381 Days...Now O'Clock With a Poet

318 days. That's how long the Montgomery boycott lasted. I just happen to have the opportunity to walk many of same hallowed halls the Rev. Martin Luther (the) King, Jr. walked during his tenure at Boston University. Yesterday, I had an interesting experience in Lowes. A white man and a black man told me that they were brothers, but they didn't know who their father was. The white man was old, and named Harry. The black man was young, named Brendan. True, they were flirting with me, but I needed some help finding a door sweep because it is cold. As I talk to them, Brendan gets called away. I find out Harry is German, and when he got to Boston, he found out it was unexpectedly racist...until a Jewish man in a Mattapan deli asked him what he expected. It was exactly what Hitler had done to the Jews. Harry was dumbstruck and enlightened.

After Harry finds out I am in seminary at BU, he asks if I have to study Martin Luther. And he tells me to go to the King library and read all of the papers. "You have to because, excuse my American English, he was a f----ing genious. And he had the cahones of an elephant. You know what cahones are?" Then Brendan comes back, and Harry (maybe trying to hook us up) tells me that Brendan is a foreigner going to college, flight school, and working two jobs to pay for it. You got Americans who won't even do that, but it's good that a foreigner can. That's why he respects him, and his wife is impressed with him so that she adopted him as family.

I usually take offense to the word "impress" depending on the context and the mouth that it comes from, but I sense this is different. He's got some judgment, but it doesn't sound like racism or classism...Who would really expect a German retired Army veteran to befriend a Trinidadian cat and joke about being his brother with his arm around him? One is blue-eyed and the other is as dredded, off-the-boat-accent as you can get. Maybe the same German guy whose son married a Jamaican girl and hangs out with his granddaughter at German school on Saturdays...Hitler must be growling, cussing, and turning over in his grave.

No disrespect to the hundreds who walked until there were holes in their shoes, no disrespect to the Jews, but that could be worth 381 days. Not absolution or forgiveness...just 381 days.

Obama spoke at King's church today and CNN followed him. (But I can't find the transcript or the whole video on CNN like I do on some politics blog.) Jeremiah Wright spoke at Howard's Rankin Chapel today and CNN followed him. (The campaign is getting nitpicky, and it's time to measure men and women.) CNN, FBI, DEA, CIA. All these letters spell something. (I'll figure that out and post it.) Hopefully, they measured their words when 40 years after King's death, there but so many new words to say, and questionable whether they are additive. I may not have said anything of value to anybody today. I'm scared to talk or respond to anything bouncing around that might be a quote or a play off of King for fear of tarnishing the poetical nuance of his words. He was not perfect, but a poet. In addition to walking, I might have volunteered to answer phones in an office where I could hear things like....

"You know there comes a time when time itself is ready for change."

What does your watch say when that happens?