One of the Best Stories of My Life

After reading Bobbie’s post today on Almost There, then reading the New York Times and Bob Herbert’s piece on McCain’s health care plan, I decided I didn’t want to look at today, write about today or even think about today. So, I chose to look back at a time in the early 80s and a job that I never expected to get.

We raised our kids in Montana, where my husband was stationed at Malmstrom AFB. When my kids first started to school I had taken a teaching position in the same Catholic school they attended. I didn’t teach any of their classes, of course, but it was fun because we could go to school together in the mornings, come home together in the afternoon and we had the same holidays and shared the same school activities.

Once they moved on to public middle schools, I worked at the library for a couple of years and enjoyed that simply because I got to be around books all the time and books have always been one of my favorite things.

But then one day I saw an ad in the newspaper that tweaked my curiosity. It was regarding a position with a new program in Montana. It was for a director of a local facility for a project called Independent Living, designed to help people with disabilities be able to become more integrated into the community. It was something I felt strongly about, something that I felt needed to happen for the disabled and so, although I knew very little about disabilities and knew no disabled people in the community, I knew I was more than willing and able to learn. So, I put in my application. Three days later I had my first interview.

The project was being directed by a nun, Sister Helen, out of the program's office in the state capital of Helena and she was looking for directors for Great Falls and for Billings. The interview went well and I met a disabled man, Jim Clark, who worked in the local office of the state employment department. He would be working with the new project as well.

I had to admit that I had no experience with the disabled, but that I was willing to learn and that I felt very strongly about the need for such a program. However, no one was more amazed than I was when three days later I was offered the job and I had to ask them why they had chosen me. Thinking about it later, their answer made perfect sense – I didn’t know what many involved with the disabled, considered impossible, I didn’t know what the usual excuses were for why the project’s goals were out of reach, I didn’t see why it couldn’t be done. They didn’t hire a disabled person at the time because there weren’t that many that would even be able to access and do much of what had to be done – that’s how bad conditions were at that time. The plan was to put the entire project in the hands of the disabled once the immediate goals were achieved. I knew the job probably wouldn’t last more than three to four years, and I was more than okay with that as I felt the disabled should, indeed run their own project, but I was excited about being able to help get it moving.

They also hired me an assistant, a Vietnam veteran who, due to wounds he received there had developed epilepsy and had been unable to find work in spite of having a degree in business. His name was David – one more David in my life in addition to my husband, David and my son, David. The next three years were three of some of the best and most exciting and rewarding years of my life.

Our first task was to find and furnish an office with separate space for both David and I. Once that was done, we set about locating as many of the disabled in the Great Falls area as possible. We got lists from hospitals, care givers and state offices. We visited one on one with as many as possible. We set up meetings where the disabled could come and voice their needs, their hopes and we began a list of things to accomplish. Things like providing parking spaces, with parking meters low enough for them to reach from a wheelchair, ramps to enable them to cross streets, attend church; go to movies, access the working environments so they might be able to get jobs, doors wide enough to allow wheelchair entrance into restaurants, stores, offices. It was a daunting task and we met a lot of resistance, excuses why it could never happen.

But over the next three years it did happen, as we set about to educate the public about the disabled. We met with business owners, city officials. We even took part in a school program in local high schools where we brought people with different disabilities to meet with students, to tell them their story about their disabilities, to answer questions. And gradually we began to see such incredible and wonderful changes not only in the disabled community, but in the entire community as they began to accept the disabled as needed and viable members.

Looking back and seeing how much has changed for the disabled over the past twenty-eight years gives me one of those warm, fuzzy feelings just knowing that I had a small part in making that happen for a lot of people in Great Falls, Montana.

It Is Indeed, A New Day

I knew I couldn’t totally drop politics; they’ve become too much a part of my life these days as I suspect they have for many others, black and white. It is so exciting being on the brink of a brand new day in our country and I have to write about it, to acknowledge, to celebrate, the huge step forward that we have finally taken. I have been so moved by the comments I have read in numerous articles regarding the feelings of black Americans about Barack Obama, his candidacy and the new hope for their future – the future for all of us really because this is a change that has finally come after well over a hundred years; even longer if you go back to the beginning of slavery in this country. And it is a change for the rest of us as well, a change we, too, can be proud of, excited about because we, too, have had a part in making this happen. I’m ready to celebrate that fact!

Bob Herbert of the New York Times spoke to a number of black people in Detroit, Michigan and as he says, it was finally time to pop the cork of that bottle of champagne that has been on ice for so long. It’s hard for many of them to talk about it without tears, an emotional rush. He says that again and again he heard from people the sense of joy and triumph that has helped to redeem at least some of the disappointments and grief of so many years of racial humiliation and oppression. The horrors of lynching and the fear blacks have felt with good cause for so many, many years. And what relief there has to be for those who are old enough to remember all too vividly the horror of those times. As one elderly woman told Mr. Herbert when he mentioned that the weather had cleared up, she told him, “God wouldn’t let it rain on a moment like this.”

These are the people that are beginning, at last, to talk about what this really means to those who for so long, couldn’t eat in the same restaurants as whites, work at the same jobs, had separate restrooms, sat at the back of the bus, were abused mentally, emotionally, physically; those who have memories of friends and families who were lynched or tortured for no other reason that the color of their skin.

These things affect me deeply because, as most of you who have read my posts recently know, I married a black man – not because I was trying to make a statement about anything, but because I loved him and I couldn’t then or now even imagine color as a reason to see anyone as different from myself. I will remember as long as I live the day a little boy on the playground whose father had pointed to my daughter as her Dad walked her to school one day and told him she was a “nigger”. Later that day he approached her on the playground and he asked if she knew that she was a “nigger”. She told me about it later, patting my hand and assuring me that, “It’s okay, he’s just ignorant, Mom”. She was seven years old.

I do have to say that was one of the very few such incidents, most people never thought about what color my kids were, primarily because we raised them in Montana – it was okay to be Black in Montana, just not Native American. Prejudice can happen to people anywhere and for many different reasons – all of which are invalid because we are first and foremost and only, human beings regardless of color, gender, nationality. We walk on two legs and put our pants on the same way.

Maybe, just maybe Obama’s being elected in this country is one giant step for all of us in recognizing, accepting, rejoicing and celebrating our differences instead of pointing to them as something undesirable or to be feared. I do so hope that is the message Obama’s success is sending to the people of this country and around the world.

All I Can Say is WOW!

I just watched first Ted Kennedy and then Michelle Obama speak at the Democratic Convention and I feel such an intense sense of pride, of compassion, of hope and of excitement -- more than I have felt in many years where the politics of this country are concerned, of course, but also for the hopes and the dreams that many of us have for the future. The future of not only our country, but our families, our children and grandchildren. Over the past fifteen years or so, but particularly the past eight, I had pretty much lost faith in our government. I've wondered where we were headed and I didn't like the prospects as I saw them. It still isn't a given that even an Obama administration can put us back on track, but at least I can see that glimmer of hope, that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

I think that tonight I shall sleep very well.