Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

Lily's hair got shorter and shorter during the year; she started by donating her pony tail in Minnesota! In Melbourne in January her hair got a lot shorter. Also, check out those freckles! The hair on my head has been getting scarcer for at least 20 years. Every haircut I've gotten in the last fifteen has been shorter than the one before it. For the last ten years I've been giving myself buzz cuts in the mirror, trusting Elise to tell me when I've missed a spot. Every few years the guard on the clippers has gotten smaller. During this time, I've missed barbershops and their casual banter. Elise once gave me a gift certificate to a place where I got a buzz, a beer, plus a hand and face massage but no chatter. I went to a place in our neighborhood and paid $30 for a buzz and a can of hipster beer but I was definitely too old and square to earn a conversation. Besides, even if I took a trim every two weeks (I prefer weekly), that would be an expensive habit....

It was hard to decide that we wouldn't visit Selma. Each person we met in Montgomery gave us the same advice: go to Selma, walk across the bridge. But some of these experiences don't seem appropriate for the children, no matter how important they are. It has been in the high nineties consistently during our time here and we couldn't see how the kids would make it over the bridge and still have the capacity to comprehend what had happened and what it meant. (Apologies,:if you don't know this history, please look up the Pettus Bridge.) This is the constant debate with this in-person educational experience: confronting the history, in person and on site is more meaningful than reading about it in textbooks. This visit has caused me to consider how to encourage other families (or classes, or schools) to make this journey. But these experiences, these confrontations and emotional or intellectual conflicts, are difficult. I believe we (and by we I mean white Americans eve...