There's been a re-birth of nativism in the "give me your tired, your poor" land that I love. The right-wingers, who need someone to hate, have decided that anti-Hispanic and anti-Muslim noise-making is just what our beleaguered country needs right now.
All of which brought to mind a painful memory. Sometime in the 1970s, I was sitting in a coffee room at the U. — a rare event for me — and a group of people were recalling happy moments from their various childhoods. One of the participants was a grey-haired woman perhaps 15 years older than I. She was a secretary or administrative assistant at not mine but some other department. She was a kindly, competent, unpretentious woman with whom I occasionally exhanged a few words of greeting or business.
I can't remember exactly what the other participants ibn the discussion remembered from their early days — probably hunting trips with dad, hitting the winning single in a softball game, a romp with the family dog — but I will never forget what Masako recalled: "When I was in the internment camp in Utah, one day Marian Anderson came to sing for us."
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