Memories

My friend Karl just became my friend on Facebook. I have not seen him in about 20 years. When we were 14 years old we were pulled over by an Orem City police officer for reckless driving. My mother was in California, and my father was gone to work for the day. It was summer and I was the only one home. We owned a green Toyota station wagon that had a bad clutch and was sitting on the curb in front of our house. I was bored and somewhat mechanically inclined (much more than my father) and so I decided to take a look at it. There was a leak in the hydraulic clutch and the temporary fix was just to put some fluid in it. I got it started and working a Karl came over and we started to drive it around the neighborhood. Neither of us had driven before and we had never been shown how to operate a clutch. We knew nothing of downshifting, As we got braver and went further away from home, we got more daring, and went faster around the curves, we had to, if we slowed down, the car would die. Eventually, someone called in the law. It just so happened that we were very close to home when we were pulled over and we just pulled the car into the driveway of my house. I was driving at the time, and so he got my information first. We were in my driveway, so I really could not make up some address and name so that my parents would not find out. It would not have worked anyway. I know because that is what Karl tried to do. This infuriated the officer and he went right over to Karl’s house and talked to his parents. He got the phone # to my parents and said that he was going to call my house later in the evening when my dad would be home. I confessed to my dad when he got home from work, but the officer never did call. It was at least a year before we were caught driving again, this time it was a neighbor’s car that they had left with us to wash, but that is another story.


My 7-year-old asked last night why the people at Obama’s rally were so happy at the election of our 44th president. I explained to him the history of black man in America. How during the founding of this nation they were kept as slaves. Kidnapped from their homes and families in Africa, and brought here in chains to serve the white man. How they were not even counted as a whole person. Lincoln freed the slaves, but they have to fight for their right to vote in the 1960’s and 70’s, where people died trying to get that right. Some of those people who fought for their freedom and their rights were at the celebration of the election of the first black American to elected president of this great land. I can understand the streams of tears falling from their eyes. I can never relate to what they went through; I can only add my celebration to theirs and welcome the end of the civil rights movement for African Americans. I explained that this election let all Americans know that anyone can do anything, regardless of your background. Let’s hope that someday soon all Americans are treated equally, and that all are allowed to enjoy the same rights and freedoms as everyone else.

I took a race relations class in college in my last semester. The teacher came from a different generation from my own. He wanted us to know about discrimination and how we practiced it in our own lives. I believe that there is still discrimination in this world. I know that some of my friends and neighbors judge people solely based on the color of their skin. I do not believe that I do. One of the assignments in that class was to interview a person of color and ask about their experience with discrimination. I interviewed a Native-American teenager that lives across the street from me. I asked if she had felt discriminated against because of her race. She said that she did not feel that she had. She felt that her heritage was great thing in her life, because it allowed to be different and she felt that others liked her because she was different. I felt almost dirty after that interview. I felt like I had brought a subject into her life that she really did not have to think about before. I hope that she did not gain the perspective that people may be discriminating against her because of her heritage, because of her skin color. I known that it does still happen, but not on the scale that it happened to the teacher of this course. I can no longer say that I have any black friends. Not by choice, but as a matter of geography. There are very few black people in my neighborhood, or really even my state. I think that is by their choice as there are a lot of very weird, very white people here. I had many black friends in the Navy. Christy never grew up around any people of color, and as I was standing watch one night, she came to visit me. The person that I was standing watch with was black and he and Christy struck up a conversation. He found her questions very amusing. She asked why black people went to the beach and why his palms were white. He laughed out loud and answered her questions without any offense or anger. He understood that she was just curious and wanted to know more about him and his culture.

-Dan