Bradezone

Dale Murphy will make it into the Hall of Fame someday. I need to believe.

The last ten years have been retired. Time for a fresh start.

If I could adequately describe the last couple of weeks, the theme would be new beginnings. And there is an odd but unmistakable parallel between these events and the overarching themes of my existence. 2008 has by far been the most eventful and exciting year of my life so far—perhaps just as much joy as sorrow until the forces of good staged a final-month rally that could make it all worthwhile. But I should remind myself that the year’s not done yet.

I’ve already written about my new job and the fateful road trips. Normally I would provide links, but all you need to do is check the posts from this past year. In a nutshell, I have visited Seattle, New York City, and Washington, D.C. in addition to the family-related trips to Tennessee and Ohio. I have changed jobs. I have moved thrice. I have been asked by good friends to take part in three weddings. I have had my heart broken and cried myself to sleep several times, but I have emerged much more self-assured from the experience. I have a renewed sense of God’s grace, perhaps testing the limits of Christian liberty but knowing that the quest for Truth allows me to pursue real happiness. I have been to the highest mountain in the lower 48. I ate the best meal of my life at the Metropolitan Grill. I have walked peacefully alone through the streets of our nation’s capital at night. I have established new friendships that probably rescued me from turmoil. Oh yeah, and I crashed my car.

Let’s go ahead and talk about this last one. I drove “back home” to Tennessee during Thanksgiving weekend, spent a wonderful time with family, ate my fill of delicious recipes mostly prepared by my grandmother, and spent a randomly brief afternoon on Beale Street where I chatted it up with two homeless guys. Eventually I embarked on the journey back to Greenville, and this is where my car became a symbol for my year. Right outside of Knoxville, the rain began to come down steadily, and interstate traffic, which was coasting downhill, came to a complete standstill. I applied the brakes, started skidding, tried a couple of times to pump the pedal to gain friction, failed, and ran into a Jeep that also bumped into a car in front of it. State trooper arrives, takes notes, gives me a ticket, yadda yadda. My hood bowed upward, my grill was smashed in a little, but I was still able to drive four miles to the next exit, where I called in my insurance claim. I surveyed the engine compartment, noted that it seemed to be structurally sound, and decided to attempt the remaining leg of my trip. Alas, somewhere in the “Great Smokies” now shrouded in darkness, I suddenly glimpsed the dispiriting sight of a “great smoke” spewing out of the right side of my engine. I knew I was in trouble and pulled off to the side, hazard lights engaged.

Fortunately for me, another car pulled in right behind me. Out stepped three of America’s finest—a group of young military enlistees, none of whom could have been older than 20. They offered me a ride to the nearest sign of civilization, so I gladly accepted. 15 minutes later we were in Asheville. I had them drop me off near an Ingles, where I proceeded to call my pal Sigs to come pick me up. Since it would take him about an hour to get there, I scouted for a better facility and located a mall across the highway. When I got there, the whole thing was closed for the evening, including the attached sports bar, which was nonetheless broadcasting an NFL game on multiple TVs. It was not even 9:00, so I was a bit disappointed with the scenario. I scanned my surroundings again, and there it was—that oasis of down-home hospitality known simply as Waffle House. I entered, sat down, ordered coffee, and began to watch Youtube videos on my iPhone for the next half-hour. Soon enough my ride arrived, and I was transported back to my house, apparently still in one piece.

Now comes the fun part of the story. I was already in the process of moving from the crappiest digs you could ever hope for and into a new apartment, so I obviously needed to move a bunch of belongings from point A to point B. I also needed to get to and from work, but luckily Sigs works close by so he drove me there and back the next few days. However I was still in a fix, and I had finally received word that my car was indeed totaled. Long story short, I had to rent a car for a few days just so I could visit some dealerships for a replacement, and I test drove a Mazda6 and a Ford Fusion. I was initially considering a truck, but was reminded of the greater ride comfort and gas mileage of cars. I looked into several used cars as well, but started to get scared off by horror stories of repair costs on the heels of unassuming purchases. I was almost ready to buy the Mazda after getting three dealerships involved and bargaining the price down quite a lot. But something didn’t feel right.

I then checked out some reviews for the compact car segment, and got excited about the 2009 Mitsubishi Lancer GTS, especially since I could get one tricked out for the price of the lower-end Mazda6. I took a test drive on Saturday, and it just so happened that the one in stock with my requested features was red, my favorite color. The karma was good. I loved how it handled, was impressed with the seamless shifting of the innovative CVT transmission, and was duly floored by the 650-watt sound system. So I informed the salesman of the offer I made for the Mazda and asked him to match it if possible. The final cost ended up just a little bit higher, but still well below invoice for the model and with a nice interest rate. This is the third car I have owned, and all of them have been Mitsubishi models. It’s a complete coincidence, but I think it shows that they have an excellent balance of value and performance. My 2000 Galant survived 182,000 miles over nearly ten years, and I never had to pay for anything other than routine maintenance. I said I would drive it until it fell apart, but I wasn’t really planning on being responsible for its demise.

This whole vehicle episode ended up reminding me of my life in general—sometimes it’s necessary to make a change. I was forced to be proactive about it just as I was with my recent job search. Other aspects of my life have and will continue to follow suit. I’m hoping beyond hope that 2009 can be own private Pax Romana.

The waves of joy sweeping through Grant Park in Chicago underlined the history of the moment. And despite the fact that I voted for the other candidate, I still feel an indescribable and somewhat unexpected rush of pride and excitement, probably because so many thoughts of my past and my country’s past shot straight to the forefront of my mind. Barack Obama has accomplished something which only too recently was considered unfathomable. He is the first black President of the United States.

When I was five years old, my family moved to Frankfurt, Germany. I was an Army brat who attended kindergarten at the military base where we lived, and I distinctly remember having an ethnically diverse group of friends. The famous axiom that kids are color blind could not have been more aptly reflected in the schools, both public and private, and my church in Frankfurt. I truly believe that my own attitudes about race were largely formed in this wonderful place. I have nothing but positive memories of my three years in Germany—yes, even the times I needed stitches after any of my patented recreational injuries. When my parents, my recently born sister and I flew back to the states, we settled near Fort Polk in Louisiana. Once again I found myself in a fairly diverse environment. My elementary school was named after George Washington Carver and was located on a street named after Martin Luther King, Jr. My next-door neighbor, who was one of my best friends and a little league baseball teammate, was Hispanic, and I never thought twice about it. It wasn’t until we moved to Ripley, Tennessee, before my fifth grade year that I started to understand something about racial prejudice in this country.

Ripley itself was racially mixed, with an especially heavy black population. The three years I spent there shed new light on the deep-seeded racism that was still prevalent in the U.S. and particularly the south. Most of my extended family on both parents’ sides lived in this area, and through them I could witness the attitudes held by so many. Most of them lived through a time when segregation was still in effect and the civil rights movement was necessarily exposing its gross injustice. Even now I find it incredibly hard to believe that such battles had to be fought and won so recently in this nation. And I continue to feel strong emotions when considering the struggle, perhaps due to a childhood spent blissfully unaware of racial conflict and a profound sense of indignation when eventually faced with its existence.

My mom has told me a bit about those times of desegregation at Ripley High School. Those first few black students faced a firestorm of attention and often hatred from the rest of the student body and the surrounding community. Their situation was representative of what was happening in small towns all throughout the south. I can hardly imagine what those experiences must have been like for anyone living through them, whether black or white. But I do know that resentment was still harbored by both sides decades after the fact—I saw it firsthand. Several relatives of mine, all of whom I yet love dearly, used the word “nigger” routinely. Sometimes it was hostile, sometimes it was simply habit, but I could never stand it. I even called out my grandfather about it once—you can imagine how some outspoken kid fared against a grizzled farmer and World War II veteran during this showdown. He sternly assured me that he was too set in his ways to think about changing now. But through the ensuing years I could see the man’s heart soften. He was jovial and friendly with several black people, so I began to realize that I had merely been seeing and hearing remnants of a culture that was drawing to a close, an old southern way of thinking that seemed shocking to my generation but was mostly just residue from the bombastic civil rights revolution of the 1960’s. I also saw the bitterness of certain members of the black population, though not as personally. Some wore their intense hatred and distrust plainly on their faces, a tragic but almost inevitable result of being treated as less than human for far too long.

So my parents basically grew up during segregation, and their generation bore the responsibility of moving our society forward in the aftermath. Not all of them succeeded, but I think many more did. When my dad joined the Navy and later the Army, he and my mom were thrust into an environment of diversity and comraderie that I am forever thankful to have been born into. Meanwhile towns like Ripley dot the south, and they are still trying to shake off the last vestiges of the old ways of thinking. Obama’s election might be one of the final acts needed to complete our emergence from that past. Though I chose not to vote for him because of our disagreements on social and economic policies, I can still readily appreciate what his victory means for the United States and the world. The impact of this moment in history is bound to be pivotal. Already I can walk the streets in my town and see brighter countenances on the faces of those who lived to see a fellow minority finally fulfill that sacred “dream” of the civil rights movement. Our nation faces definite challenges in the years ahead, and time will be the ultimate judge of our next President, but there is much to be optimistic about. The least any of us can do is reflect on how far we have come as a society and strive to improve our lot even further as we take our next steps. I might even humbly and controversially submit, fully realizing the disparity of viewpoints on the matter, that abortion is the next major human rights issue for our civilization to reexamine.