We were standing in the lobby waiting in the popcorn line, and we noticed a smartly dressed black teenager in front of us.
She wore familiar teen couture: distressed jeans so tight she’ll need a spatula to get them off, and a t-shirt featuring a rock band that hasn’t recorded, or maybe even been alive, since she was born.
From our left came another teenager, this one blonde and wearing the same uniform. She hurried to her friend: “Oh my God!” she laughed. “Oh My . . .” as she fumbled with her smart phone. She draped her right arm around her black pal’s shoulders and, heads together, they started laughing at the pictures.
It was some other teen, a boy, who was either Way Kewl or totally inept, and they just kept laughing and scrolling and gasping for air. Me, I’ve never had such fun in a popcorn line.
Wife Trophy said, softly, “Not something you’d see in Ukiah.”
“Or Oakland,” I said. “Or LA.”
It was just two kids sharing laughs, but the fact they were black and white illustrates something I’ve noticed repeatedly since we arrived in North Carolina: People mingle easy down here.
I’ve never lived anywhere that wasn’t essentially and de facto segregated. Cleveland was split right down the middle: the east side was black and the west side and most suburbs were white.
Ukiah had a sizable black population the Reverend Jim Jones brought to town and then dragged from town in the 1970s.
My older brother has lived in South Carolina half a century; he tells me there is no such thing as a small city, big city or any city in between that is not integrated in the Carolinas.
So in the smallish town where Trophy and I have landed there are teenage girls of different races hugging and laughing. I dig it.
Interracial couples are so common around here they don’t draw a glance. My neighborhood in the Historic District is sprinkled with minorities: across the street live two black women, down the street are Mexican-American families with lots of children and 75 or so guests celebrating a catered Quincienara in the front yard last weekend. Jolly good music, dancing in the street.
In a nicer neighborhood than ours a few blocks west some of the most imposing and expensive old houses have multiple stories, swimming pools, circular driveways and black families.
And the neighbors just get along, in part because they’ve grown up together and all gone to the same schools, and in part because their parents and their children have grown up together and all gone to the same schools. It’s relaxed, cheerful and chatty.
The corner grocery store has mostly black employees and customers. Fun lines. Old black ladies inspect your tomatillos and papayas at the checkout line and ask “Now what y’all gonna do with those things there?” The banter begins.
So no one is surprised (except me a little bit) when a pair of cute teenage girls (besties maybe) jostle one another like puppies in the lobby of the downtown movie theater.
DICK’S BAR LIVES ON
Last week’s report that Dick’s Bar was closing turns out to be an exaggeration. My mistake.
Instead it is being sold, and presumably will remain the only interesting place to visit in the marvelous village of Mendocino. Let’s drink to that.
WASTE FRAUD ABUSE FOREVER!
Protests across the land broke out a couple weeks back because everyone on the left fears government will shrink, federal employees will be laid off and taxes could even be reduced. The sky could also fall.
The reason our dim but lovable progressives believe these sorts of paranoid fantasies is that they get news from Democratic operatives employed at MSNBC, ABC, the San Francisco Chronicle and the other usual sources.
These newsfronts tell us Social Security is finished, guide dogs for the blind are no more and veterans will soon by left at freeway off ramps to rely on the kindness of passing motorists.
These are the same phony sources that lied to us about Trump and Russia-gate, lied to us about Hunter’s laptop, lied about cocaine in the White House, lied from start to finish about the enfeebled patient in the Oval office, and a hundred other lies. The New York Times is currently working on a three-part Stormy Daniels update.
But yeah, go ahead and believe Elon Musk is stupid, Trump is Hitler, and that trimming bloated federal agencies is a threat to “Our Democracy.”
Tom Hine is joined at the hip with Tommy Wayne Kramer, which makes for awkward everything except it’s yet another lie, this one from NPR. That’s another a lie. Oh where will it end?
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