09.25.08
Lessons Learned
I think it is so easy to take our parents for granted. They do everything for us, after all, and people often overlook the ones who are closest to them. I call my mom, with her endless telephone calls and cards, a mother to the ‘nth’ degree. And now through researching my book, I have a new appreciation for my dad. I recently was with him as he was being interviewed for a radio blog podcast. I sat next to him amazed as he talked about his life growing up during segregation and what that meant to him.
I had never heard some of the stories before. He talked about how, as part of a shop class in high school, he and his classmates had to leave their school at various times during the school day to travel across town and physically lay bricks to help build a new, white school. Or, how years later, after my father finished medical school, he was working as the first black doctor at a hospital in Tennessee when a hospital official unabashedly told my father that he wasn’t sure how he felt about having a black doctor at the hospital. In a strange twist of fate, years later when my father became Tennessee’s first black Commissioner of Mental Health, he was asked to fire this same man, but my father, without holding a grudge, did it as gently, and in as kind a manner as he could. I think hearing these stories and recording such history is so important. I think it makes our families and the world that much richer.
