Welcome to Sunday Stealing. “This week, we were inspired by Lucky Zoan. She suggested themes for letters to particular people. Let’s change it up a bit and imagine conversations rather than correspondence.”
What Would You Say At This Moment to:
1) Someone you have hurt?
It wasn’t intentional. I was just an idiot.
2) Someone who has hurt you?
What’s done is done. I may be baffled as to why you did that, when you hated it when you-know-who did the same to us. But whatever.
3) Your favorite teacher from grade school?
The late Paul Peca, my sixth-grade teacher, whom I wrote about here. I continue to use the lessons you taught us. Yes, we WERE your best class, as you said, even if you told everyone that.
4) Your most hated teacher from high school?
The gym teachers from 10th and 11th grade were sadistic twits, I thought, but I have nothing to say to them. I don’t even remember their names.
5) Your best friend from college?
Hey, effendi: glad you’re still doing that activist thing. Boston Taco Party, indeed.
6) Your favorite recording artist?
It’ll either be Paul McCartney or Paul Simon. Once I’d bored them with how much their music meant to me for many years, I’d asked if they had any pull in getting Estelle Axton into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
7) Your favorite author?
I might tell John Green (no relation) that I promise to buy Everything Is Tuberculosis very soon, and I LOVED when Desi Lydic interviewed him on The Daily Show.
Library
8) Your first boss?
That would be the late Beccye Fawcett, a woman who attended my church, Trinity A.M.E. Zion, in Binghamton, NY. I was a page at the Binghamton Public Library c 1969, where she worked. Only two decades later, I went to library school. She was the first black librarian in Broome County, and though I never asked her about it directly, I heard she had a difficult time early on. I want to ask her what that time was like. “In the Press & Sun-Bulletin’s 1974 profile piece at the time of her retirement, Beccye Fawcett explained the approach she had taken towards her life’s work: ‘lift as we climb.'”
9) Your first love?
I’m delighted that we are in a good place with each other. That wasn’t always meant to be.
10) Your true love?
As much as I complain about you saying, “Let’s go” as we’re leaving church or another event, only to get involved in another conversation, it doesn’t aggravate me anymore. It just is.
Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.