I apologize for the last post. It was really depressing.

Now, onto something a little more inspiring. Well, we’ll see. Let’s not count the comments before the post is written.

A while back, I posted about divorce and mentioned some of the difficult situations that I have been witnessing. My children have been playing a lot with M. She is seven, and being our neighbor’s granddaughter, we have known her since she was about a year old. M has finally been granted a custody situation that involves being able to go to school every day, live predominantly with the responsible parent, and still get to visit with her other parent on a regular basis.

M also happens to be African American. She was hanging out with us yesterday and decided to try to teach me to talk black. We’d been talking about birthday money, and C was going on about how she’d gotten $107 from her granddaddy for her 7th birthday, but it was in her bank account. So M asked me which bank, to which I answered “Bank of None of Your BizNess”. She guffawed, and said I had gotten the phrase wrong. “It’s supposed to be None A Ya BizWax,” she told me, “like our color says it,” as she gestured at her own face, giving me one of her characteristically adorable grins.

It was hilarious, being coached by her. Her personality is so sparkly and bubbly that you just can’t feel blue when she’s around. She’s also the kid who told me I was like, eighty hundred thousand percent COOL a while back. What a great kid.

I was really blown away when she made reference recently to the fact that she is different from us — ie, not white. It’s not something I would ever directly refer to. I am not sure why that is, since I live in a neighborhood that is quite mixed racially, as far as black and white. In my immediate block, I’d say of the 5 closest neighbors, two families are white, and three are black. We live side by side, greet one another, our kids play, our block is friendly and comfortable. It’s a kind of racial paradise.

In fact, the neighborhood that I live in is known for its tolerant attitudes. There are many bi-racial families; and families with two moms, or two dads; there are Quakers, and Catholics, Jews and Protestants. There are Muslim families, too, though no Mosque that I know of. There is a Hindu Temple and a Jewish Center within a quarter mile of each other, just down the road from the Lutheran Seminary. We all live side by side; it’s peaceful here.

In spite of all this lovey dovey living together that we try to do here, I have always felt a strong sense of the other. Or maybe of being an outsider. It’s hard to explain. I think it’s because I grew up in such a racist environment, where blacks and whites were quite segregated. (Obviously, I did not grow up here in Philadelphia, though I’m told that not all neighborhoods of our city are as cozy as the one we live in. I rarely leave the zip code, though, so I have this lovely illusion of living in a harmonious glade.)

The small town I grew up in was mostly white, with a small part of town that was kind of like a small town ghetto block where the blacks all lived. The schools I went to, public schools all, had different educational tracks - ones for kids headed to college and ones for kids who were destined to start working right out of high school, as say, hair dressers, mechanics, office assistants, or other jobs that don’t require a higher education. There were no local black kids in my ‘honors’ classes (that’s not strictly accurate, as there was ONE though she was not a local kid, but came from a neighboring affluent area that was so sparsely populated that they do not have a high school of their own). The blacks kids did not hang out with white kids. They just didn’t. We didn’t compare the way we talked, or chat about common things, or feel at ease with each other. Ever. I walked around with this tense feeling that dictated that we are all same and our color doesn’t matter, which was neither comfortable nor true.

So that is why it’s so heart warming that I find myself feeling included, feeling appreciated, feeling that I can be who I am and at the same time enjoy the company of others who aren’t the same as me. I love being able to embrace and accept the differences that we have in this region. When M talks about ‘her color,’ she speaks of it with pride and pleasure, which is just as it should be. When I think of the diversity of my neighborhood, I’m not just giving lip service to the politically correct Diversity concept. I just love that we can and do get along and not in the “good fences make good neighbors” way.

I hope that my children are learning that crucial lesson that is put so succinctly in The Muppets Take Manhattan:

Peoples is peoples. No is buildings. Is tomatoes, huh? Is peoples, is dancing, is music, is potatoes. So, peoples is peoples. Okay?

I tried to drive home this easy to remember phrase (Peoples Is Peoples!) some weeks back when we were shopping at the discount store. My daughters were kind of taken aback at seeing a woman shopping, dressed head to toe in black robes, her face showing only the tiniest strip across her eyes, for she was clearly of the Muslim faith and was choosing to dress quite conservatively. The younger one stopped and stared, and started to point. This made me feel just terrible, because my instinct was that I felt the kids should be polite, not stare, and act as if nothing was different. But that’s silly, because obviously, the woman shopping dressed in her Islamic garb is different from us, as any little kid can tell you.

The Peoples Is Peoples line jumped into my head and I pulled my girls aside. I spoke quietly to them, and reminded them what I’d told them in the car the last time we chanced to see some women dressed this way. “Underneath her clothes, that woman is just another person like anybody. People are people, no matter what they happen to be wearing. Don’t be afraid, but please also don’t point or stare because that is not a polite way to behave.”

The woman overheard my little speech and came over to us. I felt a little nervous; had she been offended? Had my kids seemed disrespectful and ignorant? Was my little pep talk too inane, did I fail to impart some important lesson? Not at all. She said to me, “I really appreciate that you took the time to talk to your kids and tell them that.” She opened her veil so that my girls could see her face, and she smiled at them. “See,” she said, “your mama is right. I’m just a regular person under here!”

Something about that encounter brought tears to my eyes. It was very emotional. I felt like if people would just talk to each other and not make assumptions, we could all breathe a little easier.

Back to my lessons on how to say None of Your BizWax properly… Maya didn’t think much of my inflection and intonation as I tried to copy her phrases exactly, but I did the best I could, and we were all amused. She told me to practice on it a while and get back to her. As Miss Mary Lennox, that sour girl who grows healthy out on the moor in The Secret Garden, says of the broad Yorkshire dialect: I’m learning it as if it were French. My kids just say we’re learning to talk Philly. I like that.