The stench of dead worms
rises above the pavement
on a rain-soaked day.
11:05 p.m.
There was another suicide bombing in Tel Aviv today. A Palestinian adolescent blew himself up in a crowded shopping area, taking nine innocent people with him and injuring dozens of others. A mother was killed in front of her husband and small children, a woman was getting into her car when a piece of human flesh spattered the windshield. Where is the sense in these attacks? They do only harm and do not help the cause of the suicides or their people. They only kill. It makes me sick.
Second on the agenda, just after reading on the internet that lovely news item, Hubby and I were going to take advantage of the quiet, childless house and have some marital fun when I went to the bathroom and discovered that only 19 days since I last had my menses, I�m at it again. God damn it! Then the phone rang and it was Little Princess, done with her exam and wanting a ride home because it was raining, so I picked her up and we went shopping at Costco, hence the crushing of worms and the unloading of groceries.
There was something I really wanted to write about that I was thinking about last night as I lay awake with freezing feet, but not having written it down, it�s gone. However, harri3tspy has opened her own can of worms by observing the introduction of racial (i.e. geographically engendered physical differences) traits to her 5-year-old son. Something tells me we�ve had this discussion before, but it�s a good-enough subject to rehash.
I grew up in Toronto, a racially-diverse city in this day and age, but almost 50 years ago it was pretty darn white. Oh, we had linguistic differences such as Italian, Portuguese and Yiddish-speaking immigrants, but everyone was more-or-less white. I hate that word. No one is white, but I�ll get to that eventually. When I was in grade 1 in a public school, I knew one black kid, period. I knew one Japanese kid. I guess that�s about it. The situation didn�t improve in junior high, except that there were more Asians about, and one more black kid, whom we nicknamed �Linc� � la The Mod Squad (see, I�m dating myself). By the time I got to high school, things were getting more colourful (pun intended) as the school was situated next to a low-income housing development, which housed quite a few black immigrant families. One of my girlfriends in high school was a black girl with the most gorgeous almond-shaped eyes. There was a boy in my homeroom who was spectacularly goodlooking; he was a racial mix of everything going, his parents having come from Trinidad. While I may have thought these people exotic looking, they were my friends, I knew them, they weren�t anything special or different.
When I was a teenager, someone jokingly asked my father how he would feel if I married a black man, and my father replied, just as jokingly, that he didn�t care what colour person I married, as long as he was Jewish. Well, fooled you there, didn�t I! I think a picture is emerging here. I can�t say that I don�t notice the colour of other people�s skin, that would be a lie. At least, I notice it when there is a marked contrast. I live in a predominantly white society, I am white by definition (even if I don�t personally consider myself to be so), sprinkled liberally with Asians and a smattering of darker-skinned folks. My daughter�s first fianc� at age 5 was the 6-year-old son of Indian immigrants down the street, his father being the laser and spectography professor at the college. But then you must remember that I live in Quebec, a province where segregation is on linguistic grounds. But that�s another story.
Many years ago, I had friends here (who have since moved away and whom I miss dreadfully), the husband was Barbadoan, his wife was Persian. They have two children, a boy and girl, the same ages as my girl and boy. I held the little girl�s hand when I dropped my son off for kindergarten his first day because she was crying heartbrokenly. Anyway, her parents and we became very good friends (he was a sociology prof and she worked in ITS) and one day I saw a poster that a black author was giving a talk on campus about racism in Canada. I decided to go. My friend the Duchess asked me why I was going, and then she said, �Oh! You�re Jewish!� I replied, �Yes, but I can pass for white.�
This man was a childhood friend of my Barbadoan friend, had come to Canada around the same time as him, but was a totally different kind of person. Whereas my friend never saw himself as being any different from the white kids he went to high school with, his friend was always aware that he was different. Anyway, I went to this �lecture� and it turned out to be a reading from the guy�s latest book (with copies for sale too, I might add). He certainly had a chip on his shoulder. The audience consisted of white, middle-aged profs, mostly from the English department, but one young black fellow had come and was sitting by himself, and at one point got up the courage to ask what a young black man should be doing or thinking or whatever. He never got an answer. Now, at one point the author said that he was driving through Montreal and saw two churches on different corners of the same intersection, a white Catholic church, and a black Baptist church. The Catholic church was beautiful and clean and very classy, the Baptist church had spray-painted on the bulletin case out front �101�, which is the number of the Quebec bill governing the language of education in this province. In a nutshell, all Qu�becois are required to send their children to French school unless they can produce a Certificate of Eligibility, meaning that one of the parents has had English as his or her primary language of instruction in Canada. We chose to send our kids to French school for primary (we had the choice, you see). Others were not so lucky. Anyway, the author says to his audience � propos this desecration of church property, �What does that tell you of how blacks are thought of in Quebec?� No one said a word, but we were all thinking, �That they�re English?�
Anyway, afterwards I told my friend the line I had given the Duchess, about how I could pass for white. He thought it was very funny, but warned me that his friend the author would not have. Prejudice works both ways, folks.
So, back to noticing that people are different from yourself. The only time I have never really noticed that people with dark skin, strangers that is, have dark skin, is when I was in Trinidad and Cuba. In those places, I was like my friend in high school. He was the only black kid in the school, but because he never saw himself, he didn�t notice that he was different from the others. In Cuba, I was white, or pale, since Cubans (and Trinidadians) come in all shades of brown, and it didn�t occur to me that anyone stood out in particular.
This has gone on a very long time, I know. It has taken me several hours to write this entry, what with interruptions for dinner and to watch a movie (Hubby and I just watched EIizabetht0wn on pay-per-view; very good flick, by the way), so I guess I should get off my podium and give someone else a say. Toodles.
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