Durham, North Carolina, and Selma, Alabama
In the autumn of 2014, still settling into retirement in Durham, a question began nagging at me: was Barack Obama going to get shot in Selma Alabama the following March?
Now stay with me: was I just being more than normally paranoid?
Consider: March 7, 2015, would be the 50th anniversary of the first march for voting rights over the Edmund Pettus Bridge out of Selma, headed for the state capitol in Montgomery.
When that march was attacked by deputies and state troopers, images of the melee were flashed around the world as “Bloody Sunday.” I was there (and recount it in the memoir, Eating Dr. King’s Dinner). Even though my Bloody Sunday assignment was to march with a second contingent — which didn’t happen because of the assault on the first — the experience left its marks on me as well. Continue reading Saving Obama In Selma 2015: For Reading When You’re Not Thinking About Milwaukee
Must have, because I’m having wild and weird hallucinations from —I don’t know— 1967? They’re full of long-haired young men shouting slogans against the draft.
In 2003, Wendy Michener, a mid-life architecture student from Raleigh, joined the Board of Quaker House in Fayetteville NC. Soon she was Clerk of the House & Grounds Committee (there were no other volunteers).
But I had been candid with the Board that– unlike several earlier Directors, who had done many repairs on their own–I was not a “handyman,” DIY type. Some matters could be ignored (and had been for years), but others could not: the roof leaked, and leaked more with each serious rainstorm. Pipes froze and flooded a semi-basement room. Old bricks were loose or crumbling. Et cetera.
And over time we struck up many conversations, which, by the end of 2003 were on the edge of courting.
However, on January 27, the night before the new system cranked up, one last gasp of the bunch of space heaters we had used in the interim set some wires smoldering in the attic.
