the first time you realize you can't talk to them anymore

in september 2009 i posted about my friend townsend who passed away. she was so important to me and i'm realizing that i never told her that enough. truth be told, i've only thought of her on occasion since the day she died. guess i was kind of numb and was moving on.

today was the first day since the minute that i found out she had died that i've had a ridiculously strong desire to pick up the phone and talk with her. i came across something online that i knew she would find amusing - in fact, she's probably the only person that would have had a big belly laugh over it. it's been all that i can do to keep my hand off the phone.

what i wouldn't give for 5 more minutes ...

wanted: a moratorium on death

i understand that one of the challenges of growing older is that many that you care about are growing even older. and while wisdom and experience come with age, so does illness. all that to say that i'm done with death. i feel like i've experienced more death since december than most people do in a lifetime - the most recent being my dear, dear friend laura townsend who passed this morning.

townsend, as she was affectionately know, was a super woman. we met while teaching at elmhurst middle school in oakland, ca. she was in her mid to late sixties working on her third or fourth career and i was 24 fresh out of college looking to change the world. from day one, she took me under her wing. i truly believe that she was sent to me as a replacement grandmother. she was so much like my grandmother - except that my grandmother was neither black nor a lesbian - and filled that void in my life when i desperately needed someone to fill that role.

townsend and i have been through many years together with many things to celebrate and many things to mourn. through it all, she was my light. she some how also let me know that life was going to work out and we were going to be just fine.

and in the words of townsend - death can kiss my royal ethiopian ass!

what i said at church today

instead of a sermon at church today, a few of us were asked to share our thoughts on faith and education. this is what i had to say ...

true confessions - adam sent me an email asking if i would participate in today's service and ... i ignored it. now before you begin to "boo" me - i ignored it because i didn't attend a christian college. just the opposite - i went to the most expensive university in the united states ... a place where it seemed the only religion was the doctrine of self-absorption and message of basking in the glory of excess. i wish i could say that it was THAT experience that pushed me into a career of public service, but i'm not sure that it did. yet ANOTHER reason to ignore adam's email. it wasn't until adam cornered me after last week's service and explained to me that it wasn't really as much about attending a christian college as it was about how my faith has influenced my ongoing education and career decisions. THAT i can do!

my faith, my strong commitment to equality of opportunity for all people and the directive in luke 12:48 - from everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked - have directed my path. living by those principles, i've transitioned from an inner city special education teacher to a state-level special education policy maker and finally to a federal-level special education policy maker. however, even as i move forward in my career and become more and more removed from kids with disabilities in classrooms, i never forget how it all started and for whom i work with and on behalf of. with that i leave you with the last paragraph of my purpose statement from my grad school application -

i do this for willie who entered my class unable to read in the 6th grade, but left reading at the 2nd grade level only three years later. i do this for kaylor who was so shy that she never uttered a word, but three years later we had to set an IEP goal to get her to be quiet. i do this for marcus who would bang his head so violently against the wall that he would end up bloodied and disoriented requiring medical attention, but is now attending college and living independently. and i do this for noah who, even as he spiraled into a more and more delusional and isolated space resisting any human interaction, would still smile when i asked him to dance.

now THAT'S oaktown

for a few years in the mid '90's, the flipflop fed called the streets of oakland, ca home and loved every part about it. from living in rockridge (and then at the top of the most ridiculously steep hill above the morcom rose garden on jean street), to working at elmhurst middle school in the flatlands on 98th between east 14th and bancroft, oakland sucked me in.

oakland had, and continues to have, a questionable reputation. oakland headlines always seem to revolve around the negative - ebonics in ousd (as an aside, as someone who worked there at that time - that's not what they were trying to do! it was just a poorly crafted, unvetted proposal that leaked out), rampant crime, and strained race relations. while, in reality, it's a place like any other - the good, the bad, and lots of areas for improvement.

so how excited was i when the newspaper of record acknowledged what i've known forever - oakland's it!