Something happened to my daughter that I hoped she would have been able to avoid. Like so many young people, she has friends all of the country. The group I’m writing about were high school friends who ventured out into the world for degrees and careers and they’ve made me and their parents proud. Of my daughter’s three distinct groups of friends, this one is the most diverse; there’s not two of them with the exact same racial or nationality combination.
A few of them ended up relocating to the same general area, about 300 miles away. They brought in newcomers.
“You’re going to love Rex (not his real name),” they told her.
“Nicest guy you ever want to meet.”
We always want our old friends to like our new friends.
The time came to visit, three hundred miles down the road. Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.
Did somebody forget to tell good ole Rex that my daughter is black, okay, African American? It really might not have come up with this group of young people.
“It was really strange,” she told me. “He wouldn’t even look at me. I tried 3 different times over four days and he just didn’t want to talk.”
Been there, my child, felt that, and I’ve got the extra layer of skin to prove it.
“Maybe he was just having a really bad weekend, but he seemed okay with everybody else,” she speculated–which is exactly what we do over and over again when we’re young, before we grow the extra layer of skin.
“Maybe,” I told her. I wasn’t ready to tell her my many “Rex” stories. There were the Rex friends, job interviews, stores, and even “great” restaurants that didn’t want my business.
I wanted her to enjoy the memories of her trip a little longer. Let’s not tell her about this entry.
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