For every door that’s been opened to me, I’ve tried to open my door to others.
Having lost a fifth-grade classmate to a house fire, having watched Suzanne die before she’d had a chance to really be an adult, I’d learned that the world could be brutal and random, that hard work didn’t always assure positive outcomes.
It’s hard to put into words what sometimes you pick up in the ether, the quiet, cruel nuances of not belonging- the subtle cues that tell you to not risk anything, to find your people and just stay put.
Suzanne’s sudden death had awakened me to the idea that I wanted more joy and meaning in my life.
He was like a wind that threatened to unsettle everything.
I had nothing or I had everything. It depends on which way you want to tell it.
I’m not sure,” she said, giving me a perfunctory, patronizing smile, “that you’re Princeton material.” Her judgment was as swift as it was dismissive, probably based on a quick-glance calculus involving my grades and test scores.
He had a simple, buoying faith that if you stuck to your principles, things would work out.
It was the very thing I’d had to create room for in our shared life, to coexist with, even if reluctantly. It aggravated me sometimes no end, but it was also what I could never disavow in Barack.
I’d been lucky to have parents, teachers, and mentors who’d fed me with a consistent, simple message: You matter. As an adult, I wanted to pass those words to a new generation.
We’d aligned ourselves with different foundations and food suppliers to install six thousand salad bars in school cafeterias and were recruiting local chefs to help schools serve meals that were not just healthy but tasty.
Most of us lived in a state of constant calibration, tweaking one area of life in hopes of bringing more steadiness to another.
I felt it then – the power of what we were doing, the significance of the ritual – as we stood there with our future still unwritten, with every unknown still utterly unknown, just gripping each other’s hands as we said our vows.
I was astonished to see how our leaders treated him only as a threat to their power, inciting mistrust by playing on backward, anti-intellectual ideas about race and class.
I owned the fact that I was reaching. Given my background, reaching was really all I could do.
They were me, as I’d once been. And I was them, as they could be.
If you were a girl with a brain and a dawning sense that you wanted to grow into something more than a wife, Mary Tyler Moore was your goddess.
I knew what mattered to me. I didn’t want to be some sort of well-dressed ornament who showed up at parties and ribbon cuttings. I wanted to do things that were purposeful and lasting.
Voting, for me, was a habit, a healthy ritual to be done conscientiously and at every opportunity.
It sounds a little like a bad joke, doesn’t it? What happens when a solitude-loving individualist marries an outgoing family woman who does not love solitude one bit?