washing dishes: a father’s glimpses

… Is the imprint that we make on another person, another being.

I’m basking in the gradual, repeating Sunday morning assembly I’ve been on 5 times in 3 months with an odd combination of writers and artists, gifted amateurs of life and experiences. A theater troupe that I’ve become more outspoken with as I’ve revealed how Tupac’s 2Pacalypse Now, Kris Kross, Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back are beats and lyrics that course through my blood vessels, the scratches that mark my knees and elbows, distinguishing days still visible decades later.

… The legacy that we have, that we leave with others either from a single conversation or a pattern of behaviors that can span years. How those words or actions endure long after we part ways.

Yesterday, when I heard R’s sermon from many moons ago of what’s available to me? when V expressed how she wasn’t in the streets yesterday because the sun isn’t her friend, which recalls Michael Franti’s lyric in It’s Never Too Late that:

And don’t fear your worst friend / cuz a worst friend is a best friend who’s done you wrong

So, the sun is always available to us — the sun is both my best friend and a friend no more who’s done me wrong.

Later, I told them that 1 of my sources of inspiration was Erick Quesnel, whose wise words from 20 years ago still move within me after he shared his compassion for Americans as he knew that most people want justice, that people are not the same as the foreign policy of a small number of people wielding and executing power.

One legacy of living through the Global War on Terror was becoming more compassionate towards U.S. citizens, who are me. The sins of Abu Ghraib, JSOC, PRISM, and the Patriot Act opened me up to how many people were outraged by those new cycles of violence. I learned in real time how Powell — acting as the top diplomat at the U.N. but functioning as a war-mongers pawn, talking about WMD — was an opportunity to recognize the humanity in all the people in this country who resisted. That was an episode when I could feel my relief at the choices my young adult self made to not enter into the federal bureaucracies that tempted me in high school. Instead, I softened into the bonds with everyday people on every continent who’d had to endure the sins of the state.