Three Beautiful Things 03/21/17: Charly's Dental Cleaning, Going to Yorktown, *I Am Not Your Negro*

1. First thing this morning, before I'd enjoyed even a sip of coffee, I drove Charly down to the vet so she could have her teeth cleaned. Later in the early afternoon, the vet's office called me to report that Charly had come through the procedure just fine and would be ready for pick up a little later in the day. I picked her up and I would have never known that she'd been under anesthesia. She came home hungry and happy to be reunited with Maggie.

2. The Deke has a three day weekend coming up and we've decided to explore the history of the American Revolution by taking a two-night trip to Yorktown, VA where we will visit the American Revolution Museum in Yorktown and the Jamestown Settlement. Since the Deke's and my birthday fall very close together, Mom gave us each some money to put together to spend on a nice dinner and we will go to a seafood restaurant in Williamsburg and enjoy some good food and wine, thanks to Mom's gift. If we can squeeze it in (ha!), we'll also go to a brewery or two and sample some fine Virginia beer.  I spent time today preparing the way for us to make this trip.

3. I picked up the Deke at school in time for us to go to the Old Greenbelt Theater to watch a late afternoon showing of I Am Not Your Negro, a documentary of the writer and intellectual James Baldwin's reflections upon the experience and his experience of being black, narrated entirely in his own written and spoken words. The only other documentary I've ever seen that took the approach of giving a dead person a voice from the grave to narrate his own story and movie was the film Tupac: Resurrection. In a way I welcomed and enjoyed, I Am Not Your Negro overwhelmed me with the sheer volume of its visual and spoken  and musical content. I wanted to stay in the theater, have the movie go back to its beginning, and watch it all again.  I wanted to listen again, among other things, to Baldwin's understanding of the nature of reality, his understanding of history, and his insights into maturity and social responsibility.