The Musings of a Latte Queen: Narratives of Everyday Life

My husband just took my son to a pop-up position he has with the National Bar Association Conference taking place in downtown St. Louis. Just yesterday evening, while taking this same son to his orientation, my daughters and I were two cars down from the stop light at 4th and the I-44/55 underpass in downtown St. Louis. We were met with a zooming stream of St. Louis Police Vans careening down the side street and making a circular beeline to the other side of downtown. What was going on? My daughters and I wondered if it was something with NetRoots Nation, also happening near downtown, or was there a protest we didn't know about. What in the World? We learned later that activists temporarily shut down I-40 downtown and disrupted flow to let visitors to the Arch Ground campus know that even in this, Black Lives Matter. This mirrored other protests around the country that are still happening after the murders of Alton Sterling (he was just buried  yesterday) and Philando Castile...

I woke up in the wee hours of the morning on Wednesday, July 6, to reach for my Nebulizer, asthma flare ups and the stifling summer of St. Louis were threathening my slumber. While pulling in the mist into squeezed tight lungs, I turned on my computer to do some mindless three-o-clock in the morning browsing. The book that was sitting on my bed was begging to be read, but I ignored her, as I ignored the pull to watch another episode of my "Mindy Project" marathon. Wishing what I was seeing was not true, I read with horror that yet another unarmed black man was killed while black by the police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. This one triggered me in ways that I can only trace back to Michael Brown's murder in August 2014. Perhaps it was that the man was selling CDs, something that my self-made lyrical rapper son does all the time, or the fact that it was outside  store, triggering memories of Staten Island and "loosies" causing NegroEric Garner to endure the ultim...