Scars

 Diane sent me these notes. She says "It took a quarantine to get me to the bottom of my to-do pile." And "Dave, I found some notes I took at the Eagan Church of Christ Retreat back in 2016.  Thought you would like to read them, because they are about you.  :)"

Here they are:

Mosaic Memoirs (about Dave May’s scars)

Dave has a scar on his left hand between his thumb and pointer finger.  I asked him about it in 2016 and this is what he told me.

“I was in the Marine Core Officer Training School.  It was in Quantico and I was about 22 years old.  We were doing war games.  I got in a hand-to-hand situation with a guy from the other team. And like an idiot, I was trying to take his rifle away from him and grabbed the wrong end.  He fired it.  It was a blank.”

As for the scar on his left inside wrist, he told me the following story.

“I was six or seven.  I had a glass in my hand and I fell.  I dropped the glass and Cecil got in trouble for that.  That’s what I remember about that.”

“You wanna hear about the scar on my butt?”

“I think I was younger than (pause) ten?  Joan Lyon was my best friend.  She had long red hair and we rode our bicycles around together.  There was a park south of Memphis with an elevated railroad track at the top of the hill.  We slid down the hill on our butts and when I got to the bottom of the hill I realized there was a tear in the jeans and my butt.”

Recorded by Diane May 

:"Growing Up White"

The following is the language from the back cover of my forthcoming book, "Growing Up White - From Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter." I hope to have it available in just a few weeks.

"This is the story of the enlightenment of one young man who lived through the Civil Rights Movement, who sympathized with it, cheered for it even, loved the music of it; but who didn’t do anything significant about it.

It will take you from WW2 to Viet Nam, from the murder of Emmet Till to the integration of Little Rock Central High School and from a Black Boy Scout Camp to James Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss. It tells of our adoption of an eleven-year-old Black boy, of the mother who ran away and the church that ran away, of my rescue by a Nigerian man, and of our successful efforts to get Black foster children adopted.

In the end it asks what Jesus would do and it suggests the beginning of a solution to our current racial issues."