Are You Holding the Wrong Hand?

The neurosurgeon found me in the hospital waiting room and said the surgery had been a success.  After four hours, it was finally over.  He had  removed most of the spousal unit's meningioma.  A meningioma is a benign tumor growing in the lining of the brain.  You can see where it is from the MRI, but you don't know what you will find until you get in there.  If it's spongy, you can suck the tumor out with a straw.  If it's hard, you have to chip away at it.  In any event, the surgeon got most of it out and Ron was doing great.  He was being transferred to the intensive care unit, and I could go up in 15 minutes.   I was relieved and eager to see him.

To get into the ICU, I had to identify myself through an intercom.  If acceptable, they would buzz and the doors would open.  The first time I tried, they told me to come back in 20 minutes.  The second time, the high wide doors parted like the Red Sea.

A nursing station was in the centre of the ICU area.  Around the perimeter of the room were 18 curtained areas, each containing an ICU bed, a patient, and numerous beeping monitors.

These cubicles were numbered.  Number one was to my left.  A nurse emerged from one of the rooms and I asked her where my husband was.  She thought for a minute, then said, "Room 10."

I walked around to #10 and peeked inside.  A man is lying under a sheet, moaning and snoring.  He looked awful.  The shape under the sheet seemed to be about the same height and girth as my husband's.  His head was covered with a turban of bandages.  His beard had been roughly shaven off.  I had never seen my husband without a beard, and who knows what a person looks like after their head is opened up and then closed and held together with a titanium clamp?  I took his hand and stroked it.  I was prepared to love him regardless of what he looked like.  He'd been through a horrible ordeal.

I held his hand for five minutes, but he didn't wake up.  Hadn't the surgeon said that he was awake and asking for me?  I noticed a clipboard on a table at the foot of the bed.  I delicately placed the hand back on the bed, and went to read the name on the clipboard.  Damn, I'd been holding the hand of some other guy.

I peeked in the adjoining rooms and found Ron in #12.  Except for the 50 staples in his head, he was his same handsome, bearded self.  "What took you so long?" he said.

**********

Whose hand are you holding?  

Could you be holding the wrong hand?

What's in a Name?

Mice will play when the cat's gone.  For schoolchildren, the cat is the teacher, and a substitute teacher is a licence to party.  I once worked as a substitute teacher.  In my interview for the position, I was asked, "What are three ways you maintain order in the classroom, and discuss each of these three ways in terms of your philosophy of education?"

"That's easy," I bluffed.  "I control the class, first, with my confidence.  If I seem to know why I'm there, the class is more secure.  Second, with my enthusiasm.  If I'm excited about my lesson, the students become excited too.  Finally, I use a pocketful of Hershey's chocolate kisses.
They hired me, but they knew and I knew that survival in the classroom requires more than confidence, enthusiasm, and kisses.  While schools have behaviour policies with serious consequences and occasional student-of-the-month type rewards, these are difficult for a stand-in to memorize five minutes before the bell.
My first assignment was a grade 8 class.  The previous sub had left at 10:30 a.m.  Much to the principal's surprise and relief, I stayed the whole day.  I survived -- but I was not pleased.  The students had a powerful tool to confound me:  they knew their names and I did not.  Much of the day had gone like this:

"You -- stop throwing those paper airplanes.  What's your name?"
"Butthead."

There are always seating plans, but these aren't much good  when they find out there's a sub.  Not only does everyone sit where they like, but students wander in from the hall and insist they belong in my class.  I needed a strategy.  If I could address students by name, they would have to be accountable, and I'd have more control.
A week later, I was assigned a grade 6 in the same middle school.  I decided that the students would wear nametags...but what if they gave me the wrong names?  I felt doomed, but suddenly through my dark fear, a light began to shine.  I would make wearing nametags a reward!
The day began with the usual rioting.  During a momentary lull after O Canada, I said authoritatively, "I have nametags for you -- but not everyone's going to get one -- because to have a nametag means to have a real, true name -- a name of your own, a name that sets you apart from all others and declares, ‛I am me!'  What happens when you have a name?"
Someone shouted, "People know what to call you."
"Exactly.  And if they know what to call you -- they can call you for dinner.  If they know what to call you, they don't say, ‛Hey you.’  They say, ‛Gee Anna, your story is great,’ or ‛Wow, John, that's a cool earring,’ but when you have no name, your identity is erased.  You get blamed for other people's crimes.  You disappear.  When you have a true name, you are unique -- but you only get a nametag if you tell me your real name."  I held my breath.
"I'll tell you my name," a boy in front piped up.
"OK, what is it?"
"William"
"Is it?"  I looked around the class -- they're all nodding.  William showed me a notebook with his name on it.  "OK.  I believe you.  William, you get the first nametag and a Hershey's kiss.  As long as you're in my class, I want you to wear this."  I wrote "William" on the stick-backed labels I had brought, and ceremoniously placed it on his shirt.  William was beaming.  The next instant, everyone was clamouring for a nametag.
I gave the class their math assignment and promised to visit each desk and name each one of them while they worked.  I hoped that the magic of being named would last till noon.

Getting Over It: How Do We Recover?

Mid-heartbreak, you wonder if you will ever get over it.  You don't even know what "over it" looks like.  Your grief is twice the size of your life.  You stumble through your day.  Contact with people seems to be through thick bullet-proof glass.  You hear someone say, "How's it going?" and you can barely find enough breath to say, "fine" or "ok" before the tears start.

"The person who falls in love is not the person who remembers falling in love."  - Junot Diaz

In the same way, the person in the midst of heartbreak is not the person remembering heartbreak.  Love, said Diaz, "has the power to transform what we otherwise take for granted."  Everything we take for granted about ourselves and our world changes when the hurricane of love tears through us.  Even our body chemistry changes.  In the aftermath of love, everything changes again.  When we are ready, when we are able, we start to put our lives back together again.

If you were dumped, you have to rebuild your confidence so you can feel as amazing and worthy as you did when you were adored.  Even when you're the one to break off, you might have to keep reminding yourself why you bailed out of that love boat.

Back in the 1990s, freedom rose above my horizon like a new dawn.  In the aftermath of love, I was responsible for my own life and had to learn to live with myself.  I lived in a small house with my six-year-old daughter.  Collages of pictures and poems covered every wall.  On the side of a kitchen cupboard, I posted pictures of previous romantic partners under the words, “Boyfriend Graveyard.”  This was one of my techniques for recovery from heartbreak, a reminder of what "over" meant to me, a reminder of why I left, a reminder of what I didn’t want.  I would not go back to unhappiness.  It was better to be alone than to live in a bad relationship, and single mothering was easier than parenting in a war zone.

My friend Doug Moore used to say that relationships are like car accidents:  There would be a collision.  Some time after, the bodies are pulled from the wreckage.  The vehicles are towed away and the debris is cleaned up.  In the end, all that's left are the skid marks.

In 1995, I left the house where the “graveyard” was, and by 1996 my exes started dying off for real.  I remember them more for the amazing things about them, for the things they taught me, and for saving my life as best they could, before I learned to save my own life.  Those are the skid marks:  the deep impressions they made on me.

"Maybe you never get over anything. You just find a way of carrying it as gently as possible."   Bronwen Wallace

How did you get over heartbreak?  Did you take action or just wait it out?

Have You Been Blessed Lately?

I was recently at a birthday party of my childhood friend, Nancy.  When she was 30,  she was snagged by religion.  It probably saved her life.  She became an evangelical singer.  All her friends are evangelicals, and every single person at this party, except me, was an evangelical.
My friend, the birthday girl, told us to go around the room and introduce ourselves.  One woman said this, "I first met Nancy when she was singing at the Christian Fellowship event at the Marquis Gardens Banquet Hall.  It was so God.  People were overcome with the spirit and fainting.  The waiters were wondering if they should call an ambulance.  One guy must have had an angel on his shoulder.  He was swaying and dancing with the spirit - his eyes closed -- and somehow didn't trip over any of the bodies."

I came out as an atheist to the people at my table.
"Being an atheist must be so hard," one said.
"Why?"
"Because you have no one to pray to."
I nodded sadly.

A few days earlier I was in a woman's washroom at the Charlotte, NC, airport. This washroom had a large jolly greeter with a very loud voice: "GOOD AFTERNOON, WELCOME TO CHARLOTTE.  HAVE A GOD-BLESSING DAY. GOD BLESS, BE SAFE GIRLS, GOD BLESS, GOD BLESS, GOD BLESS, LADIES ONCE AGAIN, GOD BLESS.  GOD BLESS, GOD BLESS, GOD BLESS GIRLS, HAVE A GOD-BLESSING DAY."  I'm not really sure what else she did besides bless people or perhaps watch their luggage while they went in a cubicle (where I hid from her booming voice and scribbled down her words verbatim.)  As I was leaving, I noticed her tip jar and stuffed in a dollar. She then blessed me a few more times. Clearly this godly marketing tool was working.

Maybe I'm becoming more tolerant.  One Sunday morning some years ago, I was on a bus travelling from Hamilton to Toronto, normally a 50-minute trip.  A woman stood up at the front of the bus and began preaching, entreating us to repent and accept Jesus.  I yelled, "Driver, can we have some quiet."  The bus driver asked the woman to sit down, but she kept preaching, mentioning also that the unrepentant woman (me) would surely face God's wrath.  The bus driver pulled off the highway to a police station.  The officers came on board and escorted the woman off.  I hope she had a God-blessing day.  This added at least 20 minutes to our trip and I had to face the wrath of the other passengers.  It turned out the bus driver knew the drill.  He said that she preached every week.

What would you do?  Sit back and repent or protest the presumption of the preacher?

Is There a Silver Lining in This Personality Disorder Playbook?

A friend of mine, Chip, has the following qualities:  funny, witty, creative, smart, helpful, warm, generous,
and talkative.

Let's call these his ermine characteristics.

At other times he can be angry, very angry, irrational, arrogant, nasty, argumentative, rigid, and silent.  Let's call these his weasel characteristics.

The ermine is white in winter blending in with the snowy landscape.  When its fur turns brown in spring, it is called a weasel or stoat.  Same beast, different colourings.  They change to protect themselves from predators.  Perhaps Chip changes for the same reason.  I don't know.

In the 13 years that I have known Chip, from time to time, his weasel side would emerge.  He mostly stayed in when that happened, aware that he could be "moody" - his word.

When he's in a good mood, Ermine Chip refuses to talk about weasel behaviour and would immediately get weaselly when I try.  When he's in a bad mood, Weasel Chip does not seem self-reflective at all.  It is impossible to have a two-sided conversation with Weasel.  He does all the proclaiming, and whatever is going on is everyone else's fault.  Always.  In fact, even supportive, kind words said to Weasel are met with hostility.

Sometimes Weasel would take over so that Ermine went into exile for days and months.  Chip would seem to have a personality change and be almost unrecognizable.  During one of these times, I took Chip to a psychiatric facility.  They fed him and kept him for a week, eventually letting him out in much the same state he went in.  It took about a year, and the Chip I knew and loved gradually came back.

You may know people who somehow stumbled into adulthood with an undiagnosed mental illness.  They may be self-medicating with drugs or alcohol.  Having seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, they fear and reject psychiatric help.  They are suffering, but won't acknowledge it.

When I ask Chip how I can help, he says, "Love me," but that's getting harder and harder to do.

Have you been in a situation like this?  What happened?

Do You Have a Double Life?

   Karl, a male relative, is thinking about transitioning.  Let's call his female identity Kay.  K. recently visited us in Toronto.  Anonymously, in the big city, he was free to be a she for a week.
   For our first meal out, I invited my close friend Cole to join us. Cole transitioned from Nicola several years ago.  Cole is a generation younger than Karl and less binary in his view of gender.  I call him post-gender.  He calls himself liminal - and his liminal state might be a permanent one.

   Cole defines liminal this way:

• Betwixt and between; in both places, but in neither at the same time.
• Occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.

   In other words, Cole lives as a boy.  He has facial hair, a deep voice, and receding hairline, but otherwise female parts.  On the other hand, Kay would prefer to be one or the other, not both.
   For Kay, the decision and the process have been difficult and often heartbreaking. She can have a great day in her female identity and feel truly and finally herself, until a waiter says, "Here's your cheque, sir."  She is afraid to reveal herself to neighbours, and appearing as a woman at work is not yet an option.  Some close family have been hostile and rejecting.
   Meanwhile, Kay will feel as though she has a double life until she makes a decision.  She seems to be moving towards living the rest of her life as a woman, but it is hard to say when she will take the next steps and what they will be.

   A passage from Ann Tyler's book, Earthly Possessions, sums up the dilemma as I see it.  The narrator is describing her child, Catherine:

When she was two, she invented a playmate named Selinda.  I knew that was normal, and didn't worry about it.  I apologized when I stepped on Selinda's toes, and set a place for her at every meal.  But after a while, Catherine moved to Selinda's place and left her own place empty.  She said she had a friend named Catherine that none of us could see.  Eventually she stopped talking about Catherine.  We seemed to be left with Selinda.  We have had Selinda with us ever since.

   This fictional child's truest, most expressive self could be found in Selinda.  It is difficult to sustain relationships with others in which we cannot be our most honest self. We create alternate identities, but sooner or later need to "move over" and live full-time as the person we truly feel ourselves to be.

Do you have a double life or a secret life?  Is it secret only from those you love the most?

 "It's said there are only 10 plots in all of fiction, but I believe there's only one: 'Who am I?'"

from The Amazing Spider-Man  (2012)

Death By Packaging?

On Monday, I bought my daughter small USB-powered speakers for her computer.  She works transcribing audio tapes for academic researchers and sometimes the interviews are poorly recorded.  I phoned her today to see if the speakers were helpful.  She said that she couldn't get them out of the hard plastic packaging.  After struggling for some time, she tried to cut the plastic open with her Swiss army knife, but cut herself open instead.  She found a band-aid and wiped the blood off the plastic, but by then her hand hurt too much, so she gave up.

The spousal unit's dentist gave him a new toothpaste last week:  Colgate Sensitive Pro-Relief.  He couldn't figure out how to open it.  We took the lid off but found another lid inside.  It looked like this.

I Googled the name of the toothpaste, and "how to open tube" came up as the first suggestion.  Clearly I wasn't the only person struggling with this.  Google told me to read the instructions:

"To open this safety seal, use the top of the cap as shown in the enclosed..."

I checked the discarded box and found a set of instructions with a diagram explaining how to open the toothpaste.  The larger lid became like an Allen key and required small motor skills, patience, and finesse.  I was able to open it without injury, but why is toothpaste now tamper proof?

Are you having packaging frustrations or am I the only one?

Do I Need a Near-Death Experience to Become Bold and Grateful?

You don't need a near-death experience to become grateful, but it helps.  If the first one doesn't take, you might need two.  

In September, 2008, the spousal unit, Ron, ate some bad cheese at a resort in Quebec and developed a near-fatal case of listeria-meningitis.  Luckily, he was saved by massive amounts of antibiotics.  The doctors told me that if I had taken him to the hospital the night before, they probably would have sent him home.  If I had waited any longer, it would have been too late.

Ron was in the hospital for 10 days and came home wearing a portable antibiotic infusion pump for another 10 days.  For that period and the two weeks following, he was intensely conscious of his surroundings and grateful for his survival.  Every outing into the neighbourhood was wondrous:  colours were vivid and sparkling and people, plants, animals were all miracles of creation.

Then the wonder and gratefulness fell away with the autumn leaves and the winter of stress and anxiety returned.

Meanwhile, a post-recovery brain scan revealed a benign meningioma.  By March 2012, the meningioma had to be removed.  Ron seemed to recover quickly from the surgery, but two months later he had a setback and his condition became increasingly worse.  By September, he could barely function.  MRI evidence suggests his temporal lobe, left amygdala, and hypothalamus might have been tickled during the delicate surgery affecting sleep, mood, memory, and motivation.

In December 2012, Ron began to recover.  This was accompanied by a new boldness and gratefulness, and it seems to be sticking.

Today we cycled out at 6:30 a.m. to watch the sunrise.  Ron adopted the persona of an Italian in the Tour de France and greets everyone with "Buongiorno."

"Buongiorno," he said to a lithe, long-haired jogger.  She smiled and said "good-day" back.

"I wish I had known this when I was 20," he said.

"Known how to be bold?" I asked.

"Yes, and grateful.  I was definitely not grateful when I was 20."

Do you need a near-death experience (or two) to remember to be grateful?

Is It the Real Thing?

Dennis Potthast:  Mr. Wizard

Musicians on vacation in Key West usually visit Larry Smith, the piano player at the Pier House Wine Bar, and play a song or two, accompanied by Larry, a bass player, and a drummer.  Sometimes Larry is familiar with the musician, sometimes not.  He welcomes everyone and some are better than others.  I was sitting in the bar on Monday, January 16, 2012, when a lanky, scruffy guy was invited up to play.  Larry introduced him as "Dennis from St. Louis."  He plugged his electric guitar into an amp, but started singing a capella in a quiet mumbling distraught voice:

                Ain't no sunshine when she's gone.  It's not warm when shes away.

            Ain't no sunshine when she's gone.  And she's always gone too long.

            Anytime she goes away.

Then he started to play.  I think I stopped breathing.  By the time he got to the lines "And I know, I know, I know, I know," we all knew.  The three musicians nodded to each other and began to play along.  Dennis "Mr. Wizard" Potthast from St. Louis was the real thing.

Klyde Broox

In the late 1990s, I was sitting in The Lionshead Pub in Hamilton Ontario for a literary open mike night.  A poet took the mike and began talking about his life in Jamaica, how he had never been hungry - but wanted to understand the experience of hunger in his country, so he decided to barely eat for a week.  "Bad idea," he said.
He then performed his poem, "I Don't Wanna Be Hungry."  I had never heard of dub poetry before, but I knew immediately that Klyde Broox, who had immigrated to our corner of southern Ontario, was the real thing.  Poetry was never the same for me again.

The real thing is out there in the arts, but also in every area of life -- politics, teaching, justice, technology.  The real thing is magnetic.  You are pulled towards it.   You think that maybe it's a subjective experience, that the speaker, singer, writer is speaking to you - and then you realize that everyone is having the same reaction.

Robert Pirsig calls this experience the Metaphysics of Quality:  "the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality" because it can be recognized before it can be conceptualized.  We know it before words try unsuccessfully to explain it - and the memory of that feeling lasts.

Do you remember the scene from The West Wing when Charley meets President Bartlett for the first time?  Charley says to Josh, "I never felt like this before."
Josh replies, "It doesn't go away."

What's your experience of the real thing?

Where Have All the Folk Singers Gone?

The answer is this:  Many of the inspiring anti-war, folk-singing activists are still out there singing and protesting.

Noel Paul Stookey

I was lucky enough to see Noel Paul Stookey, "Paul" of Peter, Paul, and Mary fame, in a concert this past weekend.  He sang the beautiful song, "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," by Pete Seeger.  He claims Peter, Paul, and Mary were singing this song one night in 1961 to an audience of six in a folk club in Boston. The six people included the club owner, the waiter, the barman and the Kingston Trio.  The Kingston Trio's version soon came out and the song reached a wide audience.

Paul also sang "Puff the Magic Dragon" accompanied by every member of the audience and mentioned how weird it was to see that song at the top of the charts in 1963, surrounded by rock and roll and surfing songs.  And, no, he said, it was not about drugs.

When the audience sang together, it reminded me that the folk singers of the 60s were not just writing and singing songs.  They participated in marches, demonstrations, and protests.  Their songs and their presence brought people together, the way union songs brought workers together when they were struggling to create a single voice against oppressive bosses.

One highlight of the concert was Paul's singing of the new lyrics he wrote for "America the Beautiful."  He said that while the first verse was rousing and strong, the original 2nd and 3rd verses with their "pilgrim feet," "alabaster cities", and "halcyon skies" were unsingable.  In his new version, he speaks to the population diversity and environmental challenges of America today.

Original First Verse

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

New Second Verse

Oh nation of the immigrant
And of the native son
Whose loyal families labor still
That we may live as one
America, America
Renew thy founder's call
And liberty and justice be
The right of one and all

New Third Verse

Oh bountiful of forest green,
Of lake and fertile lands
Where seeds of hope are tended by
Thy sons and daughters hands
America, America
The earth still calls to thee
Let human life and nature strive
To live in harmony

Another highlight of the Paul concert was this beautiful, haunting song:  Jean-Claude  -- about Nazi deportations of Jews in Alsace-Lorraine, France, 1941.  Paul - a protest singer to the end.

The song writers today, among them K'naan and Billy Bragg, are still writing powerful and inspiring protest songs.  Author Libero Della Piana wrote a blog summarizing the protest music of the 00s.  Powerful music continues to bring people together, even if everyone listens through their own private audio device.

Do We Have to Get Married?

After one more vote in the House of Commons and another in the House of Lords, gay marriage will be legal  in the UK.  There are still some objections, but with MPs voting 400 for the bill to 175 against, it will most likely pass.

Gay couples will be asking themselves, now that we can, should we?

Dr. Dan Hill (1923-2003), the former ombudsman of Ontario and the first Director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission would probably say yes.  Here's why.

The Ontario Human Rights Code is a provincial law that gives everybody equal rights and opportunities to jobs, housing, and services. The Code's goal is to prevent discrimination and harassment because of race, colour, gender, ability, and age, to name some of the sixteen grounds.

The Code came into being in 1962 – the first of its kind in Canada; however, even though anti-discrimination laws were on the books, it was difficult getting convictions.

• Police would not lay charges.
• If they did, the charges would not be brought to court.
• If charges were brought to court, judges and juries were reluctant to find their local business people and neighbours guilty of discrimination.

The goal of the human rights activists at the time was to make it unpleasant and inconvenient for people to be bigots.  They had to get charges laid and people put on trial.

In the 1960s, the Human Rights Commission was a very small operation employing maybe one and a half people.  Nonetheless, as complaints were made across the province, investigators held hearings.  Because investigating cases was so time consuming, and the staff was so small, often the best way to get compliance with the Human Rights Code was through negative publicity and embarrassing the offenders.

Word had to get out that discrimination was no longer permitted in Ontario.  The offenders had to know and the victims of discrimination had to know.

I heard about one of the early cases at the funeral of Dan Hill.  This story was told by Al Borovoy, who later became the head of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.  At the time of this story, Al worked as a lawyer for the Canadian Labour Congress Committee for Human Rights.

This story takes place in Chatham, Ontario in 1964.  Chatham and nearby Dresden were important termini of the underground railroad.  Black citizens had lived there for many years comprising about 15% of the population.  Routinely, black people were prohibited from getting their hair cut in certain barbershops, having a meal in certain restaurants, or staying in certain hotels across south-western Ontario.  The descrimination was not as  widespread as it was in the US south, but it did exist.  To combat this, a network of activists would file complaints with the Human Rights Commission who would then investigate each case, hold hearings, and see that rulings were upheld.  Once a case was won in a town, there was rarely a need for another.

There were several black leaders in Chatham.  One sent a complaint to the Human Rights Commission in Toronto that a man in Chatham refused to rent boats to blacks.  Chatham is on the Thames River which was a great habitat for many fish species including walleye, longnose, gar, bullheads, bass and chinook salmon.  The Commission set up a test.  They recruited some black and white university students from the University of Toronto and they all drove together down to Chatham.

The black students went to the dock and asked to rent a boat.  The owner of the boat company said he didn’t have any boats available.  Ten minutes later, the white students went to the dock and asked to rent a boat.  Several boats were suddenly available.  Now, the team had the proof they needed.  

First the commission (which pretty much consisted of Dan Hill) would try to get a conciliated settlement.  He generally took a reporter from the Toronto Globe and Mail.  In this case the boathouse owner refused to concede.  The story appeared in the newspaper, creating bad publicity for the businessman and the town.

The next step was that the Commission would order a hearing before an independent board of inquiry who, this time, was Judge Anderson of Belleville.  Al Borovoy acted as legal counsel for the black complainants.

Dan and Al’s strategy, in these cases, was to get the biggest audience they could so it would all be played out in front of the community.  They went up and down the street telling people that there was a human rights hearing, that a member of their community was discriminating.  The hearing was usually held in a town hall.  When the accused had to testify, he would face a room full of angry community members.

Al told me that during the hearing he was ripping into the owner of the boat rental business, accusing him of racism and illegal business practices.  The accused looked at the faces of the townspeople and was so embarrassed that, instead of testifying in his own defence, he just gave up and said, “OK OK I’ll rent boats to anyone who wants them.”

Dan Hill

At this point, Dan Hill told all the black people in the room to immediately go to the docks and put a deposit down to rent a boat to go fishing.  Several people said, "But Dan, we don't even like fishing."  Dr. Hill said "You go and reserve that boat now.  You take your families fishing this summer, or you will lose this right and all others."  So from June to August, 1964, you could hear the laughter of black families partying and picnicking out on the river.

And that's why gay couples should marry.