1964. Second grade. Two bedroom basement flat at 1750 west 21st street. Five kids. Single mom. Arroz con leche or nothing were the usual dinner choices. To this day I refuse to eat rice pudding, not because I do not like it, but because I surpassed my personal quota for how many times one can eat it without having to be involuntarily committed.
My mother belonged to an agency called West Side Organization. They were a civil rights group located on the west side of Chicago. She met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he came to Chicago to march in 1966. She played billiards with him. I remember her coming home and telling us about it.
I was exposed to social justice at an early age. It has always been a passion of mine. I was also exposed to hunger. Whenever we had sugar, butter, and cinnamon at the same time I thought that we were rich. I put them all on a piece of toast and slowly enjoyed every bite.
One day my mother returned from a meeting followed by a group of Black men. They had a couple of boxes with them. One was filled with sandwiches. The other had books. The men were extremely friendly. They had joy in bringing food to this poor family. That memory attached to my mind. There is joy in service.
After the men left we emptied the contents of the box on the table It rained sandwiches. They tasted better than anything else in the world that I could have been offered. It was not rice pudding.
We had sandwiches for days. We were the richest kids in America.
The books lasted a lifetime. There was a used children encyclopedia set that I made best friends with. They were called The Golden Book Encyclopedias. I read every word in those books and lost myself in the short, brief stories. I discovered Hawaii with captain Cook (Eurocentric set of books) and traveled east with Marco Polo. I escaped into these books. They spurred my curiosity about life and fed me with trivial knowledge.
I look for copies of that specific encyclopedia whenever I frequent thrift stores throughout America. I have a five-year-old with the same curiosity of life like his dad had. I want to feed it well.
While the sandwiches were a welcomed relief from arroz con leche, the real feast were the books that the good men brought to us that day.
No comments:
Post a Comment