Honey, I’m not going to lie. I walked into my hotel suite with a limp wrist, a half-drunk glass of Pinot and fully possessed by the living spirit of NeNe Leakes. I’m on my way up. Savannah has that effect on me. I find everything here so incredibly lovely. Doors are held open, seemingly everyone is smiling and alcohol is readily available (except Sunday mornings when the wine is for Jesus only).
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“We’ve come too far, we’ve made too much progress and we’re not going back. We are going forward.” – Congressman John Lewis, August 22, 2018 at the renaming ceremony of Freedom Parkway as the John Lewis Freedom Parkway.
Most of my belongings were still in boxes and I was using Google Maps to find the Publix Supermarket that was only three blocks away when I read they were renaming Freedom Parkway. How could I find my way around this town if the names of streets keep changing? But a few sentences later I learned it was to honor John Lewis and then it seemed too small of a gesture. Only the parkway? Mayor Bottoms should have renamed the whole dang city Lewislanta. Imagine the perseverance of this man to skirt death on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge fighting for the right to vote, to then be elected to the House of Representatives two decades later.
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Pumpkin and cinnamon are my least favorite flavors, so I never had a taste for fall…until I got lost in a field of sunflowers, rolled a wheelbarrow full of pumpkins and stood over a waterfall — all in one 70-degree day.
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Today I was supposed to be driving through Wyoming as part of an elaborate, multi-state road trip. From Yellowstone, my next stop would have been Grand Teton National Park, followed by Shoshone Falls in Idaho. But we all know what this year has done to our travel plans.
Thanks, pandemic.
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On Christmas Day in 2013 I was wheeled out of the Georgia Aquarium by two very nice people. One was a man named Met, as in I “met” you today, the day your back spasmed so intensely that it numbed your leg and rendered you paraplegic. The other was a woman named Halle who insisted on offering me an entrance voucher for a future visit, as I had only seen two exhibitions before my visit was cut short.
Between winces, I let her know that I had no plans to return. Ever. And she nodded her head and smiled even though I was being unreasonable.
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The produce section of the Whole Foods is where the best (purchased) seats of Ponce de Leon Park once stood. This baseball stadium was the home of the Atlanta Crackers from 1907 until the Braves arrived in 1966. If during that time you worked at the Sears, Roebuck & Co., however, you would be able to see the game for free.
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“We want people to learn from the city of Atlanta, learn that we are one people, we are one family. We all live in the same house: the American house, the world house. It doesn’t matter whether we are black or white, Latino, Asian American or Native American. We will not give up on each other. We will not become bitter and divided.”
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a little cuban goes a long way 