I started school in a very small town in Alabama on the first day of Freedom of Choice. I boastfully lie about my age, so I would prefer that you not do the math.

These are the things that I remember about the first day of first grade:

• Lots of parents standing around the room
• Getting in trouble for talking with Suzie (I had the coolest pencil box!)
• That very well-dressed brown boy, Gregory, was so lucky—the creepy old teacher didn’t kiss him.
• Gregory’s mom, Miss Elizabeth, had the coolest car I had ever seen. (1965 Corvair)

Most of us were blissfully oblivious to the tensions around us. My friend Tammy told me not too long ago that her father, who was on the School Board, had received death threats.

We proceeded through school. We did school pageants. For square dancing, I had to hold hands with Bart, who had warts, and Gregory on the other side. I was screwed. I knew that I would either get warts or some kind of colored cooties. But nothing stopped me from sashaying around in my lime-green cowgirl skirt (everyone else picked either red or blue).

In fourth grade the “mill village” school combined with the school I had always attended, even though, technically, I lived in the mill village zone. 

This was a traumatic experience because these children looked like me (white) and even lived on my street, but had very different life expectations. (As the eldest child of perpetual students, I’ve described my childhood and family as “overeducated and under funded” for the place that we lived.)

My fourth grade teacher was a lovely, gracious woman named Miss Watson. She was the first teacher of color in the school system. She let me build an amusement park in the back of the classroom.

After college, I went back to thank her for fostering my creativity, thinking she had seen some spark of artistic genius.

She looked at me and said “Honey, I just had to find something to keep you quiet.”

Her first homeroom class had a small group of “A” students, and the rest were below “C” level. And we had 32 kids per classroom. A few years ago, she confided that the white teachers “acted as if they had never taught anyone other than little geniuses. I believed that a good teacher could teach anyone.”

Fifth grade brought total integration. And the last prom. One jackass from a prominent family took offense when a black guy asked his date to dance and started a fight that ended one of the rights of passage for over a decade.

And in fifth grade, there was Sharon. Recently, I told her cousin that I would swear she was six feet tall then. And what a mouth! I was a little squirt and scared of her. It never occurred to me that she must have been scared, too.

We grew up together and separate. 

Throughout our school years, black and white students led separate lives. I was active in Girl Scouts, and it never occurred to me that there were no black Girl Scouts in my troop or in my town, even though I had friends through scouting from other cities who were black. 

We played ball together, cheered together, marched in the band together and even learned that sharing a Coke was a small, but significant shift in our perceptions. 

At the party after our senior play, it never occurred to the white kids to invite the black kids. (Oblivious—and consistent.) Suddenly, a group of black kids, led by Sharon, showed up. 

I remember a moment of apprehension, and then Jodie walked over and asked Sharon to dance. 

In that one moment, we knew that we were OK. 

We grew up. Some of us grew closer. 

Gregory suffered from the weight of the unrealistic expectations thrust upon him. And from the memory of Jeffery calling him an Oreo—something that we white kids couldn’t understand as being a bad thing (I mean really, who didn’t like Oreos?). Jeffery, of course, used that epithet, because he, too, had been the object of the same insult.

Sharon became a teacher. Tim, our formerly redneck co-class president is a preacher. Suzie is a pediatrician. Tammy is a school nurse.

When Jodie, a lawyer, died, tragically a suicide, Sharon’s cousin asked “Why are you to’ up over this white boy.” 

Sharon said, with great pride, “We are not like that.”

No, were were not like that, but I believe it was because of Sharon and Jodie. 

Our class reunion was last month. And it was amazing. We are free. All of us. We know each other’s families and some of each other’s trials and tribulations. And we are not like “that.” (Well, there are a couple, but they didn’t show…)

Last night, one of the first celebratory calls I made was to Sharon. I couldn’t get her on the phone, but I got her text messages until well after 2am. 

Over the years I have been on occasion embarrassed by my modest roots, being Southern, being from a small town in a state that refuses to move into the 20th Century, even though we are firmly in the 21st, and as someone who loves to travel and keeps up with the world, have been mortified at what my country has done in my name and even more reprehensible, in the name of God.

Today, I am proud to be American. 

Yes we can.

Yes we did.

And now, yes we must.

It was a really nasty, rainy day in Atlanta. I had errands to run, although I really wanted to just wrap up in my down comforter and read.

So Sparkie and I dressed in our raingear and headed out. 

Sparkie was humiliated in her slicker, hoping that no dog or human that she knew would see her dressed this way. 

Here she is hiding in her crate.

A couple of Fridays ago, I saw on Facebook a post from a friend in California. He and his partner were finally able to get married. 

I celebrated from afar (although I really dreamed of being the flower girl—but there probably isn’t enough tulle in the world to cover me…).

Today I was sent this article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081023/ap_on_el_st_lo/gay_marriage_1

Why do small minded people want to deny rights to people who were born just a little different than the mainstream.

If you want to see an “enemy of traditional marriage” LOOK AT ME!!! I‘m a straight middle-aged, Presbyterian woman.

My marriage was so bad that I never want to repeat the experience. “Traditional” marriage can be a prison, stifling the very life out of a person who is gifted. It can trap you into a level of hell that Dante did not imagine. 

The persons involved in California’s “Protect Marriage” group find that their marriages are threatened by other people’s happiness and security. How sad that their unions are so precarious. 

As with most groups who attack gay and lesbian persons, I suspect that this group is also populated by closet cases who have an inability to embrace who they are so they attack others. 

I recommend these people would better spend their time praying for themselves, for understanding that Jesus said “Love your neighbors.” And go to marriage counseling. 

We only have about 10 weeks until Sparkie and I depart for our new lives. And I have lists. Reading lists. Packing lists. (OK things are going back into the boxes they were in for the most part.) Lists of art projects that I need to start and finish. The list of stuff for my visa application (learned that the hard way). And lists of lists I need to make. 

Of course there is the list of things I need to fund as well. (Pray, light candles, cross your fingers, kill a chicken—I still need more work.)

I have had a great time working for Smith Communication Partners the past six weeks and hope to continue—perhaps even becoming their “London Office.”

Above is a sample of my reading list. Fortunately many of the other titles are already part of my library. 

OK, breathe deeply, Michelle.

Sparkie greets at the entry of our outdoor cabana/studio/living & dining room.

A gravel floor can come in handy. You never have to sweep or mop. If it gets too dusty, just hose it off. And if you knock over the citronella candles—no worries.

But leave your nice heels at home. Come by and prop up your feet. We have fresh mint for mojitos. Or maybe a mint julep for fall?

Life is getting better. 

After my concert at the Botanical Garden, I came home to an e-mail introduction. A friend of mine recommended me for a contract job. 

For the first time this year, I am working consistently and I am sooooo glad. I am working with a communications group and really enjoy the guys I’m working for.

So, my student loans for next year are secured; I have work; Sparkie and I are both well for the first time this year; and I’m meeting some wonderful people.

I have become addicted to Facebook. I set up an account at some point in the past couple of years as preparation to be a student, but never did anything else.

One night I got an invite from my friend Grits and accepted it. (She has a goal of 700 friends on Facebook.) 

The message I got back said “You have one friend.”

ONE friend. ME? How could that be? 

I set about adding friends. 

And I found that it is a great way to keep up with my closest friends—well the techno-savvy ones. 

I’ve even gotten to instant message with my friends in Seoul, South Korea and Malaysia. How cool is that? 

It’s magic.

On Friday night, my friend Kristin invited me to get out of the garden shed and into the Garden. The Atlanta Botanical Garden. There was a PBA shindig and Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary fame was playing.

For his final number, he invited us (OK—he invited everyone) up on stage to sing backup on “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

My attempt to have an audio recording of this was thwarted by my brother actually answering his phone for a change, instead of letting it go to voice mail. But he said he enjoyed it. 

So, maybe this will be impressive for my young nephews? 

This year I have tried to handle the blows I’ve taken with as much humor as I could muster. It has been really hard. Not getting to go to London was one of the single most devastating moments of my life. 

And I have been polite to my landlord as he continually broke promises, gouged me on one thing or another and even had the gaul to tell me that I really didn’t need to run my air conditioner the week it was in the 90s all day and only dipped to the high 80s in the evening.

I was really excited that he was moving out and that new tenants, young women, were moving in. Unfortunately, he neglected to tell anyone that I had laundry privileges. This precipitated a big brouhaha when the parents of the girls were doing their walk through. The real estate agent brought an amendment for me to sign and collected the key.

So, for a $25 reduction in rent, I am going to have to spend a couple hundred a month to do laundry? And this is Buckhead. The nearest laundromat I have found is in Midtown. And I don’t have a car.

Not only that, I am subsidizing the utilities of the house? 

Serves me right for renting from someone that I thought was a jerk from the beginning. 

Anyone know a good real estate lawyer?

I finally found a small place to live. It is more than I wanted to spend, but is in a great neighborhood and very convenient to MARTA and way too convenient to shopping. I refer to it as a two story garden shed. Yeah, it is really that fancy.

But I’m beginning to get a complex. Last week I sat on a swing on the old swing set that was there. I did not notice that parts of the set were missing. It cracked and crashed on me. I have bruises on top of bruises.

Late Saturday afternoon, I debated with myself whether I wanted to sit out and read, or come inside, away from mosquitoes, and watch a movie. 

The movie won. Then a little later I heard a weird noise.

A neighbor’s tree had dropped a limb right where I would have been sitting. 

While I’m fortunate that I have no broken bones and only my canopy was crushed, I’m a little paranoid right now. Since things come in threes, I rushed to the internet to assure myself that Skylab did indeed come down in 1979 and is not circling the atmosphere waiting to drop on me.

In December of 2006, I went to a funeral. Jodie, my earliest childhood friend, had killed himself. His children had the song Seasons of Love from the Broadway musical and movie Rent played at his funeral. I had no recollection of any life before Jodie. In fact, my earliest memory was of arguing with him over a fat orange crayon in the 3-year-old Sunday School room at the First Baptist Church. He and his wife and children lived in the house he grew up in, one street behind my Mom. When I ran into him walking the dogs, we were eight years old again—before his older brother had convinced him to not play with girls—and we would sit in the street and talk. Tonight, my Mom called. I was watching Rent and didn’t want to pick up during La Vie Boheme.  So I called her back as soon as the dancing was finished. She called to tell me that another one of my friends was dead. I knew immediately that he had killed himself. David grew up with my brother and became like another brother to me. As of yet, I know no details. He had a wife and two beautiful children.