Standing for “heritage, not hate” means nothing when that heritage is hate. “Are you a Yankee or a Rebel!?” a kid I’d never seen in my life yelled loudly in my face as I walked up the steps of the bus to find my seat. My mother had decided I needed to go to day […]
Kids are capable of making realistic connections whether we use a protective narrative with them or not. Once, before my husband finally sold his small, 40-year-old, spit-and-tape sealed sailboat, we considered joining a yacht club at our local lake. An acquaintance who was a member invited us to a party at the club so we […]
In my attempts to define myself as different from those around me—people I assumed were less educated, full of prejudice, and generally less interesting—I became the one full of prejudice. My one-word question sounded as if the “y” had been turned over on its side, stretching the sharp “eye” sound into a lower, longer “ah” […]
