I'm sitting in my room, trying to think.
As usual, the radio's on. Neil Diamond's song, "I am, I said," is playing softly.
Diamond, originally of New York and now living in California, expresses his feelings of displacement or of not quite belonging:
"L.A.'s fine, but it ain't home, New York's home, but it ain't mine no more."
Today, while I was out job hunting, I went back to my New York: Seattle's Madrona district. It seemed smaller, different, almost foreign. I had become an outsider to the place that had shaped my very attitude toward life.
As I walked along those same streets, I thought back to the way it was when I was about twelve:
Young, super cool Black Panthers strutted down the streets full of pride and hate, showing off their black leather jackets, their black caps and their rakes. [A type of metal hair comb].
I was attacked on the street for being white.
One of my white neighbors, a girl, sicked her dogs on kids on their way down to the beach for being black. A Jewish man died soon after his cleaning business on the corner of 34th and Union was fire bombed.
