Tag Archives: community

Connection

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Saturday was an incredibly full day.  It began with breakfast at one of our “regular” places.  I ordered what I “usually” order.  Later that morning I sat in a church sanctuary, celebrating the life of a longtime friend who finished her race in this life and crossed over into eternity. There was wonderful “catch up” conversation with a friend over a lunch that extended into the afternoon.  Then the spontaneous decision to drive to another town to catch the play “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”, and finally back home to crash on the couch with a dog who thinks I hung the moon.

As I snuggled with the dog I replayed the day.  Not just the time spent, but the emotions felt.  I thought about the gift of connection. In the course of my day I had experienced…

  • the connection and comfort of routine.  Those things we do over and over, day in and day out, that ground us in the familiar.
  • the connection of remembering and celebrating one who enriched and changed us in this life on her way to the next.
  • the connection of friendship, of shared space and conversation that warms like an old flannel shirt.
  • the connection of laughter as I joined a community of strangers to watch a play.
  • the connection of a pet who loves me without judgement or hesitation.

Resting there on the couch I felt profoundly thankful for the connections of the day.  I was glad to be reminded of the connections across the years and the ways they had challenged and sustained me.  I hoped to step into the week ahead more mindful of the space we share and our impact, for good or bad, on each other.

And then Tuesday came.  April 19.  The sixteenth anniversary of the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.  Tuesday came and reminded me of the powerful connection of shared experience. If you were living in Oklahoma on April 19, 1995, you probably remember where you were and what you were doing at 9:02 when the Murrah Federal Building was bombed.  Shared experience invites us to rise above what separates us.  On April 19, 1995, an act intended to destroy led us to common ground and gave us a reason to connect.  We connected then to rescue, to grieve, to grow, and eventually to celebrate our resilience.

Celebrate connection!   The small and the large of it.  The quiet and the loud of it.  The joy, and even the pain of it.  Most of all celebrate the timing of it and choose to connect now, with family and friends, with occasional acquaintances, with total strangers.  Connect with those like you, and not, with God’s creatures, and with yourself.  Look for the “tie that binds” and just connect.

He had a dream.

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This day of remembering Martin Luther King, Jr. has stirred memories of my own “growing up” before, during, and since the civil rights movement.  It surprises me when I remember that every school I attended from first grade until I graduated from high school in 1967, was segregated.  College was my first experience of getting to learn with people of color.  The diversity was not as balanced as it should have been, but at least it was present.

Fortunately for me, I had other opportunities during childhood to cross the lines of color that were so clearly drawn at that time.  My earliest memory of an influential African-American in my life came before I started school.  My dad went into business for himself, opening a full service gas station.  His only employee was a black man that everyone called Bourbon.  I loved to watch him as he worked.  I loved drinking a cold bottle of Grapette pop from the vending machine while listening to him tell stories and laugh.  When he laughed I laughed, and all seemed right with the world.

There was a family owned restaurant next to my dad’s station.  We ate there a lot.  Bourbon did too.  We ate in the front, Bourbon in the back, with the other black folks.  That back room is permanently engrained in my memory.  We walked through the “colored” room to get to the front.  Who knows how many times I passed Bourbon sitting in his room while on my way to mine.  I wasn’t more than four years old and even then I knew that arrangement wasn’t right, didn’t make sense, and I felt embarrassed that I was a part of it.

Then there was Eddy, my grandfather’s only ranch hand.  When at my grandparents I worked beside Eddy, feeding cattle, herding cattle, and listening to he and my grandfather talk cattle.  There wasn’t a “colored” dining room at the Lazy A.  Eddy sat at my grandparent’s kitchen table with us when he ate.

Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream. . .

“that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

He spoke those words in August, 1963.  In December, 1960, I went with my best friend and her mother to the annual Christmas parade in downtown Tulsa.  I was in the 6th grade, full of untested opinions about how the world should operate in regard to color.  The streets were crowded with families standing in the cold waiting to be ushered in to the holiday season.  As the parade began to pass I became aware of a young woman standing beside me.  She had two little girls with her, maybe three years old and much too short to see over the crowd.  She held one for a while, then the other, back and forth, up and down.  It didn’t seem like a huge gesture, just a sensible one as I asked if I could hold one of the girl’s while she held the other so both could see.

The parade ended.  The young woman thanked me again.  I said good-bye to the little girls.  I didn’t think I had taken a stand across the color line.  I just knew how much fun it had been to enjoy the parade through the eyes of children.  The fun ended when we returned to my friend’s house and sat down at the kitchen table to eat.  They began to make jokes about what I had done as though it was inconceivable that a white person would do such a thing, and that I must be uninformed or stupid for having chosen to help.  I can still recall the sickening, angry feeling that my “best” friend was behaving this way and her parents, adults I trusted, were encouraging her by participating in the teasing.  I was glad to get back home to the safety and freedom of my own family’s kindness and acceptance.

I look back on that experience and am reminded that it is often the children who take the first step toward good.  I was a child then.  It was years later before I defined my actions as courageous.  At the time I just thought of them as right.  There is a child nearby willing to be kind, willing to see something beautiful in others, willing to step toward what is right.  That child is also watching you.  When the first, courageous step is taken, let’s make sure we’re not standing in the way.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  MLK

Thank you Dr. King.

What’s in a name?

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The radio host was giving the latest update on the BP oil spill in the gulf.  He reviewed the numbers…of gallons of oil, dollars lost, estimates of damage, benefits owed to those affected, and the lives lost.  Then the show took an unexpected turn.  The host began to list the names of the men who died while working on the Deep Water Horizon.

He spoke about each man, painting a brief, personal portrait of his life.  He talked about wives and fiancés, children, unborn to young adults.  He told about interests and hobbies.  He gave witness to each life and the tremendous void left by each death.  I felt the weight of each loss as it spread beyond family to friends, to communities, to a nation, and to me.

I realized that in spite of the months of “late breaking news” about the BP catastrophe, I had only heard these men mentioned a handful of times since the day they died, and only as a group of 11 dead.  This was the first time I knew them individually, by name, with a life story.  I was embarrassed and ashamed by the lack of attention given to this loss.

Numbers are important.  They tell us the size of impact, whether we’re talking about the casualties of war, the rise in poverty, the dead after Katrina, or how many victims of domestic violence are housed in shelters.  Numbers tell us something must be done.  But numbers don’t speak to our heart.

Names are different than numbers.  I’ve known since April 20, 2010, that 11 workers died in the BP explosion.  But it wasn’t until I heard their names and stories that they stepped off the news page and became real.  These men who had lived, worked, loved, and died are now my loss too.

If numbers tell us something must be done, names tell us we must do something.  Names tell us that each number represents a person, a history, a story not unlike our own.  We are not separate in our moments of joy, not isolated in moments of loss. Ernest Hemingway knew it when he wrote:

“Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

On April 20, 2010, eleven men died while working on the Deep Water Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.  Their names are listed below.  Their loss calls us to care and to act, for their deaths are our loss too.

 

 

Jason Anderson, 35, Bay City, TX, father of two.
Aaron Dale “Bubba” Burkeen, 37, Neshoba Co, MS, survived by his wife Rhonda and two children.
Donald Clark, 48, Newellton, LA, survived by his wife Sheila, two sons, and two daughters.
Stephen Ray Curtis, 40,  Georgetown, LA, survived by his wife and two teenage children.
Gordon Jones, 28, Baton Rouge, LA, left wife, Michelle, who was three weeks from delivery of a daughter.
Roy Wyatt Kemp, 27, survived by his wife Courtney, and two children.
Karl Keppinger, Jr., 38, Natchez, MS, veteran of Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, father of one child.
Keith Blair Manuel, 56, Gonzales, LA, father of three daughters, avid LSU fan.
Dewey Revette, 48, State Line, MS, 29 years experience drilling.
Shane Roshto, 22, Franklin Co, MS, survived by his wife, Natalie, and a toddler son.
Adam Weise, 24, Yorktown, TX, youngest of four children, started working offshore after graduating from high school.

Maybe it is that simple.

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A few years ago I joined a group of women at a “thank you for your commitment and service to education” brunch at the school district superintendent’s home.  There were administrators, teachers, support staff, most with many years of service educating our children.  We enjoyed good food, good conversation, and the connection that comes with a shared purpose.

I said my “good-byes” and stood to leave.  On my way to the door one of my colleagues said, “Before you go, give us some words of wisdom.  You always have such good things to say.”  There are a dozen reasons why a sudden, unexpected request requiring a quick, verbal response turns my brain into a black hole and my mouth inoperable that I won’t go into now.  All the visiting had stopped and all eyes were on me.  I think I said something like a profound “Uh……….” which bought me a little time.  And then it came to me.  A question I had been asking myself almost daily for the past several months.  So I said:

“Nearly every day before I walk into school I ask myself, ‘I wonder what would happen if we were all just nice to each other today?'”

Everyone smiled, made a few comments, and I made my exit.  The question stayed with me.  I hear it in my head at work, at board meetings, listening to the news, observing parents and their children, and listening to political candidates.  What if it really is that simple?  As simple as being nice to each other.  How might things change if we were just nice to each other. . .

  • in discussion and debate
  • in difference and disagreement
  • during conflict and confrontation
  • with adversaries and antagonists
  • with family, friends, and even strangers

Perhaps Plato had pondered this question when he said, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

The Essential Conversation

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I love books.  My idea of a great time is going from section to section in a bookstore, the bigger the better, looking for titles and covers that spark my curiosity or speak to an interest or need.  I have been known to buy a book because a title caught my eye and I trusted the contents to be just as interesting.  “The ESSENTIAL Conversation:  What Parents and Teachers Can Learn From Each Other”, by sociologist, teacher, and parent, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot was one of my best “title” purchases.  If the title hadn’t caught me, the introduction would have sold the book.  The author wrote:

“I believe that for parents there is no more dreaded moment, no arena where they feel more exposed than at the ritual conferences that are typically scheduled twice a year–once in the fall and once in the spring–in schools. . . it is also the arena in which they [teachers] feel most uncertain, exposed, and defensive, and the place where they feel their competence and professionalism most directly challenged.”

After a quick read, the book went on a shelf until a few months ago.  As school came to a close I thought back over nine months of encounters with students, parents, and teachers.  I explored ways to make those times more helpful, more effective.  I found myself thinking of how our interactions as parents and teachers are occasionally like angry ex spouses, anxious and defensive.  We know that children often get lost and compromised in the crossfire of divorce.  I began wondering how often children are also hurt by our failure to work together as families and schools, parents and teachers.

Parents and teachers are two tremendous resources with the power to impact our children and society.  The times I have watched adults step past their anxiety and uncertainty to talk to each other in a parent/teacher conference in order to help a child succeed in school have excited me. Unfortunately we often avoid the encounter completely.   Or we approach our meeting as adversaries, becoming defensive and territorial in ways that rob us of the very thing we want, to be a part of preparing our children for a healthy, successful adulthood.

I thought of “The ESSENTIAL Conversation”, and what an appropriate, meaningful title it is.  I pulled the book off the shelf and began to read again, more thoughtfully this time.  I reviewed my own school experience trying to imagine my parent’s “conversations” with teachers.  I recalled sitting in the parent chair across from teachers as we discussed my children’s performance and progress.  I wondered if both the teachers and I were worried that we would be “blamed” for the problems and would have to give up all credit for the successes.  I took some comfort in Lawrence-Lightfoot’s thoughts:

“From my point of view there is no more complex and tender geography than the borderlands between families and schools.”

“. . . my own hard-earned wisdom as an educator and social scientist concerned about these matters did not prepare me for the depth of emotion and drama I felt in parent conferences.”   “I always suspected that other parents were experiencing some version of my anguish, but that they too were struggling alone and making it up as they went along.”

“I could also tell that teachers had their own deep concerns,  their own sense of exposure and vulnerability.  And I knew that most of them had not been adequately prepared in their professional training programs to build relationships with families as a central part of their work. . .”

We are less than one month into a new school year.  How can we take advantage of all our family/school encounters in ways that encourage our children to learn and enhance their learning environment?

Whether you are teacher, parent, or both:

  • Remember this “conversation” isn’t about you, it’s about your children.  Learn to calm your own anxiety so it doesn’t get in the way of working together.
  • Believe that sharing your observations with that other adult will allow you both to discover solutions to problems and will magnify the celebration of success.
  • Recognize each other’s efforts.  Kudos help us know we “did good” and motivate us to do more.
  • Be willing to start the conversation and to keep it going even when you disagree.  Tolerate the discomfort for growth.

For schools:

  • When you say parents are welcome at school, really mean it.
  • Encourage family involvement and look for creative ways to make that possible.

For families:

  • Be present in your child’s school experience.
  • Know their teachers and their curriculum.
  • Attend school activities.
  • Communicate with teachers in person, by phone, and in writing.

“The ESSENTIAL Conversation” considers “how the tiny drama of parent-teacher conferences is an expression of a larger cultural narrative.”  For me it is a reminder that the “tiny drama” of parent/teacher conferences isn’t so tiny after all.   You be the one that begins the conversation.