking at the words even today leaves me wanting. Probably because there is more than a bit of sexism contained within these words.

But I wasn’t wrong, of course, not in ’88, not when I wrote and rewrote these paragraphs between 2007 and 2011, and not now, at least in terms of how I perceived things then. While I believed in reproductive rights, in equal pay for equal work, and in passing the Equal Rights Amendment growing up, I also believed in saving damsels from distress and in distinguishing between “ladies” and “bitches.” Or, as my father put it when he argued with my Mom in front of me when I was four years old, “You’s a black bit’!” Or, my contradiction could’ve fully formed when my father tried to set me up with a prostitute a couple of weeks before my seventeenth birthday, in December 1986.

There was no way in 1988 I could’ve understood the contradictions between the idea of feminism (in any form) and the notion of “being a nice guy.” I hadn’t been exposed, or, rather, exposed myself to Paula Giddings, Elsa Barkley Brown, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, bell hooks, Maya Angelou, Angela Davis, and Zora Neale Hurston. I hadn’t yet been engaged in the hundreds of conversations I’d eventually have with women folk I’d become friends with, people with whom I bonded because of their suffering, people from whom I’d hidden my own suffering during those years. Date rape, physical abuse, the more typical abuse of serial cheating, among other issues. With many of these women, I recognized the sexism and misogyny I saw in myself in 1988, and saw them again when I wrote down my contemporaneous thoughts in Boy @ The Window. It didn’t occur to me until the mid-1990s that women could be just as sexist and misogynistic as men, and often could pass down their notions of masculinity and patriarchy to their children. And that thought scared me.

Imprisoned brain (or, maybe, Culture Club and “Church of the Poison Mind” [1983]), December 27, 2016. (http://mdjunction.com).

It scared me because I realized I may have learned more of my contradictions from my Mom than from my father or idiot ex-stepfather. After all, she was the one constant in my parenting, the one person who engaged me in ideas like chivalry and manliness, who through her acquiescence to Maurice might have made it okay for me to see women, especially Black women (and to a lesser extent, Latina women) as ones in need of help, even when they decide not to take it.

And it may have made it okay for me to see myself as the victim in my incident with Dahlia in June 1987, when I accidentally (the first time), and later deliberately smacked her on her left butt cheek. Maybe I was the victim in a way, at least of my own deluded thought process. And there hasn’t been a time in the past twenty-nine and a half years in which I haven’t regretted that second, deliberate slap, in response to Dahlia accusing of thoughts I didn’t have, because my only obsession in 1987 was Phyllis. I’ve said and written this before, including in Boy @ The Window. To Dahlia, I am so sorry.

Beijing smog alert, Beijing, China, December 6, 2016. (http://ibtimes.com).

I may never be the perfect intersectional womanist feminist I’ve tried to be since I told my Mom to abort my future (and since deceased) sister in 1982. I still believe that professional women’s tennis players should play best-of-five-set matches at the Gram Slam tournaments. I think more women — particularly White women — should stop calling themselves feminists if their feminism stops when dealing with women of color or poor women in general. I think that most men who aren’t feminists are assholes. But I also know that, just like with racism (as now well noted by Ibram Kendi) and with narcissism (my next project, maybe), sexist ideas are as pervasive as smog in L.A. and Beijing. I don’t have to like it or accept it, but I do have to accept that I am a man, and I will make mistakes, including sexist ones. I will have to own up, and keep trying to do better.

Christmas is Carnage!

25 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Abundance Fables, Babe (1995), Capitalism, Carnage, Christmas, Excess, Family, Family Dysfunction, Faux Moralisms, History, It's A Wonderful Life (1946), Jesus, Mythology, Origins, Romans, Suicide

A white duck? goose?, December 25, 2016. (http://pinterest.com).

One of the funniest lines in Babe (1995) comes from Ferdinand the duck (who kind of looks like a goose) yelling just before Christmas Day, “Christmas means carnage!,” as he hoped to avoid A. Hoggett’s chopping block for making duck a l’orange. But really, that’s what this holiday has felt like for me for years.

Saying “Jesus is the reason for the season” doesn’t quite help, because that’s only partly true. All the actual evidence points to Jesus’ birthday being either in April or August, not the Winter solstice. The combination of a celebration of Jesus’ birth with either the Saturnalia festivals or the “birthday of the unconquered sun” (sol invictus) commemorations via Constantine and other Roman emperors (take your pick), led to Christmas becoming a December 25th tradition in Europe, the Middle East, and Northern/East Africa. And all of this became formalized by the end of the fourth century CE. So while I believe in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and what Jesus stood for while walking among humans, I don’t see Christmas as a strictly religious, spiritual, or Christian holiday.

The Queen’s Christmas tree, Windsor Castle (steel engraving), published in The Illustrated London News, 1848, in Godey’s Lady’s Book, December 1850. (Wetman via Wikipedia). In public domain.

That’s because of how the holiday came to dominate much of the world. The myth-making in the UK and the US between 1820 and 1870 helped turn an inconsistently celebrated holiday for Jesus’ birth, community, family, and some gift-giving into capitalism at its best and worst. That the Christmas tree didn’t become a common part of the holiday until Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert began taking an annual picture of themselves around a tree in 1850 was a function of German influences and British imperialism, not just the beauty of a decorated tree. Christmas cards didn’t become normalized until a German immigrant to the US thought he could make a fortune selling cards for people to mail each other, in the 1860s and 1870s. Congress didn’t make Christmas a federal holiday until 1870, and did so in an attempt to reunite the country around the common idea of Christmas as a form of family healing. Enacted five years after the Civil War and the loss of 620,000 lives, the Christmas holiday was one thing that formerly slave-owning Southerners and anti-slavery/anti-Black Northerners could agree on.

The British and later American influences on the world — military, geopolitical, economic, and popular culture — made the holiday into the trillion-dollar business that is today. You do not have to be Christian, Muslim, or even Jewish to celebrate the holiday, because while Jesus is important to tens of millions, it is not the unifying theme, and hasn’t been for decades. Commercials and other ads, endless rounds of shopping for the latest in high-tech electronics, the near-global slaughtering of spruce and fir trees, turkeys, chickens, sheep, goats, geese, and yes, ducks. That has been the main theme of Christmas for most, It’s A Wonderful Life’s (1946) annual re-broadcast on NBC notwithstanding.

The bridge scene in It’s A Wonderful Life, where James Stewart’s character’s was contemplating suicide, 1946. (http://salon.com).

I am not bah-humbugging out about the holiday, though. I just want to remind people to not wallow too much in the mythology they tend to believe is universal about the holiday, because most of what people believe about Christmas is at best only one-third true. The fact is, some folks do bug out this time of the year, from loneliness, from a daily reminder during this season that they are the have-nots in a holiday myth built on fables of abundance. And some people attempt to and actually succeed in checking out — some permanently — this time of the year. I should know, because I almost did thirty-three years ago.

And with social media, we reinforce these tensions of economic inequality, of moralistic exclusion, of reading more spiritual meaning into a holiday that has been a big driver of consumer capitalism for nearly 150 years. We essentially stick up middle fingers at those whose families are distant and dysfunctional. We basically blow raspberries at those who do not have enough resources to do much more than provide the basics for themselves and their loved one, with many more having even less. And we shun those who have the audacity to point out the hypocrisy that is the annual holiday season.

Christmas for me has only been a holiday for me because of my younger siblings (when they were just kids, between 1988 and 1996) and because of my wife and now teenage son. I went nearly a decade of my life without Christmas trees, cards, and gifts, a combination of being a Hebrew-Israelite and abject poverty between 1979 and 1988. So despite the temptations of being in this capitalist world and somewhat of it, Christmas is only a big deal to me because of kids and their vulnerability during this time of year. Otherwise, a moment of thanksgiving and prayer, well-prepared food (but not a Saturnalia feast’s worth), and being around those who truly love and care about me is really all I’ve ever needed. That folks may only get a facsimile of this, and only around holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas (if at all), is part of the carnage that is Christmas.

This, by the way, is what all of us need, every day, Christmas or not. So, Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, and Merry Kwanzaa, but let’s pay it forward, too!

Go Greyhound (only when you can’t afford anything else)

17 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, music, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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616 East Lincoln Avenue, Abuse, Chance Encounter, Damsel-in-Distress Syndrome, Dating, Friendships, Greyhound, Growing Up, Mother-Son Relationship, Pitt, Poverty, Psychological Scars, Self-Awareness, Winter Weather

Screen shot of December 1988 calendar, December 17, 2016. (http://timeanddate.com).

It amazes me sometimes when I look at a date on a calendar and not only know I was doing at that time years and decades ago. It is uncanny sometimes how similar the weather is on a specific date versus the same date and time from another year of my nearly forty-seven.

So it is with today, a cold and freezing wet day, not only here in the DMV, but also in Pittsburgh. It’s not as cold as it was on Saturday, December 17, 1988, when lake-effect snow was pouring down on Eastern Ohio, Western New York, and Western Pennsylvania. But dreary is dreary anyway. Despite the weather, I was grateful after making it through a semester that began in homelessness, continued in foodless-ness, and ended with new friendships and with enough money to hang out for the first time in well over a year. I had aced my courses in spite of it all, faced down my Mom in changing my academic and career course to history, and felt like Pitt, if not Pittsburgh, had become my home for the first time. Thirteen months after the second of two rebuffs from my high school classmate Phyllis, I was finally, finally, self-aware of my emotional and psychological scars enough to want to begin the long, painful, and difficult work of healing.

So why couldn’t I sleep the night before my first Greyhound trip from Pittsburgh to New York?

Greyhound Bus and blizzard, Vancouver, BC, Canada, circa 2015. (http://huffingtonpost.com).

There was something different about this, though. I couldn’t go to sleep, even though I was absolutely exhausted. I wasn’t supposed to catch a bus until eight o’clock that morning, but I gave up getting sleep at five-thirty. I went out in a snowstorm to catch a PAT-Transit bus downtown, and walked over from Grant to the Greyhound Bus terminal. I didn’t think we were going anywhere the way the snow was coming down, but we left on time for New York City. Good thing for us that the bus was a non-stopper between Pittsburgh and Philly.

On the bus and across from me was a young Black woman with a Brooklyn accent. She was as pretty as anyone I’d seen in the previous seven years. But I was so tired that I kept to myself. Despite our driver’s attempts to kill us all by going at near ninety an hour on the part of the Pennsylvania Turnpike that crossed the Allegheny Mountains, I slept for a couple of hours, playing Phil Collins, Peter Cetera, Brenda Russell and Kenny G throughout.

I suppose I was antsy about going back to New York, to Mount Vernon, to 616, to the life of constantly looking over my shoulder and looking at myself through the eyes of my former classmates and neighbors. After finally rediscovering the real me, and finally beginning the process of putting away the coping strategy, Boy-@-The-Window-me, I was going back into the third armpit of hell for the next nineteen days. Or, maybe it was my terrible taste in music (except for Phil Collins, of course)!

I also had unfinished business. Now that I realized I could trust myself again, at least in part, what did everything mean? Could I sustain friendships? Would I know how to date? Can I reconcile what kind of Christian I could be in a secular, scholarly world? What would being a history major mean for me by the time I graduated in 1991? Why does this woman across from my seat keep staring at me?

Once I woke up, I looked over at her and struck up a conversation. We talked from central Pennsylvania to Philly and from there to New York. She was a second-year medical student at Wayne State University in Detroit, and was in between boyfriends. We talked about our families and our growing up in and around the big city. She was the first person to tell me, “Anything above 125th Street is upstate, don’t’cha know?,” referencing Mount Vernon. It was a long and wonderful conversation, and if I hadn’t been embarrassed by 616, I would’ve asked her out. She didn’t give me the chance to think about it. She gave me her number and said, ‘You don’t have to call, but I really would like it if you did.’

Rhiannon Griffith-Bowman smokes an e-cigarette, San Rafael, CA, April 16, 2015. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images; http://washingtonpost.com).

I should’ve given her a call, but I didn’t. I was scared, not of her, but of being my better self while at 616. I had no idea how to do the dating thing when I had to be around my idiot stepfather and his size-54, 450-pound, greasy, abusive personage. Or my Mom, who spent every waking moment either singing God’s praises (literally) or hatching plots with my input to find another way to drive my stepfather out of 616 once and for all. Or my siblings, four of which were now between the ages of four and nine, and my older brother Darren, who might as well been a six-foot-five thirteen-year-old. My Mom and Maurice smoked up a storm. There were evenings where they would have farting contests, with legs lifted up in the air, as if they were part of a nasty, stupid comedy routine! There was no way I could handle the psychological code switching I’d have to do just to hang out, not at almost nineteen years old, and with a woman four years older than me.

Looking back, I realized I had deeply over-thought the situation, that I could’ve just had tunnel vision and done what I wanted to do, and not involve myself with any 616 drama that Xmas/New Year’s break. But I couldn’t do that, not yet. My sexist, damsel-in-distress syndrome was still more powerful than any of my other sexist, misogynistic, or even feminist tendencies. Even with all that, the first of my Greyhound bus trips was easily the most important one I went on.

A Story of My Life

24 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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American Exceptionalism, CMU, Doctorate, Giving Thanks, Homelessness, Horatio Nelson Stories, Joe Trotter, Pitt, Ron Slater, Scars, Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving 1988

One of dozen of rags-to-riches falsehoods from Gilded Age author Horatio Nelson (1832-1899). (http://www.pavillionpress.com).

That one of the not-so-small miracles of my young adult life from ’88 and me completing my dissertation process in ’96 are just a day apart on the November calendar every year is a story unto itself. Between a month before my nineteen birthday and a month before my twenty-seventh, I went from a semester of homelessness, lack of money for food and rent and living in a firetrap to finishing up a doctorate in history. If this were someone else’s story, I’d think that amazing, even almost unbelievable. At the time, I was so worn out and beat up by Joe Trotter, my dissertation committee, and the scars accumulated over that eight-year — really, twenty-year — period, that the idea of seeing myself as an American example of a Horatio Nelson story would’ve likely made me angry enough to spit blood.

Even now, I don’t and won’t see myself as exceptional. That’s that American bullshit about rags-to-riches stories, about being-a-credit-to-my-race tropes, that I’d be subscribing to here. What I really was back then was young and hungry. So young that I was willing to put up with all kinds of people’s baggage, taking near-minimum wage jobs, allowing people to call me out of my name, excusing racist comments and actions. All because I wanted the brass ring, for myself and for my family. I was already hungry, from years in poverty, from years without friendship bonds, from years of people not recognizing my, dare I say, brilliance. I had a chip on my shoulder, but it wasn’t because I was mad. I was after a righteous reckoning.

Two decades removed from those Carnegie Mellon days, and approaching thirty years since Ron Slater and my band of new friends kept me in money and food during Thanksgiving ’88 and beyond, and I am thankful. I am thankful that I am no longer either of those versions of myself. The one too afraid to ask for help, and the one too naive to realize that the America I believed in for so long never existed. I am thankful that I know more about asking for and providing help, about understanding that in this America, help might never arrive, at least when folks most need it. I am thankful mostly that I still have optimism, I still have drive, and I still have people who like and love me enough to remind me that a few of America’s giga-pixels are worth savoring.

Songs in the Key of Life at 40

18 Friday Nov 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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"As", "I Wish", "Love's in Need of Love Today", "Sir Duke", Black Genius, Blackness, Elaine, Growing Up, Love, Pitt, Prescience, Songs in the Key of Life (1976), Stevie Wonder, Uplift, Wendy

Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life LP/CD cover and sleeve, 1976, 1999. (http://genius.com).

In all the nuclear meltdowns in the last weeks of Election ’16 and in the asteroid impact of Donald Trump becoming the 45th president of the United States, I almost completely forgot about one of the modern era’s greatest milestones. At the end of September, Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life double-album turned forty years old!

My wife swears that this was Stevie Wonder’s last great production of genius, that virtually all the music he’s done since has either been merely “that’s nice” or complete schlock. But compared to Songs In The Key Of Life, at least 75 percent of the music produced since 1500 CE would be schlock! I mean, between “I Wish,” “Sir Duke,” “Love’s in Need of Love Today,” “Have a Talk with God,” “Village Ghetto Land,” and my all-time favorite, “As,” who could ask for anything more out of an album or an artist?

My fandom for Songs in the Key of Life has occurred over several stages since its release on September 28, 1976. I was nearly seven when the double-album dropped, and my life couldn’t have been messier. Between my Mom and my father Jimme’s rocky and violent divorce process, my own coping with sexual assault, and my Mom getting kidney sick and ending up at Mount Vernon Hospital as a patient for three months. Add to this having babysitters as primary caregivers during that time, and a second-grade teacher who wasn’t exactly sympathetic to Black kids who couldn’t settle down. It was a rough time, maybe even rougher than my Hebrew-Israelite years.

But songs from the double-LP were there, either thanks to WBLS-107.5 FM, or to people blasting songs off 8-tracks and cassette decks out of their cars in South Side Mount Vernon. Or, in the case of hanging out with my dad, because of his drinking buddies playing Stevie Wonder’s songs over and over again. For those first few years, “I Wish” and “Sir Duke” were my favorite songs from Songs in the Key of Life. That was probably because they were the only songs from the set I’d heard in full prior to 1982.

Then, with the Wendy crush/puppy love/mini-love of the spring and summer of ’82, one of the songs my mind conjured up was “As.” The song’s more than seven minutes long, and I barely knew the words “until the rainbow burns the stars out in the sky,” much less the entirety of the poetry of that song, much less its full meaning. But my heart knew how that song made me feel, and for matter, how Wendy made me feel, at least for a time. Once my stepfather Maurice began beating on me, my Mom lost her job, and we slipped into welfare poverty, though, Stevie Wonder’s greatest works slipped from my mind.

Nine years later, and it was my friend Elaine who reintroduced me to Songs in the Key of Life. It was during the spring and summer of ’91, when I both liked and loathed Elaine at the same time. It was also the summer before graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh, and it was like my mind and heart knew I needed to feed myself more than Phil Collins, Anita Baker, PE, and Salt ‘n Pepa. I borrowed Elaine’s set of cassette recordings from the genius’ 2-LP set, and spent parts of April, May, and June walking the 3.4 miles between my place in S’Liberty and my job at Western Psychiatric in Oakland listening to Stevie Wonder. I played Songs in the Key of Life straight through a half-dozen times. But of all the songs, “Love’s in Need of Love Today” and “Have a Talk with God” became two of my favorites. After the potential for a more serious relationship with Elaine faded, I gave her back her cassettes in August.

It would be another fifteen years before I finally got Songs in the Key of Life on CD. It was 2006, and I’d finally gotten me and my wife into the iPod era. Between that and my work on my memoir Boy @ The Window, I wanted to explore what made me me musically over the years. In remembering my Wendy-love days, I literally had to go through every song on Songs in the Key of Life again before I remembered “As” in full. I was shocked that after thirty years and so many other Stevie Wonder songs, that it had remained a melody in my heart and mind. It was in the summer of ’06 that “As” became my favorite song off this all-time great album(s).

Given what had occurred in the US over the past decade, and what has been happening to people of color in the US for as long as I’ve been alive, Stevie Wonder’s music from Songs in the Key of Life is always relevant, always uplifting, always life-affirming. Trust me, with Trump’s ascendancy to the White House, “the force of evil plans” will try “to make you its possession.” And yes, I did think “that love would be in need of love today,” because it wasn’t as if “hate” wasn’t going around “breaking hearts” and bodies during the Obama years.

But I’ll close with this, perhaps the most important stanza from “As.” This, to remind myself and all of you America’s may be in more trouble than ever before, but know that trouble has been with America longer than we’ve had the privilege of Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life as genius. Thanks to Wendy, Elaine, my former Mount Vernon neighbors, and unknown New Yorkers, for playing these songs for me over the years, whether they meant to or not.

We all know sometimes life’s hates and troubles
Can make you wish you were born in another time and space
But you can bet you life times that and twice its double
That God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed
So make sure when you say you’re in it but not of it
You’re not helping to make this earth a place sometimes called Hell
Change your words into truths and then change that truth into love
And maybe our children’s grandchildren
And their great-great grandchildren will tell
I’ll be loving you