I am sure I will be writing more about Myah's graduation, her plans, hopes and dreams. For today I am a happy Gramma just knowing that she is so happy. AND I am able to post a picture because I am blogging from my very own computer. I just picked it up at the Apple Store, it didn't cost as much as I was quoted and it looks and feels like a brand new laptop. I have missed not being able to post pictures and maybe I will go back and put in a few from the days that I missed when I was blogging from an iPad.
Yesterday I got a message from the women who bought my house that I had an envelope from my High School. I will pick it up this weekend. It reminded me that my 50th Class Reunion is this year. I have never been to a class reunion. I graduated in 1968 with around a thousand other students, I have maybe a handful of people from high school that I still keep in somewhat touch with mostly through FB but sometimes by phone. We were the first class that went 4 years in a new "modern teaching concepts" building. There were NO windows in most of the classrooms. My freshman year allowed other high schoolers from Joliet Central to not have to do half day classes and the student body moved from very very over crowded school to three, East, West, and Central. One advantage was very little antics for freshman, we were all lost!
My class had lived through President Kennedy's assassination, the Vietnam War was still raging, Bobby Kennedy was killed, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated. There were riots in my high school, I had the biggest crush on Lamar and the racial realities were so very painful and confusing to me and the injustice was so obvious, but white privilege (even working class, wrong side of the tracks, while privilege) was still hidden, unaddressed and doing it's dirty little work on us all.
Students were taking to the streets, friends as well as myself were caught up in the riots in Chicago at the Democratic Convention. Lyndon B. Johnson was president when I graduated and Richard Nixon was elected that November. The Rolling Stones had just released Jumpin' Jack Flash. The Tet Offensive killed thousands and the war divided not only enemies and allies but our nation. Black athletes took a stand at the summer Olympics, I remember so very well feeling the pain and power in their action, and not really knowing what to do with it all, but I felt it and didn't forget what personal action can do. Oh, we orbited the moon. The fall of Nixon was still a ways off, but crisis, chaos, hell bent passions were unleashed and 1968 was a flashpoint year of what was still to come.
Sound familiar?
Myah in her senior yet went to Arizona and Mexico met with religious groups, non-profits and NGO's doing immigration work. She meet with tribal members whose boundaries have never been the ones made by the United States. She went to Central American helped to build a school, worked with the children, and came back a more full compassionate and just young adult. Myah volunteered weekly at the International School working with new immigrants from East Africa, she loved it. She is a fluent Spanish speaker and is not set on learning Arabic. She is quiet and spends a lot of time watching and learning as she engages in a non verbal way with her world. Myah is not taking to the streets like her Gramma did, but she will be taking to the classroom. She will be taking her life experiences and her sense of justice with her.
But for today she just gets to be 18 and not have to go to school on Monday morning. I had a few minutes of looking back time. I am thinking about these young people, when I was that "young person" how I have lived my life, and what actions my bi-racial Indigenous Native American, Northern European granddaughter will take to "form a more perfect union".
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