Day 326, February 4, 2021
Leaving Home
Tonight's soundtrack: Jaco Pastorius, Live at the Montreal Jazz Fest, 1982
Just a short one tonight as I got started late.
When I left for college, I had to fly to Tennesee and so I only carried one suitcase and mailed the rest in a footlocker. I don't know if they still have those cheap vinyl coated chipboard footlockers, but back then, they seemed to be the container of choice for college students. My footlocker held, along with my clothes, a book containing the collected work of Robert Frost, and a book of poems from the New Yorker. All through high school, I had the nightly ritual of reading and notating one of each before falling asleep. That ritual quickly disappeared once in college, but they travelled with me. There was also a little black plastic planner that held all the phone numbers and addresses of everyone I knew in my life. It was made out of the same material as those Trapper-Keepers, I think they were called, so of course it was tearing and falling apart at the seams exposing the cardboard underneath. But for years, that served as my smartphone... where all the important information went.
Some reason, I also packed a large family size bottle of Suave shampoo. This was before they changed their formula and it was a delightful electric blue and smelled like candy oceans. I suppose I feared that, without a nearby mall, and this was before the time of Amazon, I might not be able to find shampoo. I chose that moment in my life to become thrifty. Of course, between Massachusetts and Sewanee, Tennesee the shampoo bottle broke and poured its contents all over my clothes, books, and planner.
For the remainder of my college career, all I had to do was crack open the collected Frost and I got a whiff of Suave. It was like visiting a former self, like when I used to carry a pouch infused with patchouli, which meant that I was infused with patchouli. Ha, that's a little embarrassing.
Just after my senior year, I got married, went to graduate school, and then promptly had twins. Forever more, a visitor in the house I grew up in. I went home for summers and some vacations, but that was it.
I think about my parents, who left on their journey to America, and how that was embedded in their education.
I read an interview my father once made when he was in a music graduate program in Milwaukee. The interviewer asked him about returning to Korea, and my father talked about bringing what he learned back to his home country. He talked about how he missed his home and would be returning in a few years.
I wonder if he knew then that he would be staying. I wonder when both of my parents realized they were never going back. I wonder what that must have been like to arrive in a new country and think you might never go back.
Recently, my parents watched the movie Minari. They laughed about how the Korean immigrants from the 1980s saw themselves as the pioneers. What were we then, they asked? We came in the 1960s!
I suppose they were Lewis and Clark. They were in the first wave of Asian immigrants after the passing of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 which abolished the National Origins Formula, the way the United States restricted immigration from nations they deemed less desirable. Just two years later, my parents arrived, the same year anti-miscegenation laws were held as unconstitutional. For Korean immigrants, they were one of the earliest... though we just recently learned of another branch of the family that came even earlier, in the 1930-40s, right around Korean independence. They rallied for and celebrated independence in America! There are photos of that generation with stylish hair styles of the era and Korean men and women posing stylishly. They
were cool. They had created a space for themselves to exist in this country. It couldn't have been easy.
I was thinking about that journey when I spoke with a student today who was on his own for the first time in his life, sitting in a stark concrete dorm room in the middle of a pandemic. I can only imagine the heart ache of his parent when they had to say good bye and part at the store, or airport, or as the car pulled away from campus. Oh, so hard.
Sending love to my kids in school and quarantine, to all the kids and parents saying goodbye, to all those moments when everything changes.
Take care and be well,
Leo
From Our Friends:
From Greenfield Community College:
Embracing Our Legacy to Inspire a Brighter Future: A Black History Month Conference
Monday February 22
9:00am-12:00pm
An online conference to take stock of our history, contemporary events, and the wealth of our nation from the perspectives of multiple leaders. Through the lens of a multi-generational panel and moderators, we will explore what a brighter, more equitable future looks like and how we individually and collectively can make that desired America a reality. With Shanika Hope of Amazon Web Services; Imari Paris Jeffries of King Boston; Sabrina Gentewarrior of Boston State University; Elissa Chin Lu of Clark University; Mark Eldridge of ALKU; and Eric Dusseault of Mass College of Art and Design. RSVP for the Zoom link!
From ACE:
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From the Community Economies Institute:
From the Great Falls Discovery Center:
Topic: Owls of New England
Time: Feb 18, 2021 07:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/8685447439
Meeting ID: 868 544 7439
Passcode: 9xp0w1
From Learning for Justice:
What It Means to Be an Anti-racist Teacher
Anti-racist educators often hear that what they’re doing is “extra,” that it “doesn’t belong at school,” that it “isn’t real work” and that it’s “indoctrination.” Those sentiments are the work of white supremacy, and Lorena Germán, co-founder of Multicultural Classroom and #DisruptTexts, sat down with us to break all of it down.From UMass:
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From the It Gets Better Project:
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