On Being First or Only

 

Jackie Robinson

 

Chadwick Boseman as Jackie Robinson

This will not be a complete review of the newly released motion picture 42.  I have just returned from seeing it and I will say it is a good movie – good, but not great.  It tells the story of a man who was anointed by a white man to become the first black baseball player to play in America’s Major League Baseball.

I was born on November 4, 1944, so in spring of 1947, when Jackie Robinson penetrated the “color line” I was only 2 years old.  I was totally unaware of how much Mr. Robinson and I would have in common.

One of the gifts I was given at birth was an exceptional visual and auditory memory.  As the movie played, I remembered the Buick Roadmaster driving across the screen as the same model owned by my grandfather.  I remembered the names of Leo Durocher and Pee Wee Reese and Roy Campanella  coming across the airways in consecutive springs after I entered school.  If we behaved, the nuns would allow us to listen to the World Series as we sat, hands folded, at our pint-sized desks.  And I remembered the name Jackie Robinson.

For many young black movie goers, the way Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey went about accomplishing what no other had even attempted to do will be bizarre, even off-putting.  Rickey told Jackie Robinson he would have to be strong enough to stand up to the jeers, insults, racist taunts and rejections he was sure to receive, without fighting back.  To fight back would be to play into the racists’ presumptions that no Negro had the talent nor the temperament to succeed in MLB.

The portrayal of Robinson in 42 by actor Chadwick Boseman is spot on.  Yes, he does, in fact, resemble the Dodger star – same head shape, same abundant curly hair, same dazzling, toothy smile – but there is one scene in particular that I believe absolutely nails the emotional impact of being a first.  After enduring a snarling, epithet-hurling assault from the dugout of the Philadelphia Phillies via the mouth of none other than the team’s coach, Robinson leaves the field and has a monumental meltdown, alone and under the grandstand.  I felt his pain; man did I feel his pain. 

Anyone who has never been on the receiving end of public bullying will have an epiphany if he or she sees this movie.  Black, white, green or purple; if you sit through this scene, you will finally get what it feels like and you are not going to like it. 

I have written before of how I was raised to understand that in order for me to succeed in this white man’s world I would have to run circles around every  one of my white competitors.  I could not be ignorant; they expect that.  I could not be belligerent; they won’t stand for that.  I could not sound like a Negro; they preferred I speak like they do.  All this was instilled in my tiny, unfinished brain by the time I was enrolled as a first-grader in the neighborhood Catholic school.  I was the first black child so enrolled.

People like Jackie Robinson and me got lucky.  We came into the world equipped with special gifts that, if self-acknowledged, self-developed and nurtured by the adults around us, would allow us to endure all the strikes we had against us.

Jackie Robinson had to perform his way into the hearts of his teammates and the front office staff.  Whether he was a nice guy or a jerk was unknown to them.  All they knew was that he was black.  Not ready.  Too soon. “They” won’t accept him.

Until he started bringing money in.  Branch Rickey says this at the beginning of the movie:

Baseball is a business.  There is no black or white in business.  All money is green.

…or words to that effect.

As I was growing up, I remember how my mom used to brag to other people about me and my accomplishments.  “Lezlie was the first colored student at St. James School.”  “Lezlie was the first Negro at Proviso East High School to make the majorette squad.”  “Lezlie was the first Negro to be elected to the National Honor Society at her school.”  “Lezlie was the first African American student to attend her college.”

These were always said with great pride and were celebrated enthusiastically by the poor souls who had to listen to her boasting.  It often embarrassed me.  I felt resentful, for some reason.

Eventually I figured out where that resentment came from.  Nobody but me could fully understand the impact those “firsts” had on ME .  I didn’t have to endure anything like Jackie Robinson did, but there was a definite price to pay for those barrier-busting events. 

I remember being six years old and waking up in a hospital ward. The day before my beloved Collie Dog Snuffy had chased after a squirrel while I became airborne on the other end of his leash.  When I landed my left elbow struck a water meter hidden in the lush lawn of parkway in front of my grandparent’s house.  It fractured in three places; one bone poked itself through my skin and protruded sickeningly.  Surgery was required.

As I awoke I was confused and scared.  Where was I?  Where was my mother?  Why are there bars on my bed? 

I finally looked around me and saw I was in one of six beds in the ward, all of which were occupied by young children.  I learned later that most of them were suffering from crippling diseases or disorders, and I was the only one who would be ambulatory once the residual effects of ether wore off.  That fact alone would have been enough to earn the other kids’ hatred, and it did.  Now pile on the fact that I was the only one in the ward who was not white. 

Jealousy + Fear of the unknown = Rejection. And I was only six.

I remember being eleven years old.  As a Girl Scout I was eligible to attend a two-week sleep-away camp in Three Rivers, Michigan.  By this time I felt I carried a boatload of responsibility to “represent my race” in the most positive way possible.  Again, when I arrived at the camp, I found myself the only brown-skinned person in the place.  I remember wondering if the counselor who shared my first name was being nice to me because she had to or because she was just nice and was not caring about the color of my skin.  I’ll never know.

I remember being told I had been selected to participate in an experiment when I was in eighth grade.  The high school was choosing the 30 students with the highest IQs from all the feeder elementary schools.  They would be put in a special, accelerated curriculum and spend the four years studying together.  I was one of them.  My mother, of course, was beside herself with pride.  I, however, was ambivalent.

Fitting in had become a problem.  Many black kids treated me more like a pariah than anything else.  They didn’t know me because I went to the Catholic school and they all attended the segregated public school.  I was too light-skinned to be trusted because they assumed I thought I was better than they were.  Now, even when I was to attend the public high school with all of them, I was still going to be isolated from the mainstream.

On the other hand, I had few problems from the white kids.  I have an outgoing personality and am not afraid to initiate a conversation with anyone.  When I did that, for the most part, the white kids were receptive.  However… when it came to inviting me to their homes for out of school parties and sleepovers; well, that was another story altogether.  Many of those white kids learned their parents’ true feelings about race. Most had been taught that everybody is the same in God’s eyes, but their parents had neglected to tell them that it was their (the parents’) eyes that mattered when it came to who they would be allowed to befriend.

I can tell you that there were many nights when I would cry myself to sleep, praying to wake up either dark-skinned and obviously black or white-skinned and blonde haired.  Either way, things would have been a lot simpler.

Happily, there are very few barriers remaining to break through.  We have come a long way from the 1940s and 1950s that hosted my childhood.  But until our kids, regardless of race, understand what Jackie Robinson’s achievements really cost him, they will never know how great a hero he really was.  It takes extraordinary strength of character and conviction to walk alone in this life.  That Mr. Robinson had not just the talent, but the strength of character and conviction to lead the Brooklyn Dodgers to the 1947 World Series, is made abundantly clear in this movie.

For that alone, I recommend you see it.

What About Dr. Ben Carson?

 

The day I became aware of Dr. Benjamin Solomon Carson’s speech at the February 7, 2013 National Prayer Breakfast I was dumfounded.  Huh?  The same Dr. Ben Carson who struggled through his young life in a Detroit ghetto?  The same Dr. Carson whose mother was functionally illiterate and worked three jobs at a time to provide for her two young boys?

My mind wandered back a decade or more when I had the honor and pleasure of seeing Ben Carson deliver the keynote speech at one of the endless stream of gala fundraisers I was expected to attend in my position as Director of Community Relations in my corporation.  His star was rising rapidly then, thanks to his fascinating work in neurosurgery, especially his efforts to separate hopelessly conjoined twins.

His soft-spoken delivery of immensely hearable ideas about integrity, hard work and dedication earned him a rock-star-level standing ovation, and I was among the first on my feet.  The swell of pride in my chest felt awfully close to the sensation I’d get when my son hit a grand slam homer on the diamond.  Look at him, I thought.  Look at how much this bad-tempered, under-achieving little black kid has grown to contribute, not just to African American society, but to the worldwide community of people. 

So, now that this dark-skinned wunderkind has popped up on the political scene on what most black people and many white people would describe as “the wrong side of the issues,”  what are we to make of him?  How could he sell himself out like that?

Let me be perfectly clear.  I do  not understand how he or Michael Steele or Juan Williams or Justice Clarence Thomas or Pizza Man Herman Cain justify their politics to themselves.  When the rubber met the road in my own journey through life and I had to choose a team to cheer for, there was never a day that I considered myself a candidate for Republicanism.  But I do have some ideas about how someone like Dr. Ben Carson gets there.

Carson’s mother was one of those diamonds in the rough.  Despite her third-grade education, Mrs. Carson was a woman who believed in raising her kids, rather than being their friend.  Because she was determined to raise good citizens, even in the midst of the furor of the 1960s, she insisted that the obstreperous young Ben complete his homework before playing outside.  She forced him and his older brother to read two library books each week and submit to her a written report that she could barely read herself.  Along about the 5th grade, young Ben found himself actually enjoying the books he was reading and he began reading as much as he could get his hands on.

So Mama Carson, through her strict adherence to priorities she set for her boys, made a proverbial silk purse out of a sow’s ear when it came to Ben’s underachieving.  But, even as he achieved his way to the heights of a scientific career, Ben still struggled with an anger that bubbled just under the surface. 

According to Biography.com, “One time he tried to hit is mother with a hammer because she disagreed with his choice of clothes.  Another time, he inflicted a major head injury on a classmate in a dispute over a locker. In a final incident, Ben nearly stabbed to death a friend after arguing over a choice of radio stations. The only thing that prevented a tragic occurrence was the knife blade broke on the friend's belt buckle. Not knowing the extent of his friend's injury, Ben ran home and locked himself in the bathroom with a Bible.

Terrified by his own actions, he started praying, asking God to help him find a way to deal with his temper. He found salvation in the book of Proverbs in a passage that went, "Better a patient man than a warrior, a man who controls his temper than one who takes a city."

It was his faith, which was also instilled by his mother, that eventually led Carson to choose the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. This denomination of Christianity believes that Saturday (the Sabbath) is a holy day of worship and that there is an impending second-coming of Christ.  And it is his religion that has led Ben Carson to believe in the exceptionalism of the United States as a nation.

From the Christian Broadcasting Network 700 Club website:

Dr. Carson believes as a nation, America has been favored by God because we have acknowledged Him. The forefathers of our nation were clearly guided by Sovereign leadership when they knelt and prayed for wisdom at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Together they stood up and assembled a seventeen page document known as the Constitution of the United States of America. Our nation was founded on principles revealed to us in the Bible by a righteous and just God. These teachings began in the home and continued at school. In early public schools reading from the Bible was not only common, it was expected.

It is clear to me that Ben Carson is a philosophical conservative.  He believes in self-reliance and he has demonstrated it.  He believes in the “Christian fundamentals” that allegedly underlie the motives of the Founding Fathers as they constructed the American Constitution.  His religion, Seventh-Day Adventistism, values freedom as a core tenant of their faith. He’s a genuine pull-yourself-up-by-your-jockstraps-or-bra-straps kind of guy.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median income of a neurosurgeon is upwards of $200,000.  Load in the benefits and take into account Carson’s high profile, and his salary is easily topping $300,000. 

According to Forbes Magazine, Dr. Carson is a director on the boards of Costco and Kellogg.  They report Dr. Carson’s total compensation (cash and stock awards) as $221,509 and $229,024, respectively.

Not exactly part of the the infamous 47%, is he?

When I first started earning what my neighbors would have considered “real money” in my corporate job, I remember starting to see things like taxes and government programs a lot differently.  I wasn’t thrilled with the advent of Affirmative Action once I understood what it was designed to do.  In my youthful mind, I had overcome all the strikes against me – and there were many – and had succeeded.  Why shouldn’t everybody else?

I had worked very hard to even be considered eligible for that job.  I knew I had to continue to keep the focus of the white management on my achievements and off my skin color, which meant I needed to work harder and achieve more, jut to stay competitive with my colleagues.  And while I never rose to the level of income Dr. Carson has, I did surpass the magical $100,000 annual salary, which made me “rich” at the time among the average members of the black community.

So why have I never been a Republican, even after I fell in love with and married one?  What’s the difference between me and Dr. Ben Carson?

We have the identical work ethic.

We have the same Christian ethic, albeit I have discarded the religiosity of that ethic.

We have both been called sellouts by other members of the black community.

The difference seems to me to be the way in which we view those among us who did not receive the gifts Carson and I were given.  I believe that the racist foundation of the American society has hogtied a certain segment of the black population into a persistent generational proliferation of people who are not born with a clean slate, and who cannot even reach the playing field.  I believe that only some kind of draconian intervention will ever come close to obliterating that negative baggage that a black infant in the inner cities of America drags along with him when he takes his first breath.

Whereas at one time during my journey I did believe that everybody had the same chance at success as I did, I no longer believe that.  For me, my choice of political ideology has been a matter of priorities.  While I understand how and why a person of Dr. Carson’s achievements could prioritize fiscal issues above social ones, I cannot.

There are many issues, especially when it comes to the economy and fiscal policies, about which I tend to agree more with Republicans than I do Democrats.  I think we should have a balanced budget.  I think we should not spend more money than we bring in in revenues. I think we need to weed out the frauds who milk government programs inappropriately.  I think we should force government employees to work, and not exhibit the slacker attitudes many of them do.  If all of those thoughts make me a fiscal conservative, so be it.

But where Dr. Carson and I apparently differ is in our understanding of the insidious long-term effects of institutionalized and societal racism and how those effects need to be addressed.  Is he a sellout?  I don’t think so, any more than I consider myself one.  He has earned his fame and fortune, and while I’m sure he had to negotiate the racist waters even in the medical profession and sometimes compromise his personal principles, his accolades are truly the fruits of his own labors.

What I do think, though, is that Dr. Carson’s priorities are screwed up.  

I’m Thinking, But Nothing’s Happening

 

I’m thinking it is pretty pathetic to feel as if one has said all one has to say about everything, but that’s how I feel. 

My writing get up and go got up and went about two weeks ago.  I refuse to believe it has anything to do with recent medical issues.  Those kinds of things usually tweak the urge to write.  It did for a minute, but now…

Not even SCOTUS and its current activities have gotten my fingers itching to attack a keyboard.  Not even all the disgusting and demoralizing incidents of children shooting infants in the face and kidnappings of young girls have lifted the malaise in my head.

I’m thinking it must have something to do with the protracted demise of Open Salon and the slow traction Our Salon has experienced.  There was a time when I’d wake myself up in the morning with an idea for a blog post that half-wrote itself while I slept.  Of course that was mostly back when all the veterans were still there and I was busy building a readership.  A new commenter showing up on a comment thread was incentive enough to get the words to flow.

I miss that so much.  I miss the connection to so many people who have gradually disconnected.  I miss the excitement of having one of my posts selected by the editor.  I miss the different points of view on some of my more controversial pieces, even the ones that stood the hairs on the back of my neck on end.

The flame wars and dustups were monumental.  I seldom participate in them because they are counterproductive, but from time to time I would lurk on the edges and watch.  Oh, the variety of ways there were to tell someone that they are full of shit!  It could be downright entertaining.  Or upsetting.

Remember all the creative open calls?  One-hundred-word challenges.  Letters to our 17-year-old selves.  I even dabbled in fiction in response to an invitation to do so, and I’m not that into writing fiction. 

My mother has a favorite response to everything:  This too shall pass.

Really?

I’m thinking that might not work this time.

Falling Into Place

 

I woke up this morning feeling groggy and seriously unmotivated, but I had made a commitment for 10 a.m., and a commitment for me is like an Eleventh Commandment.

It only took the party in my mouth that toothpaste creates to perk me up.  Even the ever-present headache I felt when I first woke up was on its way back into hiding. 

A sudden burst of energy precipitated a flurry  of loading and unloading the laundry machines, folding and hanging clean clothes, dusting the bedroom furniture and getting dressed far ahead of schedule.  I was downright perky.

I grabbed my cell phone,my laptop and the plate from my bedtime snack and called Coqui, who was also a bit groggy today.  I took the first five steps down to the first floor of my townhouse with a lot of pep in my step.  This felt like a great day coming up.

Out of nowhere came a dizziness so sudden it literally sat me on my behind.  I kept trying to grab for the railing but felt as if I was spinning too fast to get a grip.  Everything in my line of vision was undulating and spinning with simultaneous nauseating speed.  The plate went bouncing down the stairs along with the dog, who was oblivious to my vertiginous state. I was conscious of the laptop tucked under my free arm – the one I bought only seven days ago – but I wasn’t at all sure I was going to be able to prevent it from joining Coqui and the plate.

Instead of abating, it got worse.  The part of my mind that wasn’t involved in trying to hold on to the railing and the laptop was running through the list of things that could be happening.  Heart?  No history.  Inner-ear disturbance?  Yup, maybe.  I had had long periods of time years ago when I had to take Dramamine just to get through the day.  The doctor dubbed it an inexplicable inner-ear disturbance.

As I laid my head back on the carpeted stairs trying not to allow the nausea to win, I remembered an incident about nine months ago as I was out walking.  Some arborists were working on one of the gigantic oaks down the street.  For whatever reason, it fascinated me that particular morning and I stopped to watch.  One man was so high up in the tree I had to tilt my head as far back as it would go in order to watch.  Somewhere between 60 and 90 seconds later my neck grew tired and I returned it to its full upright position, tugged on Coqui’s leash and took a step in the direction we were headed. 

The next step sent me careening diagonally across the street, flailing around for something to grab onto.  I stumbled to one knee at the same time I reached a parked car, against which I braced my body.  The wave of nausea consumed all my concentration, never mind the car coming down the street.  To say I was terrified is the mother of all understatements.

I crawled to the curb and sat.  Coqui looked at me with her licorice black eyes, head tilted to one side like the RCA Victor dog.  I was exhausted, breathing heavily and my skin was clammy.  Several minutes passed before I felt brave enough to try to stand.  After standing, I took one very tentative step, then another, until I believed the episode was indeed over.  I self-diagnosed:  must have cut off the blood supply to my head holding it back so long.

My doctor could only tell me that it wasn’t heart-related, after she did her examinations.  “Maybe it is a recurrence of that inner-ear disturbance you had all those years ago.”

Now I know it was that bitch Eminess*.  Little by little, I am beginning to recognize just how early in my life her symptoms starting interfering with my life.  Even when the neurologist asked me if I had any neurological problems earlier in life, I failed to remember Mr. Vertigo’s widely-spaced but pretty unforgettable visits. 

I also forgot the times when I was very young I would complain about a headache.  “Children don’t have headaches,” my adults would respond.  But I did.

The only residual effect of this morning’s visit is fear.  I didn’t walk the dog; just let her out in the yard.  That’s unheard of for me, but I didn’t know whether the spell was another isolated occurrence or if this time it would be the first of a series, more closely spaced.

I got through all of these events, obviously.  But before, I was able to dismiss them, put them into the archives of life’s little bumps.  Not anymore. Our friend Abrawang warned me I would want to blame every little thing on Eminess.  But I did my homework online and I called the doctor.  Of course, he couldn’t give me 100% assurance that it was or wasn’t, but I could almost see him shaking his head in the affirmative.

The symptoms, I will learn to handle.  The not knowing what’s coming next?  Not so much.

Eminess and Me

 

I have given her a name.  My new constant companion, Multiple Sclerosis or “Eminess.”  (Sorry Mr. Marshall Mathers or Eminem)

Sharing my personal business with others has never been a big deal for me. I’d rather be an open book than locked up alone with my own thoughts.  That’s why I don’t ever hide my age.  Who would I be kidding?  But illness is different, somehow.

I remember being advised by my manager to never reveal the fact that I was taking anti-depressants to co-workers.  He said they would think of me as “crazy” and would regard me differently.  He was probably right about that, but I did share the fact with a few close friends.  It wasn’t as if it would be news to them that I was battling depression.

As unpopular as it is to admit, I really do care what people think of  me.  I’d much rather be thought of as strong than as feeble.   “Healthy” and “in great shape” are certainly preferable to “fragile” and “ill.” 

When I started collecting the many symptoms that led to my recent preliminary diagnosis of MS, I would off-handedly mention the symptom-du-jour and immediately dismiss it as just another challenge aging brings.  That I am aging was obvious and could not be denied, but it is something that everybody does, whether they like it or not.

However, when I began to suspect, subconsciously, that these events might be related, I noticed myself becoming more reticent.  I only shared how I was feeling if somebody asked, and then I would more often than not sugar-coat the answer.  I enjoy the comments I get about my relatively youthful appearance and mobility, and I didn’t want to bring any attention to evidence to the contrary.

One of the reasons I started the current round of doctor’s visits was the struggle I was having in my exercise class.  Six months ago, I was able to do everything asked of us and with great energy.  Sure I would get sweaty and short of breath, but I was able to do the chair pushups, the squats, the kicks and the bends non-stop.  Now, the quads, the front muscles of my thighs, were becoming totally fatigued about half-way through the reps. I would have to stop, give them a few seconds to recover, and begin again.

Then one day the woman behind me asked me if I was okay, because she noticed I wasn’t as “into it” as I usually was.

I hated that.  I hated that it was showing, but I hated it more because I didn’t seem to be able to to anything about it.  I told the woman I thought I was coming down with the flu or something.  Yeah, right.

Last Monday I decided it was necessary to share the truth with the instructor, who was also jokingly getting on me about slacking up or staying out late partying.  I also told my workout buddy, a woman I met when I joined that class who has a similar outlook on life and a high energy level.  I did that because I knew she was becoming concerned.  In both cases, I asked them not to tell anyone else and to please not treat me any differently.

On Tuesday morning, Eminess entered the gym before I did.  The instructor was nicer and paid more attention to what I was or was not doing.  My buddy kept glancing out of the corner of her eye to see if I was getting wobbly.  She whispered, “Don’t try to overdo it!”  When the time came to move a chair in place to do certain exercises, she sprang into motion to get one for me…which I nicely declined.

I suppose I will have to make room for Eminess, a companion I didn’t choose and don’t particularly like.  She seems to want to take center stage and steal the scenes. 

As I lay in the MRI machine for forty minutes yesterday trying to ward off the panic of claustrophobia, I made myself laugh with a thought.  What if I really don’t have MS?  What if this image completely negates those lesions on my brain, the tingling in my face and feet?  Wouldn’t that be great?  I could go back to the gym and do my best impression of Roseanne Roseannadanna:  Never mind.

Then I could kick that freakin’ Eminess to the curb! I already hate the bitch.

Poverty, Atlanta-Style

 

Atlanta is a city unlike any other I have visited or lived in, at least when it comes to the visibility of poverty. 

Chicago has two complete “Sides” almost dedicated to the impoverished: The West Side and the majority of The South Side. People familiar with the layout of the city don’t find it difficult at all to avoid looking at the conditions under which far too many children are expected to survive. 

The same is true of Milwaukee – or at least it was when I lived there in the late 1960s and early 70s.  “Bad” neighborhoods (read: poor and crime-ridden) could be entirely circumvented with a little knowledge and a good road map. The only difference is which of the four “Sides” is which.

When I first came to Atlanta in 1993, I was almost amused by what the locals branded “bad neighborhoods.”  There are no tall tenement buildings, replete with gangways and pulley-operated clothes lines with someone’s underwear flapping in the breeze.  The “projects,” where many poor African Americans and Latinos were warehoused in structures like Techwood Homes, the nation’s first public housing complex opened in1936, were nothing like Chicago’s high-rise, cement structures, which seriously resembled the prisons many of their occupants’ sons and daughters would wind up inhabiting.  Atlanta’s were lower to the ground and sprinkled liberally throughout the city. 

When Atlanta Housing Authority CEO Renee Glover took over in the '90s, Atlanta had a higher percentage of its population living in public housing projects than any other U.S. city and it had more than its share of the crime that those projects attract.  Ms. Glover knew something drastic had to be done to stop the drug trafficking and gang violence that was rampant in the projects, so she followed the lead of other major U.S. cities and began demolishing the blighted complexes.  In 2009, Atlanta became the first major U.S. city to eliminated 100% of its public housing.

During the three generations of public housing in Atlanta, many cultural and policy factors combined to change the face of poverty inside the inner city.  White flight knew no class boundaries. Poor whites exercised what little privilege they had and relocated into newer public housing in outlying neighborhoods and suburbs.  As a result, aside from a handful of homeless, there are very few areas of the inner city where one can find poor whites.  And the word “poor” in Atlanta-proper (as opposed to the broader and more inclusive Metro-Atlanta) has come to be synonymous with “black.”

Which is also why the word “criminal” has become synonymous with “African American male.” 

The sad side of this story is the question, “Where did all those project residents go?”  Well, they moved into privately-owned slum dwellings concentrated in different parts of the same city.  The crime moved with them.  The front-end planning of Ms. Glover’s attempt at a solution was sorely lacking.

What makes inner-city living in Atlanta so unique, at least from my perspective, is the way pockets of severe poverty and pockets of affluence abut one another, at times with a drastic change in scenery after traveling only a few blocks.  To illustrate, the zip code I live in has the following statistics as of 2010:

Residents with income below the poverty level in 2010:

This zip code: 15.3%

Whole state:  16.5%

Median home value: $280,200

Less than three blocks away from my home is a different neighborhood with a different zip code.  This is where Martin Luther King, Jr. lived and worked.  It is where the MLK Center is located.  Here are its stats:

Residents with income below the poverty level in 2010:

This zip code: 29.7%

Whole state: 16.5%

Median home value: $229,786

It is nearly impossible to ignore the visible poverty in neighborhoods that ring multi-million dollar projects such as the Ted Turner Stadium, The Georgia Dome, Georgia Tech, and the Georgia World Congress Center; not to mention, the golden dome of the State Capitol.  When Atlanta won the bid to host the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, in spite of the piles of money spent on readying the parts of the city that would be easily visible by non-residents, some of the poorest neighborhoods just out of view were virtually ignored.

The Atlanta University Center, where the cities most prestigious historically black colleges – Morehouse, Spelman and Clark-Atlanta University – struggles on a daily basis with the crime that emanates from the surrounding impoverished neighborhoods.  Even the venerated Georgia Tech has suffered a rash of robberies and muggings at gunpoint.

City officials haven’t come close to eliminating the ubiquitous presence of the homeless.  Whether attending a performance at the Atlanta Symphony or queued up at the entrance of the latest night spot for young clubbers, it is a rare occasion not to encounter a street person.  Some are relatively well-dressed and well-spoken, some spin such pitiful yarns it makes you feel guilty to have the means to seek entertainment, and some are downright scary. 

The elaborate system of Interstate interchanges in downtown Atlanta have created a perfect spot for “urban camping.”  This man, known as “Geechie” finds the nooks and crannies under the overpass open enough to provide safety from other campers, but out of view a passing authorities.

 

 

 

 

In a slide-show story printed in Atlanta’s popular free newspaper Creative Loafing last November Geechie was described this way:

… a Charleston, S.C. native, has been homeless for about 12 years. He sleeps “on top of 15 blankets and under 15 blankets” in a little nook next to a bridge where he’s unlikely to be noticed.

In the next five years, Geechie said he’d like to have his teeth fixed, get his own apartment, and own a trucking company.

Those of us who have the wherewithal to access this post might sometimes think of ourselves as “poor.”  Next time I start feeling that way I am going to ask myself “Compared to what?”

It’s All In My Head

 

Those who know me well understand I spend the vast majority of my time inside my own head.  It’ not, I don’t think, because I am self-absorbed so much as I am self-curious and self-driven.

Last week I received the news that there is an 80 percent probability that I have Multiple Sclerosis. It wasn’t exactly unexpected news, albeit news I would prefer to have never received. MS tends to run in families; my mother has MS; her first cousin died from complications of MS; and another first cousin’s son was diagnosed five years ago.  

For years I have pursued the cause of a laundry list of seemingly unrelated symptoms, a journey that has sent me into the hallways of far too many medical specialties.  Daily headaches. Nerve pain in first one leg, then the other…seven years later.  Both disappeared.  Both feet have been totally numb for the past seven years.  Sometimes the numbness climbs its way all the way to my knees…once all the way to my thighs.  And before I could get the scheduled neurological tests done for that, the numbness traveled to my arms and hands.

As crazy as it may sound, I was relieved to finally hear that the problem is all in my head.  My brain is misfiring, failing to get complete signals to my limbs and sometimes my optic nerves. That’s happening because an auto-immune disorder is causing my body to destroy the covers of my nerves. Nobody really knows exactly why that happens.

 

So, I did not fall apart from the new diagnosis.  I have watched my mother cope with her crazy quilt of “episodes” for 44 years.  I knew I had no choice in the matter, that I would have to do the same.  And I am a tough old bird who refuses to allow much of anything to get the best of me.

Or so I thought.

I wasn’t prepared for what has been happening in the six days since I got the news.  Before the diagnosis, when I was at my workout class and the muscles in my thighs seemed to be weakening, I gave myself a bruising self-talk that included words like wuss and sissy.  When one week a few months ago I could barely walk a block without stopping because my legs felt like I was wearing concrete blocks on my feet, I remember being a bit concerned and wondering if, in fact, I could no longer stay in denial about whatever it was going on in my body, but I still forced myself to keep on going, telling myself “it was all in my head.”

Now I have another problem.  Now I KNOW why my legs are not working properly, but I still don’t want to give in.  I still feel like a wuss unless I force myself to make it through the dreaded stand-and-sit-in-the-chair-40-times-in-a-row portion of the rigorous workout designed for seniors.  Is that a good thing or am I being unreasonable?  If I accept the illness and allow myself to do less reps, will that be laziness or simply reality?  If I don’t fight every step of the way, might not the disease progress even faster?

I wasn’t prepared for this dilemma at all.  I seem to be more tuned in to the symptoms than I was before.  Well, before, I was trying to convince myself they weren’t there!  That they were all in my head.