I remember lying there silently quite a while thinking about how my sister had already picked out the best flavor of those little cereal boxes they used to sell in packs and how very soon she and my dad would be exiting out the back door. That first morning he always paid a visit to his old stomping grounds where he would tell us stories from his adventures as a kid there. When I couldn't stand missing all that any longer I called out for my mother. I yelled and yelled until finally EVERYONE came running into my room only to hear this little kid in his pajamas was too scared to get out of bed. My mother, born without the discrete gene polite society has, still to this day loves to tell the story of how I was so afraid of the African-American maid. Somehow everyone else missed the fact that she was a woman, I was in my pajamas and she was a stranger.
Anyway, the lesson I choose to take from this is that we all have a fear of what (or who) looks different from what we are used to. We hope that as adults we would learn to override that instinct to peer deeper beneath the surface. There we will always find the same elements of greed, grudges, ignorance and love in different quantities and mixes. But we also need to remember that, at first, our only information about someone else are those visual clues that tell our instinct this is a familiar person or an evil stranger. It would behoove us all to pause a few seconds before we react. With our neighbor that shouldn't mean require than a second or two. With a politician it may mean quite a bit longer to find those true elements within. But they're all there - the thief and the saint, just below the surface, just below our looks, just below our words.
