Hi again! It's been too long! A ton of stuff has happened since I last added new posts here, and I'll be getting you caught up in due time. I was just too bogged down with work, planning my Fiji trip, the follow up business from both teacher fellowships, and more work... I'll soon be adding all the goodies about my trip of a lifetime to Fiji--on my Fiji blog--now that I'm exhaling a little since our 2nd school cycle just began. But first, I've updated this whole site with new photos added to some of my old posts.
Last week, 150 people attended the celebration of such a close friend of our family, that she is more like family; a former neighbor from our apt. building. The day I returned from Fiji this summer, my mother informed me that her husband, who'd caught cancer the year Lynn died from it, had died from a sudden heart attack and been buried while I was in Fiji. Then in September, one of my best friends, M.K., was diagnosed with lymphoma and began chemotherapy. I led the annual breat-cancer fundraising drive at my school this year and we raised $331. Yesterday, I explained my annual Thanksgiving card-making assignment to my students. Later, I got a text from a dear friend of mine from college, S.K. He'd lost his father the day before and they are trying to have the funeral before Thanksgiving.
His parents have always been very kind and loving towards me and his Dad, retired and a handyman, even painted a couple of closets and fixed some things around my house shortly after I moved here. When someone dies suddenly from a heart attack like he did, besides feeling bad for them and their family, it makes me gasp in terror with the thought that I could lose another one of my closest loved ones that way. It also makes me count my blessings for those that I have ... and have had. S.K. and I got to talking about how his parents were married for 57 years and it made me think of my grandparents and how most of my other extended family members have or had long marriages.
And now... well... I just feel moved to share another source of my sisters and I's talents and inspirations--our parents. In subsequent posts, other relatives will also be acknowledged for Thanks-Giving! None of them can supercede my mother. I cannot begin to count the numerous awards and plaques she has won in her career and as a leader but on this day, just a few days before Thanksgiving, I feel moved to thank her especially, and my other closest relatives in general for being such great,special people, role models, and gifts that God created for this world, Lynn, Janet, and I.
As I listened to Steve Harvey's radio talk show just before getting out of my car for work yesterday morning, he spoke about being influenced by a woman who once told him that when she died, she wanted to have used up so much of her God given talents that she had none left; then when she went to meet her maker, she could hear "Well done my child, well done." This struck a nerve in me and made me feel anxious to do the same. I have yet to paint outside of aTi and actually shed tears driving to aTi the first day this summer because I had made the decision to just partake in the afternoon aTimpact fellowship workshop and skip the morning arts workshop so I could prepare more for school before my Fiji trip.
My mother had gone to the Newark School of Fine & Industrial Arts located above Arts High after majoring in art there, the Arts Student League in NY,and taken Sociology courses at Rutgers Newark. Then she married Lynn and I's father. Daddy was quite the Renaissance Man himself but never fulfilled his many talents though many of them he had. Mommy has done quite a lot with her talents and I hope she will do even more because she is so full of them.
Once they broke up, as a single parent, she worked as an educator, educational advocate, and community advocate for most of our lives in Newark, including being re-elected for over 20 years to the post of PTSO (Parent Teacher STudent Organization) president at Arts High, beginning the year before Lynn attended it--until she retired almost a decade ago. Lynn, Janet, and I, all followed in my mother's footsteps majoring in art at this first school of the arts in our country--Arts High. Ma was also heavily involved with the Arts High Alumni Association. As such, she was part of the committee who spent years pushing for a new wing to our alma mater which finally materialized well over a decade later.
Most of us know something of the horrible statistics and outcomes of single parenthood (especially in the inner cities) of African-American communities over the last fourty or so years. Over 70% of African-American women have never been--and probably will never be--married. More than 3/4 of African-American men are unemployed, are or have been behind bars, addicted to drugs, gay (or on the down-low), with women outside of their race, if not dead. Well, I am happy to say that we not only lived a cozy middle class Cosby-show-lifestyle in many ways amidst the poverty surrounding us in Newark, my mother never went on welfare or food stamps.
Only in very rare circumstances would she ask our father for a dime yet she never said a bad word against him as we were growing up.
I always understood that he was struggling and fighting his own demons for the rest of his life so he always had my love and we always knew we had his. He was raised by his paternal grandmother at 1st and also lived with his Dad until at age 12 or so when he watched his father get shot to death while trying to break up a domestic dispute involving a cousin who also lived with them. Right after his grandmother died, not much later, he moved in with his other grandparents (who were sharecroppers),his brother,and a number of first cousins. His mother would send them all gifts and money from her job in NY which she'd relocated to and re-married in when he was very young. But this was quite odd at a time when most people's parents stayed together and kept their children close. It was not until his adulthood that he moved to NY himself and ever lived with my paternal grandmother. These were just some of the events that wreaked havoc throughout his life.
Every so often, as we grew up, he'd come get Lynn & I & bring us to stay along with him for a weekend at our paternal grandmother's house in Brooklyn where we'd see his side of the family (other than those we'd see in NC during the summer). Or, we'd go to a unisex salon where he worked, get our hair done by him, while getting to spend time with him. Besides that harmonica, his artistic skill went into styling hair and he had a lot of loyal customers who wouldn't let anyone else touch theirs but him. I also recall feeling pride every time I'd go by a restaurant whose windows he'd painted pictures of the food on. I could always tell he wanted to get back together with our mother--but she wasn't trying to hear it and barely ever spoke to him or saw him after their marriage ended.
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