Fading into Fall

Tomorrow is the 24th of July and there has been a let-up in the heat. After two solid days of rain and a third promised for tomorrow, coolness comes kissing face and arms with re-vitalizing freshness. At 61 degrees, tonight's evening cool reminds me of the Bay Area summer. It is light sweater weather! Since tomorrow I work in the hot, unairconditioned kitchen, I am greatly relieved by this respite from the Eastern summer hot and humid climate.

I have decided to make air conditioning for the kitchen a higher cause towards which to aspire; it may be my legacy when I leave a year from now. On the tables in the dining room we post signs which address eating and food as a moral issue. We grow some of our own produce. We care about eco-justice and so buy what we can't grow from local farmers. We care about justice for the workers in the growers fields. I have come to care about worker justice in our kitchen...a comfortable place for cooks and crews and dishwashers to labor on behalf of the hundreds who seat themselves at our tables each week. There are so many priorities at Stony Point competing for too few dollars. I am wondering how to become the anonymous kitchen angel!

July has swept along as group after group have come to stay in one or another of our lodges. The Gilmore Sloane where I live, host and clean has seen a different group every weekend, and a few groups in between. Memorable were the boys of the Chiku Awali Rites of Passage. They came with their parents, mostly their dads or surrogate and a woman organizer who has seen her eighth group of boys go through. These African American young men prepare and present an original story with a moral. It must have an African theme. Called from the Gilmore Sloane kitchen where I was doing some tidying, I was told that one of the judges had failed to arrive. Would I fill in? So I sat and listened to these timid presenters, evaluating them on the basis of projection, animation, clarity, use of body, originality, creativity, preparedness and African content. (Finally something to do that calls upon my background!) I strained to hear, sitting 8 feet from the presenters. Most stories seemed to focus on the importance of wearing appropriate attire for any given occasion. One amusing tale, not intended to amuse, was of a young African villager who went to the mall to buy a red tie for a job interview!

The point of the Chiku Awali Rites of Passage for Young Men is to prepare at risk, urban boys for success...to give them the message that they can be successful in the world and to equip them with some tools to help them along the way. The weekend sessions included drumming and dance, trying on African attire, life skills, a walk and a talk on the environment and our dependency on the earth. It included the mechanics of preparing for college and college life and it even included a mock graduation, complete with cap and gown, to the traditional pomp and circumstance. The boys marched around the long table in the large Gilmore Sloane dining room, beaming! This was a foretaste of a high school graduation, hopefully a reference point, should they falter along their way. But most poignant, most visceral for me was the presentation by the program leader to these tender young black boys of what to do when you are stopped by the police. This was the Chiku Awali boys rites of passage and they and their leaders carved a permanent place for themselves in my heart. More reminiscences from the season of summer in my next post.