What is it That You See?, or, Thick Skin and the West End Girl

I.

In elementary school, we had a project having to do with the five senses.  We made a mobile that included an eye, an ear, a hand, a nose, and a tongue.  We were given glue to spread on the tongue, and a plastic cylinder shaker of sprinkles - the type of sprinkles typically used on sugar cookies. They were rainbow and stuck to the tongue to visually emphasize the sense of taste.

I can still picture that tongue and its little, tiny, rainbow balls hanging from its edges. I spent so many hours looking at it. I remember, as a child, looking at it and wondering if I would die if I ate the sprinkles if I needed to in a pinch.

In a pinch.





What I remember about growing up is the hunger.

It wasn't economic class that was starving us.



II.

I've been thinking a lot about class differences lately.

Thinking, gently, about neighborhoods I recognize in a way that a lot of the people who surround me, these days, don't.  Neighborhoods that have nice-to-very-nice cars parked outside of black and grayed houses that were once white. Houses with broken steps and hanging gutters; ripped screened porches and makeshift mailboxes.

These days, as all days, there are too many people with money telling poor and working class people that they talk loud or swear too much.

III.

It's so much more than that. More than class differences and attitudes that I'm thinking of. It includes violence and racism and murder-by-the-police and gentrification.  I've been thinking about Alex Nieto and how he was shot at 59 times by the police while he sat eating a burrito in a park.  A park in a neighborhood he grew up in, and his parents grew up in.  And then two techies walking their dogs feel scared of him and read the (licensed and for his job he was on his way to) taser he had in its holster as a gun and call 911.

It's also about shit like people using the website nextdoor dot com to basically start doing their own vigilante (in the racial profiling shitty ass meaning of the term) policing and reporting sightings to other neighbors of "suspicious people" (commonly people who were living in the neighborhood for years and generations before the people clicking away about said "suspiciousness") and these reports ending up in things like what happened to Alex.

IV.


The other morning the bus driver, a woman of about 50 years of age who was from Michigan, was chatting with a passenger, another woman, who was sitting close by. It was a lengthy ride.  The conversation was intimate. I started typing out the dialog as it happened. There was something about it that was so familiar. So needed:

People don't really drive sticks anymore. But back then, you had to learn. If you learned how to drive that, you could drive anything. 
If it snows like it does in Michigan, I mean,...we always had something with four wheel drive.  

We were together for 30 years. 

We have three kids and eight grandkids. But I never married him. 

And then it was time to go.  

So I started over. 

Bought a car...everything.   

That's why the Mustang is kind of sentimental: 

I bought it myself. 


V.


There is a lot going on these days.  It may feel hard, sometimes, to know where and how to be most effective.  Don't stop. Don't give up.  Don't numb out.

Extend your hands when you are most afraid or unsure; keep your eyes and heart open.

It's worth it.



It matters.




be well; be loved,

k.

(Democracy Now did some updated coverage of the case having to do with Alex Nieto yesterday, in case you're interested. You can watch/listen to it here: http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/12/death_by_gentrification_alex_nieto_killed )

(image: from Sandra Osip's work having to do with her childhood neighborhood in Detroit. Check out more of it, here.)