MY BOGGY BLOG: find your way through the murk

031.htm

Our Midwestern drought continues here, with temps in the 90's, crunchy
grass and dying gardens. Usually our summers are a mix of heat,
humidity and wild thunderstorms with drenching rain... but we haven't
had rain in about two months! I don't know how the farmers do it...
growing their crops and waiting on the weather. I'd be a basket case
of nerves. It was always so depressing to read the Little House on the
Prairie books and see how their harvest could look very promising one
year and then a hailstorm would dash their crops and their hopes to
bits.

We went swimming at the YWCA yesterday. We are so lucky to have a new
facility that has been so wonderfully thought out-- there's an indoor
track (a blessing in the winter!), two pools, a fit kids gym where
parents can drop kids to have fun while parents work out, all kinds of
weight machines and exercise equipment and classes. Swimming felt
especially refreshing, and now my kids can swim well enough that I can
go and do some laps and get some exercise while they swim. The family
pool was busy but not overly crowded, and as I hung out with my kids
there, I looked around and took notice for a moment of all the various
skin colors around me. There was a big Hispanic family, several Somali
kids, some African Americans. When I go to Cub for groceries, the
diversity is even greater-- I can hear several different languages
around me as I shop, see Somalis, African Americans, Hispanics, Native
Americans, Chinese, Hmong... and probably more that are slipping my
mind right now. I love the diversity, love the ordinariness of it here
in the city. That's just the way it is, life in the city.

I grew up in the suburbs, with two "black kids" (as we called them
then) in our whole school of about 1500 kids. When diversity began
creeping out to the suburbs in the last few years, I've heard comments
about it, how different those people are, how much trouble they bring
with them. I'm so sad to hear this! My children go to a city school
with a wonderful diversity of ethnicity, and that is just normal to my
kids. They will not grow up being afraid of nonwhites because they
will have shared pencils with them and tagged them at recess. That's
not to say that there aren't problems in the city or that we all get
along with our differences all the time. But we do have more
opportunities to see each other as just people or neighbors and to
share something of our similarities or differences with each other.
There is so much to learn in this big old world of ours.