Tuesday, September 19, 2023

A Year Later . . .

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Last year, on this day, the Lord took my beautiful son Nicholas Jordan Ettinger-Ravel home. Nick had been diagnosed early in 2022 with epilepsy. He worked from home & kept a camera on himself to determine if he had a seizure.

He had just assured me that he had not experienced a seizure in the day time for weeks. 

But on the 19th, a seizure & a subsequent fall took Nick from us. He was 38 years old.

When Nick was still a toddler, I put him in front of a computer, inaugurating what would become a life-long passion & career. Nick was an intelligent, compassionate & caring man with a wicked sense of humor & quick wit. He enjoyed watching films & his favorite series, listening to music, building better & faster computers & creating both useful & whimsical items with his 3-D printer.

He loved his wife & life partner of over 20 years, Jane, his family & extended family, & his two fur babies, Lexie & Franny.

Yesterday, as I at tried to prepare myself for this most unhappy of anniversaries, I drew on moments with Nick that                                                             brought me joy. 

I think it was New Year’s Eve – the first New Year’s Eve without some place to go.  Nick was not quite three & obsessed with a lunch box given to him by my boss, Mike McCann.  The lunch box was also a radio & came with earplugs.  Nick carried it everywhere.

We decided to go to Luigi’s – our family’s favorite Italian restaurant, and a short drive from our house.  Luigi’s was crowded & we did not have reservations, but they knew us & found a table for two & a place to put it.

While I don’t remember what Nick finally settled upon for his meal, I remember that we had Eggplant Rollatini for our appetizer.  At my insistence, Nick finally removed his ear plugs & told me about his day at Esperanza, the Outdoor School. 

Nick asked me about people he knew from my office, and then changed the subject:

 

How are you finding the Eggplant Rollatini, Mom?

 

I replied that I was finding it quite fine.  Then he picked up his wine glass filled with Sprite & held it toward me:

 To you, Mom, to you.

It was one of those moments a mother never forgets – when your son is certain that you are the most important & beautiful woman in the world.  Or at least in His world.

Boys are the salt of the earth. Eventually, they grow into men, but the little boy who loved you unconditionally, who believed you to be beautiful, who trusted you with his secrets & found a safe place to land with you, remains within the grown man.

Over the years, during many conversations with Nick, I recalled that evening at Luigi’s & how that little boy who grew into a man always managed to charm me.

Nick always kept me in his heart. As I will keep him in mine. 




If there ever comes a day when we are not able to be together, keep me in your heart. I’ll stay there forever.

– A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

Thursday, July 13, 2023

For Clyde . . .


 

Dearest Clyde & Jailene,

(Note to Jailene, your beautiful husband was, of course, not named Clyde.  His parents, who agreed on loving their children, did not agree on what to call him.  His mother, who will remain my sister-in-law forever because she never served me with divorce papers, insisted on calling him by an abbreviation of his middle name Alexander – the third Alexander in the Ettinger family.  His father, my sweet brother, insisted on calling him Johnny.  They both drove me crazy, so, at first, I called him Scooby Doo – because he liked the cartoon.  Then I eventually switched to Clyde.  I love that he goes by John.  His dad’s name, his grandfather Jacky’s name – Jacky & Jack are both diminutives of John, his great grandfather’s name – John Simpson Alexander Ettinger.)

So Clyde, I viewed a video of Ezrah sitting up & for a brief moment, I saw baby Clyde in your son’s face.  And I wished that my brother John, your daddy, could be with us to see his son in his grandson’s face.  That John could watch his namesake John play football, that he was here to see James & John & Ezrah grow up.

I do believe your sweet daddy is watching over us.  I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was with your Grandma Jean when she passed.

Amazing moments happen in the most normal of circumstances. 

This afternoon, I sat down at my computer & picked up a stack of pictures I wanted to send to Walgreen’s to blow up.  One was of your cousin Nick as a little boy in diapers sitting at a computer.  Another was of Nick hanging from our neighbor’s tree, his baby brother Sam crawling across the sidewalk toward his big brother.

In the stack of pictures that I want to blow up & frame, were two cards.  I had pulled them out of a case of some of the things your grandmother Jean saved.  Our certificates from Mrs. Knippe’s Swimming School, birthday cards, a bulletin from Coronado Baptist Church with your very young Aunt Janet listed as a soloist, a playbill from one of the programs Janet, John & I performed each year at Christmas.  (Always written & directed by me . . .)

One of the two cards I discovered was a birthday card for your father, John.  It had a quote from an ancient Sanskrit poem.  I have always been quite fond of translations of Sanskrit poems.  Inside, I wrote a poem in honor of your father’s birthday, dated 1977.

Apparently, it was written during a time in my writing life that I still longed to be a poet.  Poetry is a difficult discipline.  Every word is essential.  There are spatial restrictions.  I no longer write poetry.  It is too disciplined & too confining for me. 

But on that day, I wrote a poem for your father.  And now I give it to you, John, & to Jailene & to the beautiful son you share.

It is dated 04/30/1977, the day before your daddy’s May 1st birthday.

(Note:  I was not big on capitalization in those days.)

to John, in honor of your birthday, 1977

 choose

for yourself

where and when to travel.

but please

don’t just be a passenger

along for the ride,

holding on for safety.

fly the wind

and soar,

choosing your moments

to let go,

resting until it is right

to move on.

--but grab your life—

take the wind

and reach out

now.

because there are too many

detours

and other crossings

along the way.

 

Clyde, I want all of those things I wrote to your daddy for you, for your beautiful, loving wife & for the precious life God has given to you both in trust, for Ezrah.

Teach him to soar.

With love,

Aunt Jaki

Tuesday, January 31, 2023

Nick's Birthday 2023

 


I close my eyes
And I'm seeing you everywhere
I step outside
It's like I'm breathing you in the air
I can feel you're there

Fall on me
With open arms
Fall on me
From where you are
Fall on me
With all your light
With all your light
With all your light  

--- Andrea Bocelli

I miss you, son.  With every breath I take.  

Happy Birthday.



Thursday, September 30, 2021

On MFAH's Ernesto Neto: SunForceOceanLife & the Beck Collection

 


This past Thursday was another great day at the Museum of Fine Arts.  First, my brother Jason & I went to the Ernesto Neto:  SunForceOceanLife exhibit – a hanging walkway of plastic balls, held together with crocheted textile.

While my brother opted to sign a waver & remove his socks to travel the suspended walkway of balls & textile, I chose to save my arthritic knee & myself embarrassment.

So I watched as he & others entered the opening, their feet sinking into the crocheted walkway of balls, their hands struggling to grasp the crocheted netting holding them & the walkway suspended in air.

My brother said it was scary & not easy.  The looks on the faces of people (all adults this day) who emerged from the walkway confirmed Jason’s experience was not an unusual one.

The museum employee in charge of collecting waivers on electronic notebooks told me that she brought her grandchildren, ages 9 & 6 to the exhibit.  They reveled in it & could not get enough of walking that bouncing path.

I wish there had been children traveling through Neto’s celebration of SunForceOceanLife that day – to remind me of how easy it can be if we just hold onto to the wonder of childhood.

From the Neto exhibit in the Caroline Weiss Law building, we traveled through a neon lit underground tunnel to the Audrey Jones Beck building to search the John A. & Audrey Jones Beck Collection Galleries for Van Gogh’s The Rocks.

In a gallery devoted to Impressionism.

Audrey Jones Beck was the granddaughter of Houston legend Jesse H. Jones, businessman, politician & entrepreneur.  Apparently, 16-year-old Audrey Jones encountered the Impressionists on her first trip to Europe.

Later, when Audrey married John A. Beck, she persuaded him to invest in art.  And together, they established a collection she called a “student’s collection.” 

It was, in fact, one of finest private collections in the country.


The Impressionists in the collection are displayed in one gallery.  Audrey Jones Beck specified that they were always to be displayed together & never to leave the MFAH.  The paintings are never loaned out to other museums & remain a room of amazing work for visitors to the museum.

We walked through the entire Jones Beck collection, my brother gravitating to some paintings while I gravitated to others.

When I encountered the gallery of Impressionism, I immediately searched for Van Gogh’s “The Rocks.”  I explored painting after painting, including two by Berthe Morisot, I marveled. 



And I kept thinking, these paintings in this room, in all these rooms, used to hang in a home.  A place where people gathered & shared meals & laughed & cried & conversed.

It is always too often too quiet in museums.  Except when there is an event, for charity or a patron's preview or a private event like a wedding – when people gather & share a meal & laugh & cry & converse.  All in the presence of amazing works of artistic expression. 

Perhaps, in truth, art demands companionship & conversation & music & shared experience.  And whenever possible, wonderful food & wine.

However, museums like MFAH allow those of us not invited to homes of art collectors to experience the wonder & inspiration of artistic expression.  And to share those experiences.

It was a fine afternoon at the MFAH.  I kept lingering in the Jones Beck galleries until my arthritic knee, too often my faithful companion, demanded relief.  So I found my brother & we exited via the neon tunnel & an escalator & an elevator.

Until our next visit. .  .  Although I have a feeling I will always return to the Jones Beck galleries.

Meanwhile . . .




Wednesday, January 20, 2021

Jaki Jean on how I ended up in the archives of a Presidential Library


 

So, it really doesn’t matter why I googled myself but it had to do with my domain & I googled Jaki Ettinger instead of Jaki Jean Ettinger.

I wasn’t interested in references to my blog or Facebook & I no longer care about my presence in the bankruptcy courts representing a company I worked for a decade ago.  I do find it amusing at my credit for participating with my voice in a crowd scene in an anime movie back in the late 1990s.

My eyes zeroed in on one entry:         

1989 Presidential Inaugural Committee - George Bush ...

bush41library.tamu.edu › files › donated-collections

I clicked and there was my name, followed by the name of the company I represented all those years ago.

I never meant to work on an inaugural committee for George Herbert Walker Bush.  I never envisioned working on any inaugural committee for any President, Republican or Democrat or Other.

But there I was after the 1988 election, in Washington, D.C., working for a fairly new entrant into the lucrative world of florists in the District.  Bush HW had been elected & the air was full of excitement & anticipation & the promise of profits from parties.

The company I worked for was approached to bid on one of the Inaugural Balls.  It is prestigious to be asked, prestigious to be awarded the job.

I do not know how Inaugural Balls were handled before or after GWH, but that year, floral companies received a flat fee for the design.  The ultimate profit for a company working on an Inaugural is exposure & status & a line on a brochure.

Decades have passed & I no longer remember if I had any part of winning that contract – if I even typed the proposal.  It was my boss’s project – he worked with one of our most experienced floral designers – the vision & details were theirs.

Inexplicably, my boss decided to take his girlfriend to Belize.  The designer on the project left because he was pissed about not getting a raise. 

I knew nothing about the project, about its implementation.  I had no one on the staff to give me  details.  And my boss was virtually unreachable.

Calling Belize was not easy in those days – it was similar to calling ship to shore. 

Because my boss was staying at a resort owned by friends we shared, I found out how to contact him.  It was not easy, but I got through & I began expressing my extreme dissatisfaction with my current plight.

How dare you dump something this important in my lap?  How dare you leave the country during this?  I have no designer, no written instructions!  What the hell am I supposed to do?   Etc., etc., etc.

His response, no matter what I said, was Stop yelling at me.

Seriously, dear readers, I was not yelling.  Had I been in full Jaki Jean fury & force, there would have been no reason to use a phone line.

I lost a great deal of respect for my boss that day.  There was a crisis & the only help he offered was to wine & tell me he believed in me.

It was not the first time, or the last time, that my boss dumped something in my lap with no warning or preparation.

But this was an Inaugural Ball.  Shit.

In the end, I had to put on my big girl panties & cope.  An amazing designer on staff, Miguel, guided me through the process.  Orders for flowers & equipment from the floral association providing them meant listing every piece of wire, every piece of floral foam, of tape, every stem of flower.

I could not have done that without Miguel.  Miguel walked the space of the hotel where the inaugural ball with me as we talked about what needed to go where.  Or rather, Miguel told me what needed to go where.

Our company had a distinct style – Miguel took it & his mind moved beyond that style to a presentation that would take viewer’s breath away.

We did this together, everything revolving around meetings at the Old Navy Shipyard.

Because at any moment, I could receive a phone call that I had to go to the shipyard for a meeting the players of the Inaugural Ball my company was working on.

Each ball had its own set of players – assigned Secret Service, representatives from hotel management & catering departments, the person in charge of music.  I represented the florist, chosen by a friend & tennis partner of Barbara Bush.

The first time I went to a meeting, I lost a pair of floral scissors & a floral knife I kept in my purse.  I walked through what seemed like an endless stream of cubicles occupied by young Republicans dressed in suits & business attire.

I walked in dressed in jeans & the only pair of cowboy boots I have ever owned –  red George Straight ropers – wearing my Mickey Mouse watch & a pair of really fine giant cubic zirconia earrings.  My east Texas accent resurfaced.

It was good to be a Texan in Washington. 

In the midst of being on call for Inaugural meetings at the shipyard, there were other parties – inaugurals are fraught with parties, not just the balls. 

While Republicans may have been fiscal conservatives at that time, they were known for spending big money on entertainment & parties.

My company was also asked to bid on the Texas Black Tie & Boots Ball.  Even without a president-elect from Texas, that ball is huge & popular.  The 1989 stage was to be flanked by giant cowboy boots, with spurs lighting & rotating.  Giant urns needing decorating would complete the picture.

I decided on massive dozens of yellow roses in each urn – there is that whole yellow rose of Texas thing – She is always here when you come home again.  I did not get the bid, but a favored florist brought in from Texas got the job.  He used my design & stipulated that I receive two tickets to the Black Tie & Boots Ball.

Truthfully, I did not give a damn about attending the Texas ball – I wanted to get credit for those here we are when you come home again yellow roses.

Somehow all the parties & installations prior to the Inaugural came together.  The flowers & floral materials for our Inaugural Ball supplied by national floral associations arrived.  And to my surprise, every stem I ordered – the topicals, the greenery, the roses, the orchids, the lilies – everything arrived. & other organizations.

The team assigned to us, volunteer members of AIFD & other floral organizations from across the country, took Miguel’s vision & carried out an installation to perfection.

My boss arrived from Belize. Eventually, he walked through the installation with me.  After I & Miguel & the leader of the team that carried it out rendered it perfect.

He was pleased.  I was pissed & tired & weary. As we talked, two men entered across the room.

Two very fit, very tan, very serious men with earphones.

One said, “I have tickets for the Inaugural Ball.”

My boss held out his hand & said, “I think those are for me.”

“I don’t think you look like Jaki Ettinger, sir.”

Then they walked across the room & handed the tickets to me.

My boss was stunned, but I had been sitting in on meetings in the Old Navy Shipyard & I recognized those two very fit, very tan, very serious Secret Service men.

It was a crowning glory for me. 

Of course, I gave the tickets to my boss, who did not use them.

But it was a moment.  And over the next year, I encountered those Secret Service dudes who knew me by name.  They were no less stern, but there was always a smile.

So, that is how my name is on a line in the archives of the George H.W. Bush’s library in College Station, at Texas A&M.  This is enormous in light of my Aggie father, my Aggie upbringing, my Aggie sister & my Aggie niece. 

I can only imagine how my mother Jean is laughing, appreciating the irony of my father Jack’s grooming me to be a good little Republican & my guilt for not living up to that expectation.

So, dear readers, I have to visit that library.

Tuesday, November 3, 2020

Thoughts on Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

 


I told my dear friend Cate Poe that I would share my reaction to reading Attica Locke.  Cate has never steered me wrong with a reading suggestion & she did not fail to deliver with Attica Locke’s Bluebird, Bluebird.

This is a gem of a book for anyone who enjoys well written, well crafted mystery & detective novels.  It reads, as more than one reviewer has pointed out, like a classical blues song.

Bluebird, Bluebird is the first of two in Locke’s Highway 59 series.  Most Texans know that part of 59 runs across East Texas, from the border at Laredo & winding up at the Arkansas border. And along the way, there are dozens & dozens of small towns embedded between cities.

Locke draws on her own family history in this novel.  Although it isn’t necessary, if you choose to explore this read, I recommend all potential readers to google Attica Locke & read her family story.

Locke’s family story was not anything I ever learned in all those years of Texas History in public school – not even the required course in college. 

Both my parents were born & raised in small East Texan towns.  I was born in Dallas, but I traveled with my parents to places like Canton & Tyler & Lake Jackson.  My accent was so deep East Texas that Papa Field, the speech teacher at Coronado High School in El Paso gave me a list of phrases to read & record on a cassette & then reviewed them until my accent was completely neutralized.

As a native East Texan & someone who has lived & traveled along the 59 corridor for decades, with only two short deviations to northwest Houston & Washington, D.C., this novel is rich with personal recognition & memory.

I have been to that single street light in the center of Cold Springs.  I have been to Shepard.  I have been to Jasper.  I have lived in a rural county bordering Houston, when the 59 freeway tapered down from multiple lanes to two lanes on either side of a massive field between.

So, when I read Bluebird, Bluebird, I was there.  I knew the landscape, the food, the music & too much about the rules governing small East Texas communities.

This was the only novel I have read cover to cover in one sitting since my mother died this past August.  It was exactly the novel I needed to read.  I was drawn in & completely immersed.  For the hours it to complete the reading, I was transported outside myself & my grief, traveling down 59 & trying to solve two murders.

Locke’s characters are well drawn, the plot so well crafted that my immersion in solving the intertwining mysteries of deaths in a small town was not enough to predict all the details of the final solution.

Which made it enormously satisfying.

Locke left me wanting more, eager to read the second volume of this series.  Literally, she left me hanging.  In a good way.

I am picking up Heaven, my Home from the library this week.

As always, thank you, Cate.

For anyone interested in this wonderful read, or just in the blues:  check out Lightnin’ Hopkins’ Bluebird Blues on YouTube or anything with his name attached.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muYBCO9YYNo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JU2oQPCmB4


Tuesday, October 6, 2020

Revisiting "Thoughts About Necks Turned Scarlet"

 

Photo by Rachel Halperin Plotkin El Paso August 3, 2019

Over the past few years. I have struggled to compose my thoughts on the endemic racism, resentment & ignorance that continues to haunt & threaten our nation, our world & our souls.

In the aftermath of the October 2018 assault on the Jews attending Shabbat services at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, my childhood friend, Betsy Davis posted the following: 

Growing up in El Paso and living a half a short block from Temple Mount Sinai, I always felt blessed to have the diversity of friends. Going to temple on Friday night, being in a home honoring the sabbath, and learning and understanding the Jewish traditions broadened my understanding of religion. I always admired the close bonds and shared customs of the Jewish people. I do have to admit I was even a little jealous that Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur allowed my friends time away from school to watch the World Series.   I cannot imagine not having these friendships because of a religious difference. My heart and love is with you all.

 

A discussion enued among El Paso peeps & I thought, not for the first time, but with a different perspective, about the trajectory of my life.  A life that lead me from Dallas to El Paso & from El Paso to Houston to Washington DC & back to Houston.

As I thought about how my life has moved, I recalled something from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power.  It is a book I keep reading – composed of eight essays published in The Atlantic, one for each year of Obama’s presidency, preceded by the author’s notes looking back at each essay, each year & at himself.

Coates employs history, personal experience & interviews to discuss what it was like growing up as a black child in a segregated world.  Specifically, about what it was like for those growing up in a segregated working to middle class black community.

In a world with little or no interaction with whites.  Where everyone was the same & skin did not define you. 

Coates’ narrative & my friend’s post merged together in my thoughts.

For the first twelve years of my life, I grew up in segregated world.  In segregated white neighborhoods.  Where everyone was the same & color did not define you.

Because we did not experience difference.

What we did not know, because we were too young, was that color did define us.  We were all born with a skin that placed us in a position of privilege.

The only black person in the first twelve years of my life was the woman who cared for me while my father Jack attended Texas A&M & my mother Jean worked for the telephone company.  She once brought her granddaughters with her.  Both of whom joined me on my swing set & explained that green flies would one day engulf me.  Or, at least bite me.

For the first twelve years of my life, outside of my caregiver & her granddaughters, I never knew a person of any color than my own.  I never knew a person of any religion but my own.   Different denominations, but all Protestant Christians.  I never knew any Jews.

I never heard anyone speak any language but English.

Moving from Dallas to El Paso expanded & enriched my life.  My entire world was rewritten & rearranged in that landscape of desert & mountains & sunsets. 

The landscape was so very different from Dallas & east Texas.  At first the desert felt empty the mountains made me nervous.  I felt barren & closed in.

Because our house was under construction, we rented a house on Palo Alto, a walkable distance from our final destination on De Leon.

On Palo Alto, I met people with exotic last names like Paredes.  I met the Catholic family at the end of the block, living with half a dozen children in a house not much larger than our three-bedroom rental.   Across the street was a family whose first born was a little person. 

I got shot in the leg with a BB gun on Palo Alto.  I heard Spanish for the first time in my life on Palo Alto.

That summer, between church & the eclectic residents of Palo Alto, the move to our house on De Leon & endless hours at the neighborhood pool, I met & made friends who young people who just happened to be Jewish.

It was the late sixties & early seventies.  So much of what happened during those times eventually formed the person I was destined to be – the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam war, the Women’s Movement, the fight for the right of eighteen- year-olds to vote.

All while living in El Paso.

What once felt empty & barren & confining evolved – I discovered the beauty of the desert & felt the comfort, the protection, of the mountains. 

Our move to Houston, a city my father Jack once announced he would never move to because of the heat & humidity, opened another world, another reality.

Houston was flat, so wet I felt that I was drowning with every breath, so open that I felt exposed & vulnerable.

There were no sunrises or sunsets serving as gifts of wonder & calm.

We moved into a rural county bordering Houston in what is now one of the most diverse counties in the country.  It was not so diverse when we moved.

But it was the county that first inaugurated my awareness of having lived in a segregated society. 

In El Paso, it rarely dawned on me that my friends of Mexican heritage were Other to me.  In my naivete, it never dawned on me that we were not of the same race.

In El Paso, I believed that every person defined as black was a potential Martin Luther King, that my Jewish & Mexican friends were not Other. I did not recognize the kind of Difference I came to experience at my new high school.

It was a difficult & life altering experience.  And I was totally ignorant of the hierarchy & division along racial lines within John Foster Dulles High School.

The house that Jack & Jean built was not quite done when we arrived, so we lived, along with two other neighbors, at a motel in Houston, just outside Fort Bend county.

Every morning Jean dropped us off in front of the school.  And every day I faced minions of black students who cut me no slack. 

Eventually, the crowd crowned Weinie Legs.  And every time I walked past, trying to find a space safe from that coronation, I wondered why they did not like me.

In truth, I was very thin – perhaps I really did have weinie legs.  But the reaction to my presence confused me.

After a few days of taunts, I wandered into a patio.  Where all the Mexican students gathered before school. 

I thought, these kids are familiar.  But no one was particularly interested in hanging out with me.  And I was too wrapped up in feeling alone, taunted as Weinie Legs to walk up & bravely introduce myself.

Eventually, I gave up.  On everyone, including myself.  I found a bench in a breezeway & spent the time before the opening bell reading.

Then a week or so later, in Charlotte Moore’s English class, my classmate who sat in front of me, who checked every day to make sure I had both a pen & pencil, paper & the required texts turned around & said:

Jaki, you need to leave the bench & come inside the cafeteria with us.

Us.  Inside with Us.

Us included a very pale majority, interspersed with Mexicans & blacks who had successfully integrated into the majority.  Athletes, band members, Honors class students.

Navigating my new reality was not without challenges. 

In May of my senior year, dismayed, discouraged & defiant, I wrote an op-ed for the Viking Shield.

Recently, in the process of preparing for foundation work, my sister Janet found a black case fraught with treasures from the past.

Including a faded, yellowed copy of the May 9, 1972 Viking Shield.

While I remember the day it was published, I no longer remember exactly how it came to be  published.  I was not on the Shield staff.  I think I submitted it as a letter to the editor.

It was titled My Thoughts About Necks Turned Scarlet, with an accompanying cartoon & took up half of page 3.

Jaki Jean was verbose even then.

Caption reads:  “Hey!  Doesn’t she know he’s BLACK !”

 

Reading that 18-year-old Jaki Jean was both difficult & enlightening.  But in her text, I recognized the beginnings of my personal mantra:

Union without loss of Self, Integration without Assimilation, Difference without Dominance.  Inclusion.

I remember that May 9th, after the paper was distributed.  I was genuinely trepidatious about its reception.  I was an idealist living in a reality I believed unnecessary.  I wanted a world where Us was inclusive, not exclusive.  Where Us was diverse.

That May 9th, as I stood at my locker to retrieve books for the next class, a young woman of color approached me & asked if I was Jaki Ettinger.

When I told her I was, she hugged me & said Thank you.  I never knew that white people felt or thought like me.

She was not the only black classmate to reach out to me.  A dozen classmates gathered behind her, waiting to talk to me.  There were tears & smiles, hugs & handshakes, introductions.

In that moment, I realized I was not alone.  And I knew that the hope I felt crossed racial barriers.  Even in a reality defined by skin tone & difference.

I also realized that sometimes it only takes starting a conversation to find common ground.

Moving from El Paso to that not quite yet diverse county outside Houston changed my life, widened my world & enriched my experience.

Just as El Paso changed me.

Anyone who was born in or called El Paso home understands its unique & welcoming community.  It was true when I lived there, forging out my belief system, & it is true now. 

It never occurred to me when I lived in El Paso that a white supremacist, anti-Mexican,  would travel across the state to retaliate for an imagined invasion & infestation from Mexico & slaughter 23 people, wounding almost two dozen others.

We do have an infestation in this country.  But not one brought here by immigrants from across our southern border or our northern, eastern & west borders.

It comes from within.  It is who we are as a people.  And as human beings.

It is endemic, deeply drilled into our collective cultural conscious & memory.  From our very beginnings.  It is immoral, divisive, & destructive. 

The true infestation is comprised of racism, xenophobia, misogyny, ignorance, prejudice, fear of & the need to dominate the Other.  All fueled & legitimized by the rhetoric of the current leader of the free world.

I never envisioned that I would lose that moment of hope from 1972.

In these perilous times, I am not sure I can hold onto my youthful hope for change.  But I refuse to abandon my belief that difference is something to be embraced, not a call for exclusion.  It is our strength.

We will need all of that strength to ignite hope & work for a world that embraces diversity & difference.