I hope you’re having a beautiful day. ♡
Today, we’re celebrating another ¤ JohnnyO Gratitude Day! ¤

Preface, this piece was written at my regular Writing Circle Group at the diversely service orientated, participatory restaurant which has served me in so many ways, Same Cafe’ Denver, soallmayeat.org to the prompt, “Tell us a Story when someone showed you who they were and it took you a little time to believe them.”  Thank you to Coach Matt Salis, facilitator of “the Story”, thestigma.org.

Full Circle

When I think of this topic, I think of privilege. Not the typical, “white privilege” that one would associate with the Gentrified Park Hill of 2023, but rather the assimilating beautiful Gumbo which cooked into the magical neighborhood to which my family moved in 1963. I had the privilege to cook slowly and with a variety of human spices enabling me to rise as an East High Angel, graduating in the Centennial, Bi-Centennial year of 1976.

Recently, I gathered at City Park with many of the people who participated in a Grand experiment at East High called Senior Seminar, experiential learning in your last semester of High School created and envisioned by ambitious and visionary Outward Bound Instructors.

Collectively, we resolved to try to work together to bring about a regeneration of this grand experiment, as we all agreed that it had a long term impact on everyone, Black, White, Jew, Gentile, Hispanic, Male, Female, students, Staff.

What a beautiful thing it was to participate in and now reflect upon the cooperative Spirit engendered by having to work together to learn and live, not dissimilar to how people must come together and cooperate in time of War of or occurrence of natural disaster.

To what do I owe this lifelong privilege? It is the legacy of my beautiful Mother, Virginia, “Ginny”. She somehow, despite her own Privileged White upbringing, resolved that her children were going to grow up in an integrated neighborhood. She was a prominent advocate, activist and social worker, both in the secular community and the Catholic Church. All of this was occurring as my siblings and I were much too young to realize the importance of how this would impact our lives. Sadly, my Mother’s Genius and energy deteriorated into serious mental illness. My teenage years were fraught with the pain of watching our Mother succumb to these difficulties and she died when I, the oldest of my five siblings, was 21. Her legacy lives on though.

We were all, and are all different. There was never any question about that. But we were encouraged to celebrate those differences and embrace each other, in celebration.

Overcoming those differences was not then and will never be easy. Accepting equality is challenging. All in all, though, the fact of the matter is that love is a many splendored thing.

It is above all, an active behavioral decision.

The result of this all, is that a man who would become one of my best friends, Ervin Camack,

Invited me to fight taekwondo in a school where I was the only white person. He reassured me that I would always be welcome and would always be equal.

He later told me that he had remembered going into my home in Park Hill with his sister, and being introduced to my Mother. He said the way my Mother welcomed him, he knew, “there is no hate in this home.”

Thank you, Virginia Manda Nester Olander, “Ginny”.

Thanks to you Mom, today, I go nowhere by accident and I go everywhere with purpose.

Amen.

–John Olander