I have a black and white photograph of a baby girl, maybe two at most, crawling on the ground, outside, with a fawn. A little baby deer and a baby girl. Perhaps the most precious thing you could ever see. Such innocence in both. Neither afraid. Neither shy. Captured by someone who clearly loved this little girl. Who was right there. Ready to protect, sure. But just there, in the moment, to witness the beauty of this little girl, this baby deer. Captured on film by someone who knew how special this moment was, how lucky they were to witness this life. This was my mother. This precious baby was my mother, when she was one of two. When she noticed and protected and so very, very special. Within a life blink, she would become one of nine. Nine children. There would be dishes, and dirty clothes, and dirty, well, everything. And precious mo- ments would be so hard to notice, let alone capture. But here she was, the only little Hvezda girl, perhaps the only girl, to have crawled with this fawn. And she was special. I see her now, and know that photographer loved her with a full heart. And oh, to be a witness to that. To be standing in that field of grass, watching a baby girl and a baby deer, so carefree… I smell the sown fields, and the light air, and the hope of what that America was. The promise held in one click.

My mother dropped me off at college.  We were each one of two. Both on the most fragile of legs, we began our future. Innocent, hopeful.  My first roommate was Kimmie.  Not Kim, or Kimberly, but Kimmie.  Kimmie’s American dream was to one day have a job where she could put a jar big jar of candy on her desk.  Also on our floor was a big breasted girl in her late twenties, starting her life over again. She lived with an eighteen year old that worked at Second Hand Rose.  There was Kostas, from Greece, in love with the goth girl from someplace dark. The shiny couple, Peggy and Dean, who someday wanted to raise their own baseball team. The African American from Georgia. The angry couple who only wanted to be Peggy and Dean.  The boys who watched Gunsmoke. The girls from South Dakota who only wanted to smoke.  All on our fawn legs.

My first winter there, I got sick. I woke up feeling like I had the flu. But worse. I went to class, thinking maybe if I just forgot about it. It got worse. I went to the campus doctor. He took my temperature. Gave me birth control. And sent me on my way. The nurse, slightly more concerned came to my dorm room about an hour later. She brought me back. Did the tests. “Where do you live?” the doctor asked me. “Alexandria.” “I think you can make it,” he said. He thought I could make it??? Was I going to die? I had appendicitis. I called my mom. She came to get me. They had the surgeon waiting at the hospital. I did make it. It was a Thursday. I came back to school on Monday. No one believed, until I showed my scar, what I had done over the weekend.

And that was college, really. People telling you, without bold certainty, “I think you can make it.” And then, from this small campus, we were sent out into the world. No longer one of two, nor one of nine, but one of millions, with just a slight memory, of knowing, maybe, just maybe, in this click of four years that went by, maybe we were special.

My mother found her legs. Bold and strong.  She helped me find mine.  How lucky we are to witness each other’s lives. I give thanks for that. Every day.  And so it begins…

Four hours in Paris.
It sounds romantic for sure.  Probably a poem in there somewhere. And I want to write that poem now, as we sit at the Charles de Gaulle.  We’re so close to home.  Home. I had searched for it for so long, and there it was within me. Visiting my mom in Alexandria, I was home.  Seeing friends in Minneapolis, I was home.  Now, with the one I love, we are heading home.  I want to write that poem that gives thanks for the comfort of three. Write that poem that breathes the gathered in, the welcomed, the joyful, the weary. Write that poem that stands in harbors, lights up cities, covers in warmth.  But between the jet and the lag, my brain is as foggy as March in Paris. How could I write that poem?

In the movie, Ol’ Gringo, Gregory Peck tells Jane Fonda, he, in fact, could write such a powerful poem.  

Peck:  Oh, when I was little more than a child, I dreamt I would do things that would change the world, and one night when I was about sixteen, I promised a girl that I would do something grand, something really grand, that would make it impossible for her not to love me, and that afterwards, I would come back to her.

“What is it, exactly, that you would do?” she asked.

I would write the most beautiful poem that anybody had ever written, a poem that would make people cry with happiness, love with desperation, make them feel they understand the meaning of their existence on this earth.

“Oh, no, you cannot write that poem”, she said, “nobody can”.

I said “Wait.”

“For how long?” she answered.

Since I was little more than a child and every hour seemed filled with limitless possibilities, I…I told her “just for a short while.”

I wrote for fifty years. I wrote every day of my life, without exception. I wrote and wrote. I wrote during long nights of insomnia. I wrote in foreign countries, in newsrooms, full of enemies. I wrote while my youth drifted by, while love betrayed me.

Many years ago, I forgot her face.

The exact color of her eyes.

The precise line of her mouth.

But today, with my back against that wall, I saw you.

And I knew that you were she.

And that the only place on earth I could have written that poem would have been in your arms.

Perhaps in the arms of Paris, I will write that poem.  But today, it is enough to simply sigh, and know that I am home.  

In George Orwell’s short story, “Shooting an Elephant,” the narrator, possibly Orwell himself, is a police officer sent to kill an elephant that is perhaps on a rampage. When he finds the elephant, he doesn’t want to shoot it, but he is extremely pressured by the local people, and he finally shoots it, simply to “avoid looking the fool.” 

“At that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of “must” was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd — seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing — no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.” 

For a brief time in my young years, it wasn’t cool to have clean tennis shoes. I remember the kids with money and houses and fathers who mowed the lawn on Saturdays and drove in clean cars, they would scuff up their shoes to be “cool.”  

My single mother worked for a long time to get me my first pair of tennis shoes that actually had a logo on them. I put them on and just stared. I didn’t want to get a mark in them.   They were beautiful and it was like I was suddenly a part of something…. Something that the others had. I remember sitting on my grandma’s steps with my cousins from Minneapolis, who knew what it took to be cool.   These cousins, who had a swimming pool and neighbors with the same. Who had an address they were proud of. They looked at my shoes and laughing said, “Get new shoes? They’re awfully white aren’t they?“   I knew what they meant.  I was not in the club. I wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t cool. Just scuff them up.  Do it. You don’t want to look like an idiot. My heart beat quickly, I wanted to belong. But I knew how many phone calls my mom had to answer at Alexandria Public schools just to pay for those shoes. I knew how many words she typed and how many angry parents she put up with just to afford them. I knew. And they continued to laugh at me. I knew and they started to walk away.  I rubbed them against the cement. 

My mom saw the scratches but didn’t say anything. I felt ashamed. I loved those shoes and I should have been strong enough to keep them pristine.  I should have been strong enough to wear them proudly… White… Glowing, yes we are poor, yes, my shoes are white, and yes, my mother gave them to me, and yes, that makes me cool!   I thanked my mom again for the shoes.  I slept in them that night. 

Having a mother that loves you, nothing makes you stronger, and what could be cooler than that?  I start each day with a full heart, and take a walk in clean shoes.