The Only One...

Greetings from Burley, Idaho. I've been here for about 12 hours and I have not seen a single solitary brotha yet. It's just me. I'm convinced. There weren't any on my flight. There aren't any at my hotel. I didn't see any at the Chili's restaurant I ate at for lunch. I didn't see any at Morey's Steak House at dinner. Come to think of it, I didn't even see any brothas throwin' bags at the airport or as skycaps. Even the airport in Salt Lake City, you'll see a brotha throwin' bags if you look out the window. But here? None.

I'm sitting in my room at the Fairfield Inn watching an HBO Special called The Blacklist, and I'm really feelin' this quote that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar just said a moment ago. I'm also wishing I had stuck to my general rule of making sure that I get a top floor room so that I don't have to listen to people with heavy feet stomping around all night. It's bad enough that the wind outside my window seems to have kicked up to a hurricane force gael for some reason. When I got back from dinner about an hour ago, it was easily 70 degrees. I'm tired enough that I should be able to sleep through all of that. I hope. But once again, I've digressed. Let me get back to Kareem.

He said something like "I'd rather be a lamp-post in Harlem than the governor in Georgia," expressing the sentiment that being at home in Harlem is so much more desirable, even if you have to be a lamp post, than to have to suffer through being in Georgia where it's likely that the "other" man is not really treatin' the brotha-man very well. There is something about Harlem that it's hard to explain if you haven't been there. Even before I had ever been there, I wanted to go. It was almost like making a pilgrimage to Mecca for me. It seemed that everything that I had ever read had happened in Harlem. All of my heroes (Malcolm X, Kareem, Dr. J, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, etc.) had all been in Harlem and helped to cement its legend in my mind and probably the minds of many others. Maybe that doesn't ring true for everybody, but it does for me. If you've read any Harlem Renaissance poetry or stories or listened to tales of jazz musicians playing jam sessions that lasted all night, or about playground legends holding court in poorly lit asphalt cages, then you should want to go there too. Any neighborhood that has more than a million black people (yes! Neighborhood!) is a place where I want to be. Even, I daresay, as a lamp post. I don't mean to repeat myself, but it bears mentioning, yet again that I can especially say and feel this from here in Idaho.