The Musings of a Latte Queen: Narratives of Everyday Life

The other day I sat down for a cup of coffee with a group of teenage girls. They were all laughing, some frowning at the vanilla latte they ordered for the first time, all were enthusiastic on a Saturday. I watched these young middle school girls interact in an environment new to them - the local coffee shop. They immediately settled in to joint tables and absorbed the culture of conversation and people. My heart sang a song last Saturday with these girls. My Navy son told me he would rather face some pretty tough guys than a room full of teenager girls. I talked with him about my upcoming volunteer work and what he thought of me giving my heart away. In the email he sent me about the hormones and attitudes of girls, I wondered at that moment if I should turn tail and run. I have three sons, all having travelled through the murky waters of being a black male teen in America. I understood what they needed. I knew how to love them and guide them. My fellas also knew that I understood the...

My daughter is pretending to bowl. She set up three shoe boxes on their ends and used her playground ball. She is at the end of the dining room, using the hardwood floor as her alley. The red ball travels down the "lane" and she watches with the same intensity of her first trip to the suburban alley I am sitting her watching her. My mind tells me to finish that last load of laundry before bedtime. My heart is telling me it can wait. This is a moment that won't be here tomorrow. "Mom, look at what I did all by myself!" She calls out to me with the triumph of a little one who discovered the joy of creativity. Her game of bowling turned into basketball with our dining table serving as the background for her hoop. The hoop is her dolls carrier and the former "bowling" shoebox. The red ball is now a basketball and she made a shot that would rival Michael Jordan's glory days. The joy she gained in the few minutes of play is something the leadi...

It seems that I have been thinking a lot about race, class, and ethnicity. Perhaps it is because of the election. Perhaps it is because of the call for healing Kirkwood. Perhaps it is because art has imitated life and I've had a view of both. The other night I watched The Nanny Diaries on my pay-per-view cable channel. It struck me as a little funny how the rich, white (English ethnicity?) ladies of the Upper East Side couldn't manage to feed their own children or give them a hug. They hired out to do that, did they even have the child? There was a scene with all the nannies picking up the chubby-faced preschoolers from one of Manhattan's designed-to-guarantee-Ivy League-preschools when I noticed all the nannies. Most were East European, Latino (Mexican, Salvadorian, you name it), Caribbean (likely Jamaican since English is the main language), or young white and fresh from college American girl. The little terrors (only because they really want the attention of their power...

I usually don't use this space to talk about politics. These are not usual times. I thought about the election and the events over these past few months that ultimately made my decision this morning. I am writing about all this. Americans under 40 are almost overwhelmingly gravitating toward Senator Barack Obama. He represents youth, vitality, hope, resurgence, re-invigoration, honesty, and the future. The young people of the United States have watched what the Baby Boomers (Bush, Clinton) have done to the world and are anxious for a paradigm shift. The last twenty years of politics in our country has been in the hands of a "ruling class." The years of Clinton were good for the economy and morale...to a point...until all his dirty dealings became apparent. The country thought we were headed for moral decline and did an about face to elect George Bush to the highest office in the land. Buoyed by the religious right and outrage over Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, and ...

It's another snow day, another day with a house full of kids - my own plus my cousin's daughter. They keep running to the window to look at the quarter-sized, fluffy white flakes stream down from the heavens as if the shower had been left on. The schools cancelled before the first flake but in the wake of the icy roads and impending storm, wisely called it off. I thought though, wisely for the parents or the kids? This morning I'm beginning to wonder. My daughters normally don't wake up until after 9am, giving me 2-3 hours of quiet bliss to write and meditate on the day. This morning my phone rang at the get-mad-at-the-world-hour of 5:30am. It was a recorded message from the school system letting me know the kids would be cocooned at home today. I turned on the morning news report to see how much this was real or hype. I started dozing off when my phone rang at the haven't-had-a-latte-yet hour of 6:30am. It was my cousin asking if I would watch her 11-year-...