LEAD Technologies Inc. V1.01

I stumbled through the front door, laden with the burdens of duffel bag, briefcase, and laptop, of weariness from a four-hour Sunday afternoon drive, and of a failed effort at emotional connection. “He doesn’t look very happy to be home,” Mom observed to Quinn in a whisper the whole household could hear.  “Give me a chance!” I growled, shutting the front door behind me and dropping my bags.  I resigned myself to giving the report they would invite before I could pee or unpack or take a deep steeling breath against the resumption of my duties.  Heidi had taught me to play pickleball, I reported, and we beat the opposing couple 14-12, slapping our paddles in smiling congratulations.  Are you sure you’ve never played before? the group had asked me.    Did you know that the four girls in the women’s restroom under the crushing concrete rubble of the Klan bomb at the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963, were named Denise, Addie, Cynthia, and Carole, I reported, and that the little sister Sarah missed the rubble by inches but lost an eye from shattered glass and later wore a blue glass eye because the standard colors did not include African brown and because her family could not afford a custom glass eye, I reported, and how Martin Luther King, Jr. praised the girls as “unoffending, innocent, and beautiful” victims of hatred and as “martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity”?  His eulogy moved me to goose bumps.  And I reported that Henry (27 months) and I had sat on the wooden foot bridge and dropped dandelion flowers onto the rippling creek and watched them float away, little petalled suns bobbing and twirling so brightly on the dull water, floating toward other lands, other rivers, other stories, other happy endings or endings not quite so happy, like the flower-stars sucked into circling eddies, though most finally floated onward to grace downstream.  And I threw together something called “dinner” at the late hour of eight on a Sunday afternoon.

(Photo above used with respect under the Fair Use Doctrine.)