Yesterday

I had a date with a guy I met on MySpace. He's 35, lives in Long Beach (which isnt too far at least) and was willing to drive to my hood since I had to work yesterday and he didn't. The night before we talked on the phone till 2 am so I felt like I kind of knew him so I let him pick me up at home which I don't often do. He has a 1968 Dodge somethingorother, some kind of muscle car, in really nice shape, so we went in that. He got the door for me every time, even closed it since the doors on that thing weigh a ton. Went to eat at a BBQ place and shared each others food. I'm not at all squeamish about that kind of thing but a lot of people are and it was nice to know he wasn't one of them because if a date orders something that looks/smells good I usually want a taste and am not shy about asking for one. He ate some of my mashed potatoes, I ate some of his corn and clam chowder and we both shared the brownie ala mode. Then went to Starbucks where I treated him (well, I got our drinks for free but still, he didn't have to pay) and we sat and talked till around 9:30. Then back to my house to hang out until 12, and I even got a neck and shoulder massage out of the deal. He's actually really nice, good sense of humor, tall, doesn't take things too seriously and not bad looking. I think there will probably be another date which would not be a bad thing. Stay tuned...
I am truly the melting pot being German, Black, Cherokee, French and Irish. My mom is only German and French but my dad was all five of those things. I've always considered myself just me, or mixed or whatever but my dad definitely considered himself Black, period. I'm sure part of that was the time he grew up in where you were even more racially defined than now. Regardless, he sometimes got annoyed with me that I didn't consider myself Black but I'd remind him I also didnt' consider myself white, I was just me. Anyway, in probably the 40s when my dad was working on the railways he ended up in Chicago for a night and decided to go find a bar to hang out in. I'm sure segregation was in place at the time but anyway he ended up at a black bar. So he walks in and goes up to the bar and orders a drink of some sort and then turns to the guy next to him and says "hey nigga, what's up?" or something to that effect and the man turned and looked at my dad and said "you aren't black enough to be calling me nigga" and my dad took his drink and slunk away. I always found it amusing that someone who so clearly identified himself as black was too white to call another brother nigga.
another time on the train my dad was sitting in front of a little girl and her mother and noticed that the child kept looking at his hair. Finally she asked him if she could touch it. The mother was very embarassed and told the girl no but my dad said "of course you can" and let the girl touch his hair. Obviously she'd never touched really curly kinky hair before. She told him "oh, it's so soft" and was all smiles because she got to touch his hair that was so different from her own. My dad felt and I also feel that understanding our differences as people leads us to not be afraid of "others" or distrust or dislike them but to be more accepting and helping a young child know what this different hair felt like and especially that he was so kind to her hopefully put her on a path to be more accepting and not racially intolerant. Too bad as adults we forget that desire to know about others rather than just judging them on the basis of things like skin color or hair texture or all the othre irrelevant things in life.