Seattle, Washington - the last Thursday in October, 2008
Foggy, 45 degrees, still, fall

A VOTE FOR OZZIE DAVIS
(with thanks to my mentor, Robert Kimball)

The setting:
The season is fall. The hour is seven a.m. First light of day. But thick fog will delay the appearance of the sun until mid-morning. The air is damp and chilly. The streets of the city are quilted with quiet. The dry fallen leaves are piled in crunchy heaps against sidewalk curbs.

The actor:
An older man stands on the sidewalk at an intersection.  Before him are two metal bins. One is for mail. One is for trash. In each hand the man is holding an envelope. One contains a letter to God, written in the dark hours of the previous night.

The letter:
“Dear God. I write in despair and anguish. With tears in my eyes. The theme of our time is Change. But I’ve been around long enough to know nothing will really change. Evil still rules this world. Disease, war, greed, cruelty, suffering, hate, stupidity, racism, violence. . . . . Do I need to go on? You know. You’re all-powerful, all-creative. You made this mess. Why?
You could clean up your own mess. You could do better. Even I could do better. What a waste of what might have been so good, so fine, so beautiful. I believe in you. But I don’t trust you. I just wanted to make that clear.”

The reflection:
The man smiles as he considers his letter to God. “Stupid, absurd idea.” he says to himself. When he demanded of his mother to tell him why God seemed so mean, she would retreat behind the answer that “Someday you’ll understand.” And he’s still waiting. Or, it occurs to him, that maybe he does understand. And his mother did, too. What he knows now is all the truth about God and the world he’ll ever get. A great big everlasting WHY?

It surprised him that he wrote the letter. It just seemed to fall out of his mind.
One more sample of the wiggy weirdness that runs around loose in his head.
What the hell?
Action:
The man crumples the letter into a ball. Lets it go. Watches it fall into the trash bin. If there really is a God, then He doesn’t need mail to know where the man stands. And if not, well, the trash bin is where the thoughts belong.

The other envelope:
This one contains the man’s absentee ballot. He wrote his letter to God this morning at the same time he was working through his voting decisions for the election of 2008. Now he holds the stamped envelope over the open slot of the mail box. “Maybe this should go in the trash, too,” he thinks.
He shakes his head as if to clear it of the fog of cynicism.

The memory:
The man’s mind takes him back 43 years to a morning in March of 1965 in the town of Selma, Alabama. He has slept wrapped in an old army blanket on a cot in an unheated two-room shack. He sees the face of Ozzie Davis in the dawn light. A Negro man - with very black, very wrinkled skin. Mr. Davis says, “Here’s a cup of hot water. I don’t have anything else.”

The man was offered shelter by Ozzie Davis - to protect him from any overnight violence that might come from the police, soldiers, dogs, and the white madmen surrounding the neighborhood. The man has never slept in the house of a Black person before. He ever imagined that his safety would depend on the kindness of this stranger.
He is still scared. Ozzie Davis is scared, too.
But in parting, Mr. Davis hugged him and said,
“Someday, someday, this will all work out. We will overcome.”

The action:
The man lets go of the envelope. His vote is cast. For Barak Obama.
It’s also a vote on behalf of Ozzie Davis, who did not live to see Someday.
But he believed. He hoped. He did what he could do.
And Someday has come.