A Mark on, I mean in, the "W" column...

Courtesy of The Sun


At 11:00 pm on Tuesday, November 4th I awoke to the sounds of gun shots and fireworks. That's what our neighborhood typically reserves for New Year's Eve and the 4th of July. Well it certainly was an evening worthy of the bubbly and even more so, an independence day, an American revolution, worthy of excessive and over the top celebration.

As John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, July 4th "...ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more."

I think this moment in America is just as deserving...

It's still sinking in that on 1/20/09, I'll have a new boss. A boss I can already be proud of. A boss who won't speak in malapropisms. A boss who will support the things I feel strongly about. A boss who won't make us look bad to the rest of the world. A boss who will have some very high expectations placed on him but who will be able to handle them. A boss who will inspire vs. conspire. A boss who will consider the options vs. ignore them. Obama is the boss I've been waiting for since I became a federal employee and the President I've been waiting for since Clinton.

Maya Angelou said Obama is a clear and clean wind, a breeze. ... There is some poetry in him, yes. Who could say it better than that?

Okay, enough of my sap. You get the point. at this point, I'm either preaching to the choir or rubbing it in.

What I really wanted to write about was my conversation with Mrs. Jones, our next door neighbor. Mrs. Jones is a black woman who has lived in Atlanta all of her life. She moved next door in the early 1960's, after divorcing her 1st and only husband, and proceeded to raise her 4 children as a single mother. I stopped to chat with her on Thursday afternoon as she was tending to her beloved rose bush, a shrub rose that is the centerpiece of her front yard and that was started from a cutting of a plant that belonged to her mother.

I said to her, "it's a great day in Atlanta, don't you think?" And she replied "honey, it's a great day in America." As I almost choked up at hearing that, she went on to say that she just knew this day was coming and that she didn't even watch the returns on Tuesday night. She felt it in her heart that the right man would win the Presidency and that she would just wake up Wednesday morning and confirm what she already knew to be true.

She went on to reminisce about when she was taking her practical nursing training at "the old Grady Hospital." She commented on how the black students were separated from the white students and the black patients were separated from the white patients. To support herself through school, she did "domestic work" for a woman in town. She recalled being sent to the Atlanta downtown shopping area to pick up a hat for her boss and having to state, out loud, that the hat was not for herself, but for Miss so and so (she wouldn't tell me the woman's name). In other words, she would not have been able to buy a hat for herself, it had to be for her "employer."

And God forbid if she had to use the restroom while she was shopping for her boss. The stores wouldn't let black people use their facilities, she'd have to go to the bus station or the train station down at what's now called Five Points.

I asked Mrs. Jones if she'd seen the acceptance speech and she replied that she didn't need to. She already knew that the Obama family was a sight to behold and that they would do our nation proud. She noted how she saw Barack as a role model for our young black men (and white men too) in that he wasn't a thug; he was educated, smart, eloquent, and handsome. She kept commenting on how pretty the whole family was; almost as if she saw her own family in that light but would never say it out loud (they are, by the way, quite an attractive family).

We talked for a long time about how she'd been waiting for a role model like Obama. And she closed by saying she had mentioned to her grandson that our new President was a "Real Man." She told her son's son that she hoped that all "them kids" would finally "buy belts and jack them drawers up off their butts."

Can't think of a better closing than that...