Ba
ck when I was in high school my mother encountered a man who had once lived across the street from her family home. He and his brother had rented rooms there. Mama said that she had developed a crush on this man’s brother mostly because he was a student at Rice University and she always had a thing for highly intelligent men. Nothing ever came of her fantasies and she moved on into adulthood only to one day have a chance meeting with the old neighbor. She learned that the man was a widower, having lost his wife to cancer. He was lonely and raising children much like Mama. I suppose it was inevitable that he would eventually ask her out on a date. It seemed as though they had much in common but nothing might have been further from the truth.
After their first outing together my mom came home and insisted that she was never going to see this guy again. He was totally not her type even though he was quite handsome. He had not been particularly successful in life, never even attending college and constantly moving from one dead end job to another. Mama saw no future for them and that seemed to be the end of that. Unfortunately the man was quite persistent and my mama was far too kind to keep putting him off. Before she was even able to explain what had happened he had become a constant fixture around our house and not a particularly welcome one. In fact, I disliked him intensely mostly because of his politics. Continue reading “The Alternative Right”
The annual frenzy known as March Madness is now over and a new national championship team wears the crown. The tournament comes by its frenetic name quite naturally because year after year virtually anything might happen as one college battles another. Unlike football that has become somewhat predictable and mostly the domain of universities with large amounts of money to spend, basketball is a sport that is still open to even small somewhat unknown schools. Whether public or private, it doesn’t seem to matter because as the minutes on the clock tick down nothing about the ending is ever certain. More than one Cinderella team has scored a victory in the final seconds making the game
I’m sitting in a waiting room at Methodist Hospital while Mike has some minor surgery. He tends to get cysts in his back that grow until they are pressing on nerves and they sometimes get infected opening the possibility of MRSA. He’s had a couple of the culprits removed over the years so it is a somewhat routine procedure but as we all know anything can happen whenever someone receives an anesthetic and goes under the knife. I suspect that we’ll be headed home in a few hours but I don’t take the process lightly given the seriousness of the pre-operative paperwork and preparation involved. 
There are a great number of people complaining about the state of the world these days and admittedly we have a mess or two on our hands but in the grand scheme of things our fate is actually less difficult than that which mankind has endured in the past. A brief look at the history of the world confirms my grandfather’s favorite witticism that “these are the good old days.” We sometimes forget about the hardships and discriminations that people who came before us bore. We talk of a war on women but even the worst chauvinist pigs can’t compare with the treatment of our grandmothers and great grandmothers, not to mention a sizable number of ladies in other parts of the world even in modern times. It wasn’t that long ago that African Americans were slaves or that their children were prohibited from staying in hotels or eating in restaurants that were open to those of us lucky enough to have white skin. I’m Sharron Burnett rather than Sharron Gonzalez because when my father-in-law adopted my husband he insisted that Mike keep the name with which he was born lest he encounter prejudice. We still have much to improve but in general the world and our country in particular is a far better place than it was when I was still a young girl.
Growing up I was acutely aware that I was the granddaughter of immigrants from Eastern Europe. My mother was quite proud of her background and upbringing. She taught me and my brothers to be aspirational just as her father had once instructed her. Mama and her siblings loved the United States of America with all of their hearts. Her brothers eagerly enlisted in the military at the outbreak of World War II. Mama got tears in her eyes recalling Pearl Harbor and the time that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt traveled down Navigation Street near her childhood home. Being an American citizen was a source of great pride to her. She felt that only in this country would she have been able to accomplish as much as she eventually did. She instilled in me a feeling that I would have the power to accomplish anything if only I worked hard. In only one generation removed from my grandparents my cousins and I have achieved the American dream that first brought my grandparents across the ocean.
