Playing with Weapons

I think about all the victims in Aurora, and I realize there are many more than originally counted. Think about all the people in the theater who were not physically injured but who are mentally and emotionally wounded. Think about families and friends of the victims – they are suffering, too.  The suffering is like the rings created in a body of water after an object has broken the surface, moving out wider and wider.

Sales of guns have risen in Colorado since the shooting.  My home state, with 10% unemployment, didn’t have a spike in sales but a spike in interest in purchasing guns. I say, smart thing, pay that mortgage or buy some food instead. That will help you survive better than buying a gun.

I asked Ronald what he thought would have happened if other people in the theater were armed. Remember, he is a certified pistol safety instructor. He said, “A lot more people would have died.”

Visibility was almost zero. People were running and diving in all directions. The noise must have been deafening. Holmes wore riot gear. In such a situation, who would have been able to pull off a shot that hit the one vulnerable area, the neck, of the assassin? No one but the best-trained sniper, a rarity, could have made such a shot. But someone else with a gun might have shot wildly into the crowd and killed even more people.

Another “joker” was arrested for threatening his boss and employees in Maryland. He was going to be terminated from his job. He made two threatening phone calls and the company contacted police. They found an arsenal in his home.

“If you asked me who the Joker is, I’d say a face card or a character in the Batman comics,” Ronald said as we were eating breakfast yesterday morning. “Why do people use something like that to hold up like a banner?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and I really don’t. I watch all the superhero movies and the action/adventure movies, and I have never wanted to hurt a single person. I can’t understand why people need arsenals or why they want to shoot people. I see shooting as a sport, target shooting or hunting, though I am not a fan of hunting just for the sake of killing. My husband shoots at circles, not silhouettes, and he doesn't hunt. Today’s paper had a column about gun control and featured a photo from a local shooting range. The photo was of a shooter at the range aiming at a life-sized photo image of a man. Many people buy assault weapons, and they talk about shooting people.  See my post about my husband’s experience as a pistol safety instructor Profiling Fatality 3 and last week's post on the Aurora shooting: Tired World.

Gun violence is mainstream and accepted. People are afraid so they want to get guns, and they want to use them. What are we so afraid of?

A four-year-old was shot and killed in a park in the Bronx by a stray bullet. A person on Facebook wondered how a parent could have let a four-year-old out to play at 9:30 in the evening. 

I know why that child was out in the park. When we still lived in Syracuse, I remember driving through the poor sections of the city on warm nights, and everyone was out – the streets were teeming with people. The houses and apartments were not air-conditioned and were stiflingly hot.  That’s why fire and police personnel check on the elderly during heat waves. They can’t get out, and the inside temperature can be twenty or thirty degrees higher than outside. The inside temperature can be deadly.

That child was out because that was better than being in. That mother couldn’t have known that a group of teenagers who were playing basketball would be armed and willing to use their weapons.

Mental illness is stigmatized and access to mental health care is difficult even for those with health insurance. Even if an individual is seeing a psychiatrist, as Holmes supposedly was, it is difficult to predict when one might descend into thoughts of harming oneself or others. Already people are predicting that Holmes is mentally ill, but we don’t know for sure. Maybe that helps people make sense of the senseless violence. We have to be able to explain things, even the seemingly unexplainable.

Here’s my explanation: we live in an increasingly divisive society that tends to isolate individuals instead of creating community. The rich are getting richer while everyone else is getting poorer. Everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else. It is making us a fearful and violent society.  The push for personal freedoms has caused people to act on those feelings. Many people feel isolated and disenfranchised, not a part of mainstream society. I wonder, is anyone really part of the mainstream or are we all islands in the ocean?

There is so much we need to do to calm the situation. The first thing is to take assault weapons and riot gear off our streets, except in the hands of qualified and trained police and military personnel. Why is it easier to buy an assault weapon than it is to register to vote in some states?

The second thing is to stop this trend where most of America, the 99%, is plunging into poverty. We are a better country than this. Corporations have to be better stewards of the people who live where they do business. Our government needs to step in. It’s not socialism, it is the right thing to do, and it levels the playing field for everyone.

The third thing is to accept our diversity. It is our strength, not our weakness. We can come together, if we would just be more tolerant and more accepting of our differences.

Here’s the latest story from the golf range:

This week Ronald climbed the stairs to the front porch after hitting balls. He figured he’d spend a little time chatting with the white guys on the porch. He keeps trying to get along, because they are the people in his social sphere.

The golf club repair guy said, “You want that driver fixed, you better get it to me.”

“Not [Jacob],” Ronald responded.

“What? He thought you were [Jacob]?” I asked. I remembered that Ronald had told me [Jacob] had broken his driver the week before.

[Jacob] is a half-foot taller than Ronald, about ten years younger, very dark, and thin as a rail. The two men couldn’t look more different.

“Oh,” the golf club repair guy said, “I don’t see that well.”

“And he wants people to give him their golf clubs to repair?” I asked, laughing. I was still incredulous.  Let me remind you that Ronald’s been going there for five years. [Jacob] covers the shop for the owner sometimes, and he is there hitting balls almost as often as Ronald. How could the man not be able to tell them apart?

Then I remembered that back in Syracuse, Ronald and his friend Michael, who also played golf, were often mistaken for one another. Ronald had about three inches on Michael, and Michael had that small, long-muscled gymnastic body – he was a gymnast for Syracuse University back when we were students until an injury knocked him off the team. Michael’s eyes turned up at the outer corners and his nose was pointed. He wore glasses. This was in contrast to Ronald’s large, round eyes and broad nose. Yet people used their names interchangeably.  After it happened often enough, both men gave up and answered to either name.

Not only did they get mistaken for one another, but many times in the almost twenty years they were club members, they were reported at the pro shop for “sneaking onto the course.” One day a new white member marched into the pro shop and demanded someone get the black guy off the course. The club pro, who jokingly referred to Ronald as “Walter Hogan” because of his accurate drives, said, “Ron’s been a member for a lot longer than you have. He should have been in here asking about you.”

Change is very slow. But we need to try harder. We need to fight against social isolation. We need to see one another clearly. We need to stop being so fearful. We need to make people feel part of something greater than just the individual, and we need to include all Americans and celebrate our diversity.

Racial Ramble: More on Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman by Way of My Husband and the Game of Golf

The tragic case of Trayvon Martin’s death is receding from the public eye and from public memory just six weeks after it happened. I have to wonder if the public has gotten their fill of the event and decided to move on. It appears the media have. Perhaps they have nothing new to report. More current events must be reported, I suppose. I am saddened that our memories and passion are so short.

George Zimmerman must be held accountable for his actions that night, but he still has not been charged. I wrote in my last post that he is not evil, but simply human. That doesn’t mean he should be allowed to walk the streets free after his actions. Others out there who think what he did is right and righteous must know that with the right to bear arms comes great responsibility. All freedoms come with responsibility.

What upsets me the most is that some people want to believe the tragedy was not racially motivated. Yes, George Zimmerman is interethnic – Caucasian and Hispanic – but we don’t know how Zimmerman identifies, and we certainly don’t know his thoughts on race except for what he said on the 911 tape, some of which is garbled. What he actually considered suspicious about Trayvon is a mystery, but it certainly appears it was because Trayvon was a black teenager wearing a hoodie.

 Every day black boys and black men are at risk of being identified as suspicious, and that suspicion can turn dangerous and deadly within a few minutes.

I can’t get out of my head how accurate that above statement is and how intimately familiar it feels when thinking about my life and my husband’s experiences.

My husband plays golf regularly. There is something called a gang some here in this southern state. It’s a group of men who play competitively on a daily basis. Teams are assembled from a pool of four levels of players.  The A player on each team is allowed to pick a B, C and D level player. On the gang some my husband joined some months back, many of the men have played together for over thirty years. They are mostly white men. They mostly don’t like my husband. The few blacks on the gang some are older than my husband and don’t speak up about how the white men playing alongside them often treat them disrespectfully. They avoid talking to Ronald. They are from down here, and they remember Jim Crow laws. They know their place and are okay with occupying it.

Ronald was put in the D pool of players. He has played golf, and played well, for over thirty years, but the grass down here is different, thicker, viny, straight instead of bent, and he has had to change his game to adjust to it, so his scoring has dropped a little. Though, even with that fact, he should never have been put in the D level and belongs in the B or A level.

The funny thing is, he comes home with cash in his pocket every day. Some of the men on the teams he has played on have never once made money in all the years they played the gang some, and suddenly, after he gets on their team, they’ve begun winning.

It makes a lot of the men angry and suspicious.

“Have they accused you of sandbagging yet?” I ask him when he comes home and pulls a wad of bills out of his pocket.

“No, but they must be wondering,” he responds.

“Well, they put you in the Ds, they have to live with it,” I say. He didn’t ask to be put in the lowest level skill group.

Some of the men won’t acknowledge Ronald, even if they are on his team. They don’t speak to him even when he asks a direct question. They talk while he hits his tee shot and walk in front of his line to the green when he is hitting in the fairway. He is invisible or at least they wish he were.

“What will happen if they tell Ronald they don’t want him to play?” my friend asks me when I relate some of the things that happened on the gang some.

“It’s a municipal course. They can’t tell him he can’t play,” I respond.

Other guys on the gang some have rifled through his golf bag when they thought he wasn’t looking and sometimes when they knew he was.

A few have confronted him.  One accused him of not putting his money in the skins pot (or scats as they call them down here) even though he had. One said he cheated on a hole when he took a ball drop. That white man was on another hole, and he used the f-word with “mother” in front of it. Ronald told him it wasn’t his business and that he ought to learn the rules of golf. Then Ronald told him that he would pull out of the hole, if he had a problem, and picked up his ball and took a double bogey. The guy still wouldn’t back down. Ronald used the f-word, too, even though he doesn’t usually, but he’s told me in the past that sometimes that’s the only way a white guy will listen.

One of Ronald’s team members picked up his own bag and walked off the course when the exchange occurred. He hadn’t said a word to Ronald the whole time they played. Back at the clubhouse the gang some leader said, “I heard you tried to cheat.”

“Cheat? I don’t cheat,” Ronald said. Then he explained what happened.

“Oh, well that part of the course is ‘ground under repair.’ You could have taken a free drop, no stroke penalty,” the leader said, but he didn’t say he’d talk to the other guy for spoiling Ronald’s round.

The guy who had accused Ronald of cheating slunk through the crowd and left. Ronald stopped going for a few days. He said it was stressful and affecting his game. I told him, “They won. They don’t want you there, and you gave them exactly what they wanted.”

He returned the next day. “You’re right,” he said. “If I stopped going every place white people didn’t want me, I wouldn’t go anywhere.”

The next evening I went with him to the course so I could walk nine holes while he played. We ran into a couple of black guys and they joined us. Ronald said all the black guys come out at dusk and play the course, after the white guys have gone home for the day.

“They sure don’t like you, bro’,” said one. “All they do is talk about you.”

“I told him they don’t want him here,” I said. “I told him, ‘bad enough you’re black; bad enough you are from up north; and bad enough you take their money every day.”

The guy laughed. “Three strikes against him. But you gotta keep going back. Don’t let them stop you.”

Another of Ronald’s black acquaintances had played on the gang some a few times. Then he told Ronald he hated it. “Why do I want to play with a bunch of rednecks who don’t want me there?”

I guess if someone has to do it, Ronald’s the best choice. That knowledge scares me, but I can’t keep him boxed and wrapped in tissue paper in the closet so he doesn’t get damaged. I’ve already accepted that as his wife I might one day find the police knocking on my door to tell me something I don’t want to hear. This is America.

He’s the best choice for representing on the gang some because he won’t let them get away with anything, just like he didn’t let the white guys on the fire department do whatever they wanted and force him off the job. Or when the white seller didn’t want to sell the house to us because we are interracial. Or when the car salesman wouldn’t let Ronald test-drive the Acura RL because, he said, “You can’t afford this car.”

Ronald bought the car a week later from another salesman while the first guy watched with his mouth open. He tried to claim Ronald was his customer. “No, I’m not. You didn’t want to sell me a car,” Ronald said. “And I’ve spoken to your manager about it.”

As we continued on the course, we ended up with another group of three black men. It was getting dark and a storm was blowing in. There was no one else on the course, anyway, so they played as one big group. The other three black men were circumspect at first. I know they were thinking, “What kind of trouble are we going to be in when they see six black men out here with a white woman?”

I wasn’t worried. I’d been in that situation many times before, and whether it’s the police or just some “concerned” citizen asking if I am there of my own volition, I have an answer for them. Even as a middle-aged woman, white men still think I’ve been coerced. They can’t imagine that I want to be there. They can’t imagine Ronald is my husband.

Once I fainted at the mall when Ronald and I were out shopping. He went into fire lieutenant mode and ran the scene until the first responders got there. They were relatively new firefighters, and, even though Ronald was retired by then, they addressed him as lieutenant. They knew him from the job, but they didn’t realize he was more to me than the Good Samaritan.

“Can we call someone, ma’am, to meet you at the hospital?”

“I guess you can call my husband, but he’s already heard you. He’s right here.”

There were a lot of apologies all around.

We got caught in the thunderstorm on the last hole and ran back to our cars. I jumped into the passenger seat, but as Ronald was loading his clubs into the back of the SUV and changing his shoes, one of the other guys walked up to him to say good-bye.

“Don’t stop going. You’ll just give them what they want,” he said.

I have to keep asking myself “what do white people want?” They want to say they aren’t racist, but their actions are often the opposite of what they say. It’s easy to tell someone like my husband that they read into everything and look for racism. That puts the blame on the victim by questioning his credibility. That’s the easy way out. Then no one has to change anything about what they want, what they think, or how those two things contribute to racism in America.

Trayvon knew he was in trouble when he saw George Zimmerman trailing him. He knew it wouldn’t end well. Did he know it would end his life? Should he have just stayed home so he wouldn’t have run into Zimmerman? Maybe his father wished he had boxed and wrapped him in tissue paper and stored him safe in the closet, so the police wouldn’t have knocked on his door that night and told him something he didn’t want to hear.  But Trayvon had a right to be outside that night. Zimmerman is the one who needed to ask what he wanted when he trailed Trayvon and decided to pull the trigger.

Olio

One of my twin daughters asked me to write about something happy. She’s convinced it will increase my blog readership, and her intuition is hardly ever wrong. So, dear readers, here’s my happy blog.

My husband and I had a lovely adventure yesterday, driving in the G37S down to Charlotte and a golf equipment show. Part of our motivation was to take a drive to see the leaves – a great show of gold, burgundy, and red. We saw horses, hawks and wild turkeys along the way, too.

At the golf course, Ronald tried out some drivers and almost won a free pair of shoes in a wedge-hitting contest. “I still feel good,” he had said after his attempt to hit a ball into a painted red circle 100 yards out on the driving range to claim his free shoes. His ball hit inside the circle but took a jump and was at exactly 9:00 less than a foot outside the red line. Then he won the hourly putting contest, sinking five putts in a row. The crowd around him chanted each number with growing excitement. He received a nice pair of sports sunglasses for his effort.

“Don’t you golf?” one of the vendors asked me.

“Not me,” I said, smiling. My excitement was in watching Ronald enjoy himself.

We headed north and stopped in Concord for a late lunch at Razoo’s, stopping first at Bass Pro Shops so we could admire the boats and point out the one each of us liked best and imagined purchasing one day.  After a relaxed meal filled with conversation, andouille sausage, red beans and rice for me and ribs and French fries for him, we wandered over to the movie theater and saw the third remake of The Thing. It wasn’t the greatest movie we’ve ever seen (I might have liked the 1982 make, starring Kurt Russell, better, but all three are forgettable), but it had its moments that elicited gasps, screams, squeezed hands, and jumps.  Then we headed home, both sated.

Lots of times it isn’t what we are doing, but that we are together doing it. And we don’t do a lot of things together. Some couples do, but both of us need space just for thinking and creating, and, in spite of the fact that I work at home, I still crave solitude, maybe a reaction to growing up with four siblings and an array of animals in a house that measured less than 1000 sq.ft. Sometimes the bathroom was the only place to grab some alone time. Ronald craves the same, since he was raised in similar circumstances, but his idea of solitude is a book and a soda at a crowded bar, the activity and noise swirling around him. He also enjoys spontaneous conversations with strangers he may or may not ever run across again. That’s out of my comfort zone, though I can handle it on occasion.

When we do spend time together, like eating dinner together every night, that time remains special and doesn’t sink into the category of other mediocre daily occurrences. I think mediocrity can kill a relationship if a couple is not attentive.

Ronald and I have been together for almost thirty-six years, married almost twenty-nine years. We’ve beat divorce statistics three or four times over, and when we have faced hard times and conflict, as any couple who has spent more than three months together, we always find ourselves again. Part of our secret is that we love each other, sometimes unnervingly so to other people. A psychologist might determine we are enmeshed and co-dependent. She would be right, but what might be contraindicated for other couples, works for us. It’s negotiating and knowing what works that can keep a couple together.

The second part of our secret is the respect we have for one another. We were raised in different racial, cultural and ethnic environments, and that causes us to see and interpret the world in different and sometimes divergent ways, but we embrace our differences and respect them. Maybe our differences are what attracted us and the combination of our differences and likenesses gives us the gift of longevity.

I think the most important thing I’ve learned in our thirty-six years together is that there is no normal, no average and no absolute when it comes to people. We are too complex for that. Those concepts are just the middle ground in the great continuum of human experience. Each of us fits somewhere along the continuum, and it is long, maybe even infinite.   We can beat the odds of hatred and divisiveness if we understand that each of us is different but we still share likenesses, commonality, through our humanity. We can beat the odds if we learn to respect our differences and acknowledge them in the continuum of our thoughts, beliefs, actions and feelings. Not a one of us is average or normal. We are who we are. And I love that about myself, about Ronald, about my daughters and about all the people who make their way into my life. It doesn’t mean there is no conflict, because I think humankind is destined for that, but it does mean that we can make room for a bigger concept of who we are, and maybe that will minimize some of the conflict we now experience.

(excerpt from Chapter 1 Who Bee’s You? Shades of Tolerance: A Biracial Love Story)

I was unaware what the future would hold for us when we met freshman year at Syracuse University in January 1976, just back from Christmas break.  With new work-study hours to accommodate my new class schedule, I was working my first Friday, payday, at the Copy Center in Bird Library when Ronald walked in and stood at the counter.

He wore an over-sized green army jacket and a knit stocking cap with a long tail. A girl’s fuzzy pink mitten covered his right hand only to the bottom joint of his thumb.  In that hand he carried a large, black leather artist’s portfolio. He kept his other hand pocketed against the sub-zero temperature outside. His large deep brown eyes, the corners creased with interest and humor, roamed up and down me as I approached the counter.

“May I help you?” I inquired, clasping my hands and placing them on the counter in front of me, my eyes meeting his.

“I want money,” he said, and he smiled like he had just eaten something indescribably delicious, his teeth gleaming in contrast to his skin.

I turned to my supervisor Maxine and called her name. Maxine, man-sized with a perfectly coifed Afro that made her yet another six or seven inches taller, looked up from the microform reader/printer she was operating and said, “Ronnie, leave that girl alone. She’s too good for you.”

“Okay,” he said, shrugging, his smile mischievous, “I just came in for my check.”

“Oh, okay, what’s your name?” I asked as I turned to the register to pull out his check. I pressed the “no sale” button.

“Ronnie Hagan or ‘The Ron’.  Who bees you?” he said, smiling at his own joke.

“Dianne,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, nodding in recognition, “the Dianne with two ‘n’s’. I’ve seen your time card.”

I pulled his check from the pile and handed it to him. A thought entered my mind at that moment as I looked at his eyes, his smile, and his ungloved hand now released from his pocket, soft and clean, with long graceful fingers: This is the man I’m going to marry.  It made me smile and remember that Ma warned me repeatedly to never marry an Italian like Dad, and Ronald Hagan was not Italian; he was Afro-American.

“Your eyes make my heart skip beats,” he said. 

I want to imagine what Ronald saw when he looked at me back then, and I wish he could still see me that way. I pull out the old photos, many of which Ronald took of me during college for his photography classes. My eyes are the focal point of most of them and draw me into each photo, and I can see the loving way he looked at me through the camera lens and the way I looked back at him. The discovery is both surprising and amusing as I flip through one photo after the other.  My eyes are large and round, with long dark lashes and high dark brows over them. I look distinctly Italian after my father, despite my amber eyes and my fine, straight, dark hair, but I have the porcelain skin, clear and unblemished, of my Irish mother. In several photos taken during the warm months, tiny, nearly invisible freckles sprinkle my nose and cheeks.

The contrast between my dark hair and pale skin caused Ronald to skip afternoon classes, he told me later. He had heard about porcelain skin, he said, but never understood what it really looked like until he saw me.

The day I met Ronald Hagan, The Ron, I wore a rust colored gauze shirt, purposely shrunk in the dryer so it became form-fitted to my slender torso; the buttons open from the collar to just below my breasts, a tube top peeking out the opening.  I wore denim hip-hugger bellbottoms that fit snugly over my hips, buttocks and thighs. The bells covered my platform clogs completely and were so long the bottoms were frayed and worn. 

I did not know back then that I was alluring. I know now when I study the old photos; or when Cara and Mackenzie look at the photos and tell me how beautiful I am; or when I look at Cara and Mackenzie and see younger versions of myself and think how beautiful they are; or when Ronald, his arms drawing me into an embrace, says, “You look very Dianne today.”  That is when I know he can still see me the way I was back then, not the Dianne who is aging with crepe lines framing my round eyes and stretch marks and permanent freckles marring the once flawless skin.

I understood in a rational way back then that I attracted male attention – in fact a fellow student had only told me a few days before I met Ronald, perhaps as an unsuccessful ploy to get into my pants, that I exuded a certain “delicious sensuality,” but for me, the allure was just dress up and role-play. 

I still see the lonely child when I look in the mirror: dirty, hair knotted, sad eyes, and dressed in hand-me-downs. I did not know then that Ronald saw his own sad image when he looked at me the day we met. His smile and laughing eyes belied his thoughts.

I display photographs in a digital photo frame. There is a picture of me when I am about eight standing in the center of our cluttered parlor: a birdcage to my left; the buffet directly behind me stacked with magazines, two table lamps on either end, handed down to us by neighbors, with seagull silhouettes on both their shades and bodies, and red tapered candles right beside them as if we had lovely formal dinners awaiting us; my youngest brother’s portrait hangs above the buffet; a photo album open to a page of black and white photos lays to one side; the hand and pink jumper of the blond, blue-eyed baby doll given to me that Christmas lying on top of other items. The dolls never looked like me.

Dark, straight hair touches the tops of my shoulders and turns this way and that, the bangs mussed across my forehead. My nose overshadows my pointy chin and two large front teeth fill my tiny, downturned mouth. My eyes are too large for my face, sit in dark crevasses, and stare tentatively at the camera, pleading acceptance.

My skin nearly matches the white sweater I wear. The sweater is crumpled, the sleeves too long, but it is buttoned perfectly from top to bottom, something I find surprising, because I remember many occasions catching my buttons mismatched after I had already arrived at school and my peers had taken notice. I can only see a slash of navy beneath the sweater, but I remember that it is a navy pleated skirt that never lost its shape, and for this I am thankful, as my clothes were never ironed until I began ironing them myself at age nine. I can only see the tops of my hands but they are clasped in front of my skirt.

This is the child I recall – the one who is burdened with the possibility that she may get lost in the clutter and no one will come look for her.

There is another photo taken when I was four. I stand in front of the Christmas tree in a dress with a black velvet top, a lacy empire waist, and a white chiffon skirt, covered with black and white velvet spots, falling well above my knees. My skin is vibrant as I stand bare-armed and bare-legged, my right knee turned in and pushed straight while my left leg bends slightly, all in an effort to stay standing in my black high-heeled shoes with elastic straps. My arms hang at my sides, my hands hidden in the flounces of the skirt, my left one holding the strap of a small white purse. My hair is short, a pixie cut; the only way Ma could keep the knots out of it. I face the camera squarely: my eyebrows are raised in disbelief, my eyes are defiant, and my mouth is wide open, screaming for attention.

This is the child who will not allow anyone to forget her or wrong her. This is the child who, even when dressed in fancy duds, gets ugly if she has to. Though my overall temperament is shy and quiet, I have relied on her often in the years since Ronald and I met whenever I had to fight for my right to love him. And now, at this time in our lives when our stories are no longer protecting us, this fierce little girl rises within me.

Ronald saw me through artistic eyes the day we met. Years later he told me he used to comfort himself by drawing the shape of my eyes over and over or visualizing my slender fingers with long oval nails or the perfect clarity of my skin.

He stayed the afternoon at the Copy Center, standing on the other side of the counter, talking, staring at me, my shyness making me blush under his stare. He told me he had watched my time card last semester, I imagine looking for clues, and was attracted to my handwriting. He said it was visually interesting like hieroglyphics, my letters printed but looking like symbols instead of actual letters.

            “How do you say your last name?” he asked.

            “Lee-YUT-zee,” I pronounced carefully.

            “And how do you spell it?”

            “L-I-U-Z-Z-I.”

            “That’s a nice name. You ought to put it on a t-shirt.”

            I had never been told that before. Mostly I spent a lot of time spelling my last name over and over and correcting the pronunciation of it. But within a month of meeting The Ron, he had bought me a black, fitted t-shirt with Liuzzi printed in rainbow colored capital letters across my chest.

Maxine intervened every once in a while with her own opinions. “Ronnie, I told you she’s too good for you. Go to class.”

Maybe her words were meant as a warning. Maybe her reaction was the first instance of someone wanting our relationship to break apart before it even started. Maybe she knew what I did not know back then, perhaps because I had been too young or because, in a child’s eyes, it did not seem to have the same significance as the Civil Rights Act of 1964: nine years before I met Ronald, in June 1967, the Supreme Court had struck down anti-miscegenation laws in a landmark case, Loving vs. Virginia. The decision caused fifteen other states to remove similar laws from their books. Two states, South Carolina and Alabama, kept laws banning interracial marriage up until 1998 and 2000, respectively. In spite of the Supreme Court decision, many people still believed interracial marriage was an abomination. I would come to hate the expression “birds of a feather flock together” because I would hear it in the coming years as the reason why interracial relationships were wrong.

But on the day I met Ronald, I did not know the Supreme Court had intervened on behalf of an interracial couple, arrested while asleep in their bed in Virginia, nor had I ever heard the expression about birds used as a justification for racist beliefs.

Besides I could see Maxine was fond of Ronald, the way she lowered her head and looked up at him, like she was a much smaller and younger woman. She had fallen for his charm and flirtations, too.

I liked Ronald – he was after all the man I would marry – and I gave him the phone number to the campus only phone at the end of the hall on my dorm floor.