This spring has been so full of commotion and activity that I have had no time at all to keep up with the blog. I have really missed it, and kept thinking I would find time overall Memorial Day weekend or 4th of July, and now we are in the middle of summer and I have not even posted the Easter pictures,missed pics of the beach because I did not have the right batteries and are just sitting down to talk about how my family has completed fallen for Obama.
We had fun at Easter, and colored Easter eggs. That was a messy process, but fun but not like last year's Easter. I missed our friend's ritual of thinking about what we wanted to accomplish in the next year. In Easter of 2007, I said I wanted to go back to Kenya with our family in 08 without using a credit card. We didn't make it. Instead, Boo has had to have surgery on his teeth, and I am still trying to figure out how to pay for my root canal. Between the two of that is $6,000 in medical bills if I get mine-so much for Kenya.
The presidential primary season in Portland really heated up this year, and we all caught the Obama bug. We all had it already, we have since long before he announced but the Hillary/Obama stuff had us worked into a fervor. We were surprised to see Oregon playing such a key role in the election.
We took Bugaboo to the Obama rally in May that drew 75,000 people. It was pretty unbelievable and my pictures don't do it justice (refer back to previous battery issues), but it was really amazing to see people just keep coming. Baba Malcolm, Malcolm and I arrived downtown at around 10:15. The rally was supposed to start at 12:30, and people were already wrapped around the block. All over the place there were people selling all kinds of things with Obama's picture or name on it. It reminded me of the little kiosks in Nairobi where you could buy everything Nikes to 1 cent candies and cigarettes to fish for tonight's dinner.
What was really shocking to me was that it was not a predominately African-American crowd. It was very mixed ( well for Oregon anyway), and people stood patiently in 90+ degree weather waiting to see Obama. While he spoke,well-organized Campaign activist sprayed the crowd down and offered us cook drinking water. Malcolm sat on our shoulders and learned the expression "Yes, we can." He still says it whenever he sees a picture of Obama on TV or something. We put an Obama sign in our yard, and somehow he learned to read it on his own, wherever he sees the word Obama in whatever context he reads it. That's my baby boy. Yes, we can Malcolm.We can.
After the May Primary then June arrived and so did my mother and my birthday. This year, I actually wanted to do something and we had people over for a party in our garden.
I have gotten addicted to garden. We have chickens now, and hopefully soon we will have a beautiful coop as well so they can get out of our basement! Malcolm loves the plants, and eats anything green he finds growing.
He is really enjoying a few weeks off of school hanging out with our church community. You know before he was born I really thought my activist community would step up and be a family for my little one. It did not happen that way, instead I got an entirely new family, and I am totally grateful that God sent them to me every single day. I do not know what anyone does without a faith community, and feel that ours is striving very hard to become the Beloved Community that Dr. King dreamed of. Malcolm knows more peace and love and community in a rainbow of people than I ever have. I hope that we continue to keep the balance of his experiences on the safety and community side and not the pain and hurt that so many of us have felt under the stings of racism here.
