A Kiss, a Memory, and the Long Road Between Then and Now

Jean has always believed that memory has a mischievous streak — especially the kind triggered by music. One moment she’s driving to the grocery store, minding her own business, and the next she’s dropped straight into a full moon‑drenched scene from the 1960s involving rum, steel drums, and a kiss that would age into something far more complicated than it felt at the time. What follows is her attempt to braid that long‑ago moment with the world she lives in now, and the distance between the two...AI

Music has a unique way of hooking us up with memories buried deep in years past. When a song manages to bring a vivid memory alive, you can’t help but marvel at our brain’s computer‑like ability to retrieve data our conscious self had long forgotten. That’s what happened to me on the way to the grocery store when Riley Green’s voice came over the country station singing, “...I know I can’t stand or sit, but if I was hammered, could I dance like this?...I ain’t as think as you drunk I am.”

I can count the number of times I’ve been truly drunk on the fingers of one hand. And all those times were in the last century — the 1960s, to be precise. There are different kinds of drunks, and I was a happy drunk, the kind who wanted to be on the move, dancing and singing. One particular time I was on vacation with another twenty‑something girl down in the Bahamas.

If you’ve been to the Bahamas, you might remember, as I do, the buttery‑smooth rum and the steel drums those notes rang like laughter as they tumbled through the warm air while the rum settled me into my happy place. As I remember it, it was the kind of intoxicating combination that loosened my world at the seams, making everything feel a little softer, a little friendlier — the perfect prelude to that warm, tipsy, rum‑drunk joy with a side of “I love you, man,” delivered to bartenders, strangers, and possibly a palm tree.

And to the Black taxi cab driver who delivered us back to our hotel that night. After he opened the taxi door and let us out, I gave him a long, deep kiss, much to his surprised delight and much to the disgust of my friend. Later she said she couldn’t believe I actually touched a Black man, much less kissed him shamelessly. And in a public place, no less! It was sometime after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law and before the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed, better known as the Fair Housing Act. But in my friend’s world, Blacks and whites mixing was still a sin.

Try as I might, I can’t remember her name or what she looked like, but I still remember that taxi driver’s sparkling eyes and wide, toothy smile as he enjoyed my drunken state as much as I was. 

It’s a sad statement about how limited my world has been that when I got home from that vacation, I’d have to fast‑forward to when I moved here, four‑and‑a‑half years ago, before I’d have real contact with Black people again. And those in my daily life, now, are all employees of my continuum care community — the wait staff, the cleaning staff, and our CEO. As a flaming liberal I, of course, loved having Obama as our president but that's not the same as actually talking with someone from another race on a daily basis.

When I see our very capable CEO at our monthly Dialogues, standing in front of my fellow residents, his skin as dark as the night, I can’t help noticing the irony: a Black man confidently leading a room full of old white people in a country where that simple image would once have been dangerous, even impossible. I sometimes wonder if he feels that history humming under the floorboards the way I do.

The universe has a way of pairing my life experiences so neatly that it often feels like a deliberate plan to call attention to something I might miss otherwise. When I got home from the grocery store with that feel‑good memory still lingering in my mind, I went to a lecture here in our all‑purpose room. It featured an Abraham Lincoln impersonator who put on a fabulous one‑man show about the Civil War.

There’s roughly a hundred years between when the Civil War was fought that ended slavery and my trip to the Bahamas, and over another half‑century between that trip and now. Still, I’ve always been proud of the fact that my generation has done so much to move race relationships forward — although I’m not sure Black people would see the progress in the same light as most whites do (not to mention the backtracking our current administration is attempting). In terms of history, it wasn’t all that long ago when a Black man would have gotten strung up to the nearest tree for kissing a white woman, even if he wasn’t the one who initiated it. Few days go by when I don’t see someone hug our CEO. I wonder what my long‑ago travel companion would think of that. Has she changed over the decades, or does she still hold onto the belief that races shouldn’t mix? Is prejudice so deeply ingrained in some of us that we can’t change?

I didn’t know where this post was going when I started, but somehow it feels like I’m at the end except for saying that sometimes a silly, rum‑drunk memory from sixty years ago can remind you how far we’ve come, how far we haven’t, and how strangely a single impulsive kiss can echo across a lifetime. And looking back now, I can finally see what I couldn’t then: the kiss was never the scandal. The scandal was the world that insisted it should be. ©

See you next Wednesday!