Everything's Gonna Be All Right

Rise up this mornin',


Smiled with the risin' sun,


Three little birds


Pitch by my doorstep


Singin' sweet songs


Of melodies pure and true,

Sayin', ("This is my message to you-ou-ou:")



Singin': "Don't worry 'bout a thing,


'Cause every little thing gonna be all right.


Singin': "Don't worry (don't worry) 'bout a thing,


'Cause every little thing gonna be all right!"

~ Bob Marley

I had planned to write about a different topic, but life has a way of directing one’s thoughts and that is what happened to me this week. Everyone in my circle is experiencing stressful times, and as a fixer and a pleaser, their stress has affected me.

No matter how co-dependent I am and how much I want to take the reins and steer the horse back on course, I’ve learned that is not my most useful role.  So I’ve had to learn how to assist people in other ways.

The thing about life is that things happen and even the best prepared of us can be knocked down on occasion.

Sometimes I think how rote our lives are. Up at a certain time every morning, same morning routine just about every day, off to work or something else, bills to pay, laundry to wash and fold, groceries to buy, lawns to mow, bathrooms to clean, this TV show on this night, another one the next night, books to read and new ones added to the list, exercise, nutritional meal, splurge meal, a movie, or a concert or a road trip on the weekend. Then something happens that snaps us upright and out of the mundane. No one said life was going to be easy, and sometimes it’s downright boring and that’s not easy either. One isn’t better than the other, it seems.

Right now I know people who are out of work (some for a few years), who struggle to pay bills, who lost a loved one, who have an illness, who are making a life transition, and others who just feel overwhelmed. I feel for each of them, wish I could help them better, and wonder when it will be my turn.

A couple of weeks ago, Ronald and I went out for dinner. That’s something that has become rather common for us as empty nesters in a new location (I hate to keep calling it new when we’ve been here five years) where we can’t seem to find friends. As we approached the restaurant, there was a man sitting on the bench. I noticed he watched us as we got closer and closer.

“Hey, you look like a nice couple,” he said. “I don’t want no money, but I sure could use a ride.”

My shyness made me retreat a step. Ronald glanced at me then spoke.

“Where do you need to go?” he asked.

The man identified an intersection a few miles away.

“Why don’t you go in, and I’ll give this man a ride,” Ronald said. He opened the door for me and, as it closed behind me, I heard him introduce himself to the man.

I sat in a booth, ordered a soda, and told the waitress I was waiting for my husband because he offered a ride to someone that needed one.  “That’s so nice of him,” she said.

I had my cell phone out on the table, watching the digital numbers change as time passed, and figuring out at what precise time panic would set in if Ronald hadn’t returned.

Finally I decided I would give him three more minutes, and then figure out whether I would call his cell phone or 911. Just at that moment, he slid into the booth.

“I had my cell phone ready in case you didn’t get back,” I said, laughing, relieved.

“He had to go a little farther than he initially said,” he replied. “He never would have gotten there walking.”

Last week he shared a similar story. He had gone out to shoot pool on a weeknight. He played quite a few games with a guy he had never seen before, sat and talked afterwards over a soda, and it was late by the time he finished. I had long ago gone to bed so I could get up for work in the morning.  A teenage girl flagged him down as he drove home. He stopped and she asked if he could give her a ride.

“My God,” I said, “you could have been a serial killer.”

“I dropped her off at the corner of her street,” he said.

“She was lucky.”

“I see a lot of girls out late around here,” he said. “I don’t know why they are out at that time of night.”

“I taught Cara and Mackenzie to not get into situations like that if they could help it,” I said. In theory I hope for equality among the sexes, but in real life, brawn wins out in certain situations.

“She acted like I was going to ask her for something,” he said.

“She was expecting it,” I said. I told him about a reality show I had watched where a teenage girl was getting into strangers cars and offering sex in exchange for rides. Her father had died and her mother had been in a car accident that had left her paralyzed. This girl was angry at life and out of control.

“Yup, but she got me instead,” he said. I felt relief. I could have been reading about her in the paper but instead she got home safely that night.

A year ago he came home asking if we had any wire hangers.

“This guy is locked out of his truck downtown, and he doesn’t have any money to call for a tow truck or help,” he said. “I stopped at the dry cleaner, but they wouldn’t give me one. Probably thought I was going to do something illegal.”

I handed him a hanger, knowing that as a retired firefighter, he knew how to open a car door. He turned and headed back out, and I knew I’d hear a good story that night at dinner.

Ronald is nonjudgmental about the circumstances when a person asks him for help. He’s not thinking, “this guy is homeless” or “he’s going to take my money and buy drugs” or “he’s going to do me harm.” He assesses the situation and determines if there is anything he can contribute.  He learned to do that on the job. It didn’t matter if it was a prostitute who had been beaten up by a john or the drug addict who suffered a bad trip or the wealthy guy who rammed his BMW into a guardrail. He was there to assist.

A lot of people wonder why Ronald hasn’t continued to work in firefighting in some way, but he is adamant that he wants nothing to do with it. Over twenty-five years he saw things he would not wish anyone else to witness, and they haunt him as many others who work in such fields will attest. He knows what death looks like, and catastrophic injury, and terror, and mass destruction. He knows those things are equalizers. He still has a strong need to serve, to protect, and to assist.

I know a few of my readers probably think I am crazy over Ronald. I am. I’m crazy in love and crazy full of respect for him and how his presence makes a mark in the world. It’s an honor to have someone like that in my life. In many ways, he saved my life, but he has told me I did the same for him.

It still frightens me, though. It’s not that I don’t want him to help, but that I don’t know how to read the situations like he does. Sometimes I worry about the danger he might encounter. But I know I have to trust him in those situations, just as I told him a long time ago when he was still on the job that he could rely on his intuition because it never failed him.

Another dinner out a few nights ago, and another situation arose. The guy who held open the door for us first asked us if he could cut ahead since he had been at the door first, and the line was fairly long. We both said yes. Then he started a conversation with us.

He said he was new in town, was in the military, and worked for the FAA. He said that since he had moved to the city, he hadn’t really been able to meet people, and he wanted to know what places might be good to do that. I chuckled because we hadn’t been very successful at meeting people. Ronald made a suggestion or two. We exchanged introductions, and, in the meantime, he had worked his way around to being behind us in the line. When we reached the hostess desk, Ronald waved him in front of us, but he begged off. The hostess asked, “Two for dinner?”

We looked at one another and silently assented, as people who have been together for almost forty years tend to do. Ronald said, “Maybe three. Would you like to join us?”

The man seemed surprised and said that he was actually waiting for a friend and that he would stop by our table to exchange phone numbers.

He never stopped by although I saw him several times on his cell phone racing to the restroom. It made me suspicious.

Later, on our way back to the car, Ronald said, “I don’t know about that guy. What was his name again?”

“Adam. He was strange,” I said.

“A lot of times, guys are trying to sell drugs or buy drugs, and they tend to look for a black guy. They make their assumptions,” he said.

“You know, I was thinking that,” I replied. “It’s like the guy that worked in the dining hall when we were in college. One day he asked me if I liked to party. I was confused and didn’t know how to respond, and he never asked me again. Now I know, just from this situation, that he was wondering if I did drugs.”

“It took you all these years to figure that out?” Ronald asked, laughing.

“Yup.”

I know Ronald relies on his intuition, and that’s true about my daughters, and even myself. My fear in certain situations is my intuition telling me, “you can’t handle this so don’t get involved.”  That’s why I didn’t answer the dining hall employee when he asked me his question. I didn’t know what he meant, but I knew it couldn’t be good.

I may not be in the position to help people the way Ronald does, but I’m the cheerleader who isn’t afraid to shed a tear and feel your pain alongside you while I listen to your story. That’s what I do best: letting people share their burdens or vent, helping them believe in themselves, to reach for something better, or to help pick up the pieces after life has been shattered by some event.

I can think of many times when I met a stranger – someone who walked into my office or that I met at a function or in a store or who rang my doorbell – and my intuition told me they needed to talk to someone. I’m that someone. I can listen and listen and listen, for hours if need be. I can sense if that person needs more than that and offer suggestions, a contact name or place to assist, or some lovely platitudes that lift the spirit.  Maybe I’ll never see that person again. That happens frequently. My hope is that I left a gift for that person, maybe recognition of one’s own strength. Each person leaves me a gift as well – the gift of connectedness.

Trusting your intuition is true for you, too. Listen to it. Withhold judgment. Hear what it really says, not what you think it should say or what you want it to say.

When those things in life occur that knock you down, trust in yourself. You’ll find your way. You’ll figure out the outcome, even if it isn’t the one you first wished for or imagined. In the end things have a way of working out just the way they are supposed to – everything’s gonna be all right.

Get Up, Stand Up: Redemption Songs

I felt discouraged this week. Sometimes I wonder why I keep writing about race and culture. It seems as if people don’t really care when it doesn’t impact their lives directly. On surface, of course, lots of people denounce racism, but most of those people will not ever do a single thing about it, because they don’t see their role in it, and they don’t recognize racist situations. In their minds the racists wear white sheets and burn crosses on lawns. They aren’t the people sitting near us in the restaurant giving us the “Southern stare” or the ones telling Ronald that President Obama is neither a citizen nor a Christian.

We experienced the “Southern stare” again on Friday night.  I described how we coined the phrase in my post Amendment One: I See Hateful People (http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2012/05/amendment-one-i-see-hateful-people.html). 

We had gone out for pizza on Friday, and on our way out of the restaurant, a table full of people stopped eating, talking, and drinking to stare at us, as if they had seen the strangest thing and might never have a chance to see it again. You might be asking, “Why do you have to keep talking about it? Why does it bother you? I’ve been stared at before.”

I bring it up again and again, because it is common in our experience. We can’t go places without it occurring and if you are white, you don’t think about that happening to you. You may have been stared at, but not in this way, I promise you. You are expected and welcome just about every place you go. You don’t surprise, shock, or offend others. We do. Gay couples do. People who have physical deformities do. But if you are white, heterosexual, and physically average (which most people are), no one notices you, and you can go about your business. But for those of us who differ from the majority, our ability to go about our business is hampered and sometimes turns dangerous as it did for Trayvon Martin who was shot and killed returning from a quick run to the convenience store.

Take gay couples in my home state of North Carolina. Not only did the state vote to constitutionally define marriage as between and man and a woman, many preachers have spewed hate about homosexuality during their Sunday sermons. On Mother’s Day a Catawba County preacher railed against gay couples and called for them to be placed in concentration camps. Not only did he reach his parishioners with his hateful message, the church posted the sermon on You Tube where it was viewed 165,000 times before it was taken down.

An alumnus from Wake Forest University took out a full-page ad in the Winston-Salem Journal asking for the removal of the university’s chaplain Imam Khalid Griggs. The alumnus Donald Wood claimed Griggs, a Muslim, would replace all our laws including the U.S. Constitution with Shariah law.

The Ku Klux Klan still exists, and they planned to stage a rally and cross burning near Harmony, NC on Memorial Day weekend. Protestors turned out. One sign read, “Bigotry wrapped in religion is still BIGOTRY.” One resident of Harmony was quoted in the paper as saying, “[The Klan rally] was a shock to me. I thought that stuff died down.”

But it hasn’t died down. Such activity has actually increased. Though most people don’t think they support racism there is a new level of fear and anger about people who are different than the majority, particularly because minorities are now growing in number. See my post Demographic Evolution (http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2012/05/demographic-evolution.html).

So I keep writing about it hoping I can contribute to changing our social views on race and culture. Over thirty-six years of experiencing race in America has taught me that change is slow and regression is prevalent. Sometimes I think I can’t change anything. Then discouragement paralyzes me.

But last night my resolve changed again.

We went to Ziggy’s, a national club in Winston-Salem, to see The Wailers perform. There is only one original member left, bassist Aston “Family Man” Barrett, but we had seen Bob Marley and the Wailers twice before Marley died in 1981.

We were too early to purchase tickets, so we wandered upstairs to the outdoor bar. Ronald asked me to wait while he went to the restroom. He is always attendant to me at bars. I hated them when I was a young woman because men buzzed around me like flies on dog shit, and I hated the attention. I always thought my large eyes made me look vulnerable to their pickup lines. I’m not as worried now that I am a woman of a certain age, but Ronald is still protective, and I am appreciative.

I stood by the outdoor deck to wait for him. A man stopped him on the way, hugged him, and told him he missed him.  The middle-aged black man with pocked skin stood at my height. He carried a stuffed messenger bag swung around behind his back. I heard Ronald tell him that he had the wrong guy, but the man insisted, “No, man, I know you. I just got out of prison, but I remember you.”

I wondered if he was one of the people Ronald spoke with on one of his late evening forays downtown during the warm weather. He likes to sit on the benches lining the sidewalks, watch the crowds walk by, talk to anyone who stops, and, he tells me, learn about life and people. A minute later the man’s white wife joined them, so I wandered over. She looked weary and shy. She weighed a good hundred pounds more than her husband, her skin was sunburned, her hair lay flat on her head and pushed behind her ears, and her teeth were dark on the edges and spaced apart.

Ronald introduced me, and the man told me I was beautiful and that Ronald was fortunate. Then he told us his wife waited for him while he served a fourteen-year sentence for shooting an intruder during a break-in at his home. He had found God in prison, as many do, and we talked about the Bible for a few minutes. Then they told us they were homeless, down on their luck, and looking for some help. We expressed our sorrow for their condition.

Soon we hugged one another good-bye like long lost friends. The man asked Ronald if he could talk to him privately, and I knew he was asking him for a handout. I stood with his wife and told her I hoped something good would come into their lives, and she told me she had spent a day in the hospital for heat stroke and how her husband was trying to keep her out of the sun. “Take good care of yourself,” I said when Ronald and her husband joined us again and we said our final good-byes.

“You didn’t know him,” I said after we had purchased our tickets and entered the venue.

“Nope.”

“How much did you give him?”

 “Twenty,” he said.  I wasn’t surprised. On many occasions I witnessed Ronald give someone money, buy someone a meal, give something of ours to someone who needed it more than we did, or give someone a lift to a destination miles out of his way. His generous spirit is one of the things I love about him.

“They’ll get a nice meal out of it. Maybe at Jimmy John’s,” I said. I felt bad that we spent fifty dollars to get into the concert when it could have bought them a hotel room for the night. I knew they scoped us out, another interracial couple that would be empathic. I knew they lied, but I didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t.

“He worked for it,” Ronald said as if he had read my mind.

“You did what felt right,” I said.

The Wailers came on stage long after the opening band, just as I was growing tired of waiting, just before midnight. They opened with the song Get Up, Stand Up.

Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights

Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights

Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights

Get up, stand up, don't give up the fight

Preacher man don't tell me

Heaven is under the earth

I know you don't know

What life is really worth

It's not all that glitters is gold

Half the story has never been told

So now you see the light

Stand up for your rights

My whole mood lifted. I felt awake. Ronald and I, holding hands, moved to the music. I leaned into his ear and said, “I love the drummer.” I sang along with the lyrics. The crowd was quite diverse: people of all ages and all races, quite a few interracial couples. Reggae music has universal appeal.

The main singer was not Bob Marley, but he had a special stage presence, a mellow, soothing voice, and he sang in the pocket of the music, riding on the rhythm, taking his time, as if he were floating on the notes.

When the band took their final bows and left the stage, I was disappointed for a moment. “They didn’t sing No Woman, No Cry,” I said. “They can’t be done yet.”

The lead singer and the guitarist wandered back up on stage about five minutes later.

The singer began singing a cappella. The guitarist joined in after the first verse.

Won't you help to sing

These songs of freedom?

'Cause all I ever have

Redemption songs

Redemption songs

Redemption songs

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery

None but ourselves can free our mind

The rest of the band walked back on stage, and they began playing No Woman, No Cry. “You have to dance this one with me,” I told Ronald. He wrapped his arms around me and I nuzzled my head against his chin. We held each other tightly as the lyrics washed over us:

No, woman, no cry.

'Cause - 'cause - 'cause I remember when a we used to sit

In a government yard in Trenchtown,

Oba - obaserving the 'ypocrites - yeah! -

Mingle with the good people we meet, yeah!

Good friends we have, oh, good friends we have lost

Along the way, yeah!

In this great future, you can't forget your past;

So dry your tears, I seh. Yeah!

No, woman, no cry;

No, woman, no cry. Eh, yeah!

A little darlin', don't shed no tears:

No, woman, no cry. Eh!

I felt the urge to cry and squeezed my arms tighter around Ronald’s neck. He tightened his arms around my waist.

I know now that I have to get up, stand up. I have to keep writing about race and culture, even when it is painful and when people wonder why I keep talking about it. I may not change anyone or anything. No woman, no cry. All I have are redemption songs.