I'm reading a new six hundred page bio of James Baldwin and he describes attending a church service in Alabama at which King preached - and he notes how gloriously singular the experience was. And it made me remember the time when I did a radio show for the Salvation Army and realized why the Black church was so important, almost like the equivalent to therapy for Whites. Black families can and do abandon their members. The Black church never does that. And I also remembered when my father died, a reverend man I hardly knew who was interviewed on the program sent me condolence and a peace lily.
Don
Donald Dean Kelly died on June 5th. He was my big one. We were twenty six when we met. We walked past each other in the Village late one night and both of us turned around. He was wearing a giant parka with a pulled up fur-trimmed hood. Gushing beard, big ugly 70s glasses. I only saw the tip of his nose. For me, it was love at first nose. We went to a bar and had beers and I played with the ring pulls on his pants that zipped down the front. He told me he was a conceptual artist/ live-in babysitter. He once wrote on an egg and mailed it. He slept over and in the morning, I walked him to the subway. He grabbed my arm - wait a minute . He went in an antiques store and came out and put a small kaleidoscope in my palm. And thus began our many years of promised land and civil war. Most days, he mumbled and stammered but, once in a blue moon, he landed a joke or story river stone smooth. He once found an 8 by 10 foot mirror on the street. We both bled when it shattered carrying it up the mar...
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