Need a Laugh--Try Kate Salley Palmer

Kate Salley Palmer is a political cartoonist and a friend. Good cartoonists often see what most of us miss. Like remind us that sometimes the Emperor really has not a stitch of clothing. Kate is wonderful--and talented. For years she was a cartoonist for The Greenville News. Now she works publishing children's book and often books for adults. Her coloring book about the 2020 election, Race to the White House is great. You can find it at warbranchpress.com. She and her husband Jim live in Clemson and help keep things honest around here. Great friends. Check out this book if you are interested. And her books for children are great. You won't even have to color the pages to enjoy the book.

--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com

We cannot forget the Immigrants

Colleague Ken Sehested does some mighty fine work on touching our pulse and talking about things that matter. You can read his stuff at PrayerandPolitics.org                             .

We cannot forget our brothers and sisters who have fled horrible conditions looking for a better way to live their lives. They don't find it in cages, in tents, in heads shaking when they apply for asylum. I wonder how many children will never see their parents again. And think of the parents who risked everything to get to the border to find nothing that helps or brings hope.

--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com

School Days--I Still Remember My First Teacher

School Days--I Still Remember My First Teacher

School begins this week. All over the country kids are buying shoes and shirts and pants, dresses and backpacks. It’s a New Year and it calls for new duds. Teachers are hauling supplies, bookcases and books into schoolrooms everywhere. We say that January first is the beginning of a New Year. No. For children, parents and teachers, the year really begins at the end of the summer when the school doors open. But like January 1, there is something wonderful and scary about the opening of a new door and walking into the unknown.

I still remember going to school that first scary day. We lived two blocks from the schoolhouse. My school was a great big two-story redbrick building. From a six-year olds viewpoint it looked like the biggest building in the world. Across the street from the school was a long white building we called “The Teacher’s Cottage.” Single women lived in what could easily have been called a Protestant Convent.  I don’t know how many teachers lived there. I do know the Mother Superior in that boarding house for teachers was a tall stately woman named Miss Eva. She seemed to be as old as God and twice as scary. She was the Principal and ruled the school and the cottage filled with unmarried teachers, with an iron hand. After I entered school that first week, I learned the most frightening thing that could happen to a student would be to be summoned to that Principal’s office. Up the long stairs, down the dark hall at the end of the second floor was her office. It was whispered that behind those forbidding doors there was a whipping machine. We were also warned that few who entered those doors ever came out again. Six-year-olds are believers and seven or eight-year-olds would talk about the whipping machine and other unimagined horrors at the top of those stairs.

That first school morning, my mother did not go to work at 7 :00 as she usually did. She stayed home, put on her best dress and waited for the big bell across the street at the mill to ring. The ringing of that bell was a signal that it was time for us to go to school. The bell would ring thirty minutes before school started. The second bell would proclaim that school had started. 

I still remember that September day. The air was cool and crispy for a Georgia morning. My mother opened the screen door on our front porch, turned and said, “Let’s go.” I did not know then what I know now. There was a grief in the opening of that door. She knew, standing there, that something monumental was happening. I would walk down the steps, up the street into a larger world. I would return that afternoon and thousands of afternoons after that. But I would be different. That morning I crossed the Equator. My innocence would slowly fade away.  Surely my Mother knew that this beginning was like no beginning I had ever faced. There would be things to learn, people to meet, failures and defeats and laughter and promise.  There would be mean kids to fight and friends to discover and teachers to cram dreams in my head.

After my Mother left me at the door, she turned around to go back to her job in the mill. Alone and scared, I found my room and my teacher. It has been sixty years ago and yet I can see her still. She stood in the doorway to my class that morning. Dishwater blonde hair, small-frame, freckled and light complexioned. She wore wire-rimmed glasses that glittered when the sun hit them. She wore a starched printed dress and was gentle and seldom raised her voice. Her name was Miss Beggs.  Surely other teachers along the way challenged me more. But Miss Beggs I will always remember. She walked with me across a bridge my parents could not walk. She taught me about a world bigger and finer than I had ever known. There would be no going back—this was the point of no return. I still remember that she held my hand as we walked to recess, to the rest room and to the lunchroom that first year. She must have known I was shy and afraid. The passing of the years often adds far richer colors than are present in real life. Yet as I think of Miss Beggs I really believe the kindness that I remember was truly there.

I don’t recall if she taught at our school more than a year. I never remember seeing her after that first grade experience. Where did she come from and where did she go? It hardly matters. What did matter was that she took me by the hand, she pointed the way. I love school and books and studying to this very day. She opened windows and doors that could never be shut again. Is it any wonder that syarsome seventy later I can still see her face and I still remember her name?

(Several years ago I published this piece in The Greenvile News and on one of blog pieces--this year's school beginnings brings it all back.)

--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com

An Artist Protests in a Telling Way 2019 America

photo by Will Luo / flickr

The America Prospect has interviewed artist Eastaban Whiteside. Esteban is a self-taught artist who has done a whole series paintings and drawings of his feelings of Mr. Trump and the direction our country is going. I recommend you reading this article and study his fine and telling work. He is an African American  feeling like a stranger in his native land.

What he doesn't realize is that you don't have to be a person of color to feel like an outsider these days. This is supposed to be a United States. Our Constitution talks about liberty and justice for all. Of course we have always had great divisions and strong opinions about many things--but our current President does not seem to understand that part of his calling is to be the President for everybody.

photo by Bob Jagerndorf / flickr

--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com

First Day at School in Mississippi Won't be Forgotten

photo by U.S. Army Garrison Casey / flickr

"Children finished their first day of school with no parents to go home to tonight. Babies and toddlers remained in daycare with no guardian to pick them up. A child vainly searched a workplace parking lot for missing parents."--Ashton Pittman. Jackson Free Press


Do you remember your first day of school? Scary and not quite knowing what to expect. The big kids in the neighborhood told stories that kept you awake at night. Mean teachers. A whipping machine in the Principal's office. Shots sometime in the fall for vaccinations. Teachers wouldn't let you go to the bathroom. The first grade teachers, they said were the worst. Why they'd kick you out for chewing gum, for whispering to someone across the aisle. Just about anything. 

But it wasn't all bad. Mama had taken us to town on the bus, went to the store we could afford and we got outfitted mighty fine. New shirts--cotton and checked. New pair of pants. Even new shoes. We had underwear and socks already. My mother opened her purse, took out the lay-away receipt, paid what she still owed. We got back on the bus and headed home.

Days before we had picked up some pencils and a Blue Horse notebook. This was the time without backpacks. But we did have a metal box that held paper and pencils and our tiny pencil sharpener and our lunch in a paper sack.  Even though we were scared we followed a long line of big kids up the street to the red-brick school. Scared but excited, wondering what this new chapter in our lives would mean. 

Back home we later found out that our parents, especially our Mamas cried a lot that day. Their babies were leaving the nest. They knew what we did not know. From now on things would be radically different in our little lives and theirs too. It would never be as it was.  

But this August--this starting of the school week in Mississippi another drama was played out.

photo by Zhang You / flickr

Without notice ICE officials descended in Morton,Mississippi and hauled away 680 Hispanic parents. Most of those arrested worked in food processing plants. It will be a long time before I forget that picture of that little girl sitting on the curb crying and saying,  " I want my Daddy. I want my Daddy." 

What happens to kids who feel abandoned by their parents? School officials said that for the next few days 50% of those children did not go to school. And if they did--how could they concentrate wondering where their parents were and what would happen to them.

This is our government in 2019. Cages and kids shipped off to God knows where some never able to see their parents again. What kind of traumas are we foisting on these children? And what is these terrible actions doing to the hearts of the people of our country. 

Where are we going folks? What do we do with these dreams we have had about a place called America where people could find safety and hope and a better life? T.S. Eliot year ago expressed our time well:

"A Cry from the North, from the West and from the South
Whence thousands travel daily to the timekept City;
Where My Word is unspoken,
In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels
The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit,
The nettle should flourish own the gravel court,
And the wind shall say: 'Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.'" (T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock)  

photo by Thomas Cizanskas / flickr

--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com

Something We Need to Remember in a Crazy Time

photo by Indi Samarajiva / flickr

In these strange days it is very hard to keep our perspective. And so many of us who claim to be people of faith find ourselves not so sure about this faith business. With shootings just about everyday and the heart-breaking stories of so many whose lives have been torn up by the roots. With ramblings of hate and rage and injustice just about everyday. With immigrants scared to walk our streets and so many have forgotten that Statue of Liberty and all she stands for. And then politicians jockeying for power and so little leadership or courage from those we have elected. It all adds up to a whole lot of darkness.

Every day I pick up a little devotional book with readings from a great preacher of another day. Paul Scherer was a Lutheran preacher and has influenced me greatly through the years. In today's meditation written so many years ago, he wrote:

"The simple fact is that the cross never stayed on the hill where they put it. It marched out across the Roman Empire. It leaped on those proud standards and got itself emblazoned there. It fluttered over Europe, in dark forests, on lonely castles. And began to point the patience centuries to a better way of treating men (and women) than they had found. It brought them face to face where hate would always fail. " (Paul E. Scherer, Love Is a Spendthrift )

When Marianne Williamson, one of the Democratic candidates said during the debate that we have to remember that the greatest of these is love. That word seemed so strange and other-worldly and out of place. Wait! Wait! This love is no sloppy and sentimental word. It may just be the hardest commandment of them all. But this its our charge as Democrats and Republicans and Independents and the Indifferent. Love will span every division and smother every single hate--so let us take up the mantle that we would just as soon ignore and continue to do our parts in a divided and hurting world. Our religion keeps telling us: it works. Hmm. "Lord, I believe...help thou my unbelief..."

photo by Kristoffer Borsting / flickr


--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com