MLK Day

I don't really have time to write this and I don't think anybody even knows I have a blog. But, something strange happened to me today. We're in the middle of switching our bedrooms around since we're a family of five now. I'm giving up my office. So typical. I was a little sad, I admit, but the kids have the upstairs now and we have relative peace.

Sue and I started the day with coffee and NPR as usual. We tuned in to the end of Martin Luther King's last speech, given just a week before he died, which neither of us had heard before. We missed most of it, but got a series of verses about the things he had seen in his life cadenced with "...If I had'a sneezed!" Honestly it sounded like a parody of his "I have a dream" speech. Sue and I were both slightly amused, snapped out of it when the announcer revealed that it was his last speech, and then promptly forgot about it in the mess of sheetrock, paint, boxes and shelves.

After everyone was in bed and I had shoveled the snow out of the driveway and finished my wine from dinnertime, I checked Facebook. My brother John had posted the "I have a dream" speech from youtube. I thought briefly about making a silly comment about what I had heard this morning. Then I saw that the youtube comments had been disabled because "many of the comments were hateful and racist." That made me feel angry and sad and a little guilty. It also made me wonder about the speech I had heard on NPR.

Googling "If a had sneezed" brought up the famous Mountaintop speech right away. I looked for a transcript and began to read it. This was one week before he was assasinated, and he was prophesying it. He recounted an attempt on his life by a demented black woman with a letter opener that plunged into his chest so close to his aorta that he would have died, had he but sneezed. At the end of the speech he basically says he knows they're coming for him, but it doesn't matter, because his work was done, he had been to the mountaintop, and he feared no man.

And then something strange happened. I wept. At first I thought it might have been for the loss of my office. Maybe it's because having three children, I feel like I've been to the mountaintop, too. And like Dr. King, I'm so glad to be living in this time, in this age. I am so optimistic for their future, I too have had my fears relieved. 'Twas Grace, and MLK.