The last time I was in a hotel banquet room was precisely one year ago— at a writer’s conference in Boston; best-selling novelist Ann Patchett delivered the keynote address. Lunch had already been served so the wait staff stood at the edges of the huge ballroom while Patchett expounded   300 or so rapt writers, editors et al.

Although I’d really appreciated her message (Hey, writers: None of this waiting on the Muse stuff, please. Just plant your butt on a chair and WORK!), there was one very uncomfortable moment in that ballroom. When she’d heard that her first book was going to be published, she was truly excited, she told us, because now she could actually live! Because, you see, she’d been in a nowhere job, wasting her life, going nowhere waitressing. As I remember it, she’d denigrated waitressing at some length.

My friend Lynne nudged me, pointing to the (black and white) wait staff in their black and white uniforms standing nearby: “Wonder how they’re feeling about what she’s saying?” she’d asked rhetorically.

This past Saturday night, in a banquet room in the Richmond (VA) Marriot Hotel, I joined 80 or so wellwishers to celebrate Owen Cardwell’s 40th pastoral anniversary. When, during one of the songs performed by the talented LeRoix and Chantel Hampton and their band, I noticed one of the (all black) wait staff singing along, I remembered Ann Patchett’s insensitivity.

“So,” I thought. “When those serving and those being served are black [mostly], something different can happen, huh?”

But then it really got interesting: Soon after person after person had stood up to tell what “Pastor” had meant in their lives, Elder Jason Boswell, co-mc for the evening, was suddenly moved to directly address one of the waiters (Quakers and Baptists: we’re both sometimes just moved to do something!)

“You from New York?” he asked the burly waiter standing by the banquet room’s main door.

Nonplussed when the whole room went quiet, the guy said he was, then stated how moved he’d been to hear all the nice things people had to say about Dr. Cardwell.

Well!

Before you knew it, that waiter’s [I don't know his name] standing in the front of the room being prayed over, the room’s cheering and clapping, and he’s publicly declaring that he’s accepting Christ into his life.

I’ll never know what accepting Christ means to that waiter (or myself, for that matter.) Or, over the long haul, what that moment will mean in his life.

But I sure know how moved I was when Jason broke through that them-us divide.

Beautiful!

The Somerville Public Library received a grant this year to sponsor “Somerville Reads,” an opportunity for any city resident who can read, can read English, and wanted to, to read the same book: Tim O’Brien’s amazing The Things They Carried. The SPL also arranged a number of  discussion groups, a community read-aloud, and a Vietnam film series. These have been happening all this month. Cool, huh?

Tuesday, I attended a well-attended discussion at Porter Square Books, a wonderful, independent bookstore which, to be technical, is in Cambridge. Sigh. (Like many Somervillians, I’m just a wee bit pissed that next-city-over Cambridge boosts so many bookstores; don’t get me started about its brand-new library.)

Much as I loved every minute of  Tuesday’s discussion, ably moderated by writer Margot Livesey, much as I love, love, love Porter Square Books, I couldn’t help but feel sad that a discussion re a Vietnam novel couldn’t have happened on Somerville “soil.” Somerville lost  so many, many soldiers in Vietnam; a disproportionate number. Soil. Isn’t war about soil?

O’Brien makes war and the men and women who fight it excruciatingly, you-can-smell-it-and-taste-it real. None of these abstractions about “courage” and “glory” and “sacrifice,” please. First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, the odious Azar, the soulful Kiowa; by the end of the book, we KNOW these men.

And here’s something we carry, after finishing O’Brien’s masterpiece. We read an April, 2010 account of American soldiers killing civilians, women and children, on a bus in Afghanistan—a bus!— and we know that men and women like Bowker and Cross and, yes, even Kiowa perpetuated that attack. (Which, apparently, happened in a thick fog. The fog of war?) We know how scared those soldiers are, how exhausted, how so often poorly commanded. We know for a fact that American soldiers  have and can and will kill for revenge. We know that in war, horrendous mistakes happen.

We can’t condone such an attack, no way. But we get it.

In Way Opens, I talk about a much-needed history lesson on the back of a segregated bus in 1961. But, like everyone else, these Oh-My-Goodness/You-Mean-What-I’ve-Always-Thought-To-Be-True-Ain’t-Necessarily-So? lessons have continued. In an American History class in college a couple of years later, for example, I first learned how, in the earliest days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Quakers had been brutally persecuted by the Puritans.

Really? Who knew?

These lessons have taught me, like the bumper sticker advises, to “Question Authority.” Much as I fight it, however, like many white Americans, I frequently lapse into a blind acceptance of what the mainstream media, dominated by other white Americans, tell me.

But when The Boston Globe reported this week that Manny “Junior” daVeiga shot himself in the head while struggling with Boston police, even I, so often clueless, muttered, “Yeah, right.”

The Globe’s unequivocal support of the police and the Suffolk County district attorney’s version of what happened continues: In a classic blame-the-victim piece, the 19-year-old DaVeiga’s mental health history and his association with a Cape Verdean gang made the front page of the “Metro” section the day after his death; an ominous photo of a tanked-up Hummer  now being used by the police in that neighborhood appeared the following day.

My dear friend Lynn Lazar is asking white people to stand in solidarity with the Cape Verdean community—bless her.

This blog’s my way to do so.

This month’s history theme came up because my dear friend Lissa gave me a copy of Richard J. Evans’ The Coming of the Third Reich (if you know Lissa, you know that such a book is a pretty typical offering. If you know me, you know how grateful I am to have a friend like Lissa.)

“Gripping,” “Comprehensive,”  Magisterial,” “Definitive,” claims the paperback’s covers. All true.

That I was reading this gripping, . . .  book the weekend Barney Frank and John Lewis were verbally abused made this page-turner even more compelling.

Today’s lesson: One reason the Nazis  rose to power? A pervasive, ominous, well-publicized threat of violence. Yes, certainly the Brownshirts and the Stormtroopers outright attacked  newspaper offices, union headquarters, assaulted Jews, university professors, Communists.

But for the exhausted Germans, debilitated by war and hyper-inflation and shame (I am becoming more and more fascinated by shame; more anon), that this violent, might-is-right movement (in its earliest days, Nazis called themselves a movement, not a political party) had been unleashed [great word, huh] was enough. Even if the Brownshirts hadn’t burned any books in your town, you were likely to think and act and vote as if they had.

So listen up, Sarah Palin. As a Quaker, I “utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons.” (That’s from our Peace Testimony which we announced “to the whole world” in 1661.) And now that I’m hip to how incredibly effective just threatening violence can be, well, I’m asking you to cut it out. Okay?

The current controversy regarding the use of the word “Negro” on the US Census forms reminds me of an exchange I had with Chauncey Spencer, now deceased, in June of 2002. Son of Harlem Renaissance poet (and Lynchburg resident) Anne Spencer, ninety-six years old at the time of our meeting, Chauncey Spencer had been a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, our country’s first African-American fighter pilots. In fact, he’d help to found the Tuskegee Airmen (with a little help from a guy named Harry Truman).

” ‘People! We’re all just people!’ My mother always said that,” the World War II hero noted re whether or not to use the word “Black” or “African-American.”

The word “Negro” wasn’t mentioned—I think even to a ninety-six year old African-American, that word was passe.

Our conversation continued: I’d felt compelled to amend Anne Spencer’s statement.”White Americans need to understand more of African-Americans’ experience, first,” I said, before we can all agree that such words don’t matter. And the former Tuskegee Airman readily agreed.

* from “White Things” by Anne Spencer: Most things are colorful things—the sky, earth, and sea /Black men are most men; but the white are free!

[Dedicated to Anne Kuckro, January 4, 1945 - March 10, 2010, whose dedication to Wethersfield CT's historic preservation and to beauty and aesthetics were remarkable.]

This morning as I sat at my computer, I heard several voices in the side yard of the 6-unit condo building next door. A peek out my study window revealed two workmen carrying fencing poles, directed by the building’s often-gone-missing handyman. Next appeared sections of (unpainted, crudely-made) stockade fencing which were stacked against the Norway maples between our yards. An April Fool’s Joke?

You see, my husband and I had recently torn down the six-feet-tall fencing between our two yards (well, let’s be honest: He did. I just came up with the idea.) and now there’s a charming and graceful stone wall, maybe two feet tall, between us.

Like many writers, I often work in my pajamas and robe so in the time it took me to get showered and dressed in order to confront those bozos, I had worked myself up into a real hissy fit—AND was alternately appalled at how appalled I was.

The hissy fit went like this: “Those horrible people! How dare they! How can they erect a fence without even discussing it with us? And it’s so ugly. It’ll completely ruin that open and natural area. I know there was a break-in in that first-floor unit but, really, if those condo people want security, there are a zillion other ways to make that building more safe than by erecting an ugly, obstructing fence!”

The appalled dialogue went like this: “I live in a city. The economy is terrible. It’s elitist and irrational to care about  how my side yard looks when people are out of work, losing their homes, etc, etc.”

But you know what? You can be passionate about social injustice AND care about how things look.

Finally dressed, I went outside. “Hi,” I said, trying to keep the shrill out my voice. “Where’s this fence going?”

“In the back,” the handyman told me, putting his hand on my (indignant) shoulder.

“Phew,” I replied. “I was afraid it was—”

“Oh, no, no no!” the handyman assured me. “I like your stone wall. Nice and open. Looks nice.”

Yes, it does. That stone wall, so very very New England, fits. And although erected this past fall, it’s already timeless. Historic.