Only Here On the Street Where I Live

My friend Georgianne was down here this weekend, finishing a slumber party we began over 35 years ago up in my bedroom in Appleton, slugging down our first illegal beers, one each, enough to send us into giggles for the rest of the night. We are better drinkers now and haven't lost a bit of our giggling prowess either. This was Georgianne's first visit to my house in Madison, the first time she has been in any of the many cities and neighborhoods I've  called home. Over morning coffee before she left, she commented on how well I seemed to fit in this place I've now lived for over two years. "It seems like the perfect fit for you," she commented. I demurred, which means I protested but not too vehemently.

It's hard to protest living in Madison, Wisconsin unless you want to sound like a real jerk. Madison is a really nice place to live. There are good reasons it regularly makes it into the Top 10 of annual magazine lists, "Best Places to Live," "Best Place to Find A Job," "Best Educated City," "Best Place to Ride Bikes," "Best Place to Be a Dog," and "Definitely Best Place to Be a Lesbian." By and large, we're well-educated, stably employed, healthy and overly friendly in this town. To say you don't like to live here is like saying you like going to the dentist; it makes people look at you strangely and maybe even recoil a bit.

If there was any doubt about this in my mind, it disappeared today. Martin Luther King Day. I was out of town last night but got back mid-afternoon. As I drove back, I was listening to an amazing show on radio station WORT-FM dedicated to the jubilant music of Haiti and the resilient spirit of its  people. Then, as I turned onto a semi-commercial street in my neighborhood, I noticed a gaggle of school children waving large hand-lettered signs toward drivers like me. HELP HAITI! DONATE TO THE RED CROSS! I turned off the road and circled the block so I could drive by again, more slowly and with money ready. "Do you want a cookie?" the happy collector asked me as she clambered down from the roadside snow bank. "Perhaps you would eat one for me," I suggested. She seemed to think that was reasonable.

Turns out a bunch of neighborhood kids, out of school for the MLK holiday, had organized this on their own. They baked cookies to reward donors and spent the morning making signs out of old corrugated cardboard. A local hospital, St. Mary's, where one of their moms worked, had pledged to match what they collected as long as it wasn't more than $10,000. With my $10, they were well on their way to at least one percent of that, I'm sure. St. Mary's, btw, is doing this for Haitian donations raised by all their employees. Hooray for their generosity!

I finished the drive home. The Haitian music show was done, and the next show was a public affairs program on which the host was talking about how desperately low on food the survivors of the earthquake are, with relief efforts slowed by the destruction of the little nation's transportation infrastructure. Prices of any remaining food supplies in the metropolitan Port Au Prince area have predictably sky-rocketed. People are fighting over cans of soup. I would be doing the same if I were there. So would you. So would Mr. Limbaugh and Mr. Robertson. Don't let them fool you. Don't let them fool your parents or your neighbors. Speak the truth on Haiti. It's Martin Luther King Day, and we have the honor and privilege of living in the United States of America where our waste is a bigger problem than our wants.

And those of us who live in Madison have it even better than most. Georgianne is a school teacher in a northern county. They don't even get to take this day as a holiday, and there are many districts like this, commemorating Columbus Day but not Martin Luther King Day. In at least one school district up in northwestern Wisconsin, they actually take off a day they call "Easter Monday," but not MLK Day.

Is there really an Easter Monday, for anyone?