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A few weeks back, the Baltimore Sun published a long profile of a member of my church. I missed it when it first came out, but of course it was plastered all over the bulletin board in the Parish Hall, so I got to read it yesterday. It's inspiring.

On his first trip as a civil rights activist, Charles Blackburn already knew the rules: Disconnect the lights in your car so you're not an easy target for snipers. Drive down the center of the road to make it harder to be run off the side. Stick to the black neighborhoods whenever possible.

A white Unitarian minister, he was headed from his home in Huntsville, Ala., to McComb, Miss., where a string of bombings had devastated black homes and churches. It was October 1964. Nine white men arrested in the bombings had just been released.

"I knew what the violence was and that these people were out on the street," Blackburn says. But he made the lonely trip all the same, arriving at a bus station where he was met with a sea of white faces. "I knew what was in my heart, and I knew what I believed. And if they had known this, my life would have been worth very little to them."

He carried another secret in that bus station, and in his years fighting for civil rights in the South: He was gay. It was a secret he would keep for 10 more years, until 1974, when he separated from his wife and moved to Baltimore.

Now, four decades after risking his life in a civil rights struggle for others, Blackburn, 73, says it is time to fight for himself. Along with his partner of 28 years, Glen Dehn, he is a plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking to expand marriage to gay and lesbian couples in Maryland. Blackburn is a bridge between the two movements, a man with a creased face and thinning hair who knows what it means to stand up, and why it is essential.

I knew that Charles had been involved in the Civil Rights movement as a young minister in Huntsville, Alabama, but I didn't know how extensive his involvement was: jailed, threatened, church windows shot out. I know him as an elderly man who sings in the choir, makes stained glass, and keeps up an exquisite showpiece of a Victorian home. And of course, I know him as a genteel, dignified gay marriage activist. Our whole church is behind him.

Read the whole profile. You'll need bugmenot to get past the first page, but it's worth it. Really.

(no subject)

Alex got a nasty cold over Thanksgiving. She had a persistent, dry, hacking cough afterward, which, as often happens following a cold, lasted for weeks. A couple of days ago, the cough started to get ugly, and ramped up with tremendous ferocity. This morning she coughed so hard that she vomited.

So this afternoon we saw one of our pediatrician's partners. She diagnosed Alex with a sinus infection that has been, in the doctor's very words, "seething" since Thanksgiving. It is now causing the dreadful cough, and has also backed up her Eustachian tubes and started an ear infection. Although the AAP now recommends that most ear infections not be treated with antibiotics, it seems not to apply in our case. Alex now has a big bottle of bright pink, bubblegum-scented, sludgy, but apparently tasty Amoxicillin. We also bought her a bottle of combination antihistamine and cough syrup to help her sleep. (The sinus infection drains when she lies down, so she feels much worse at night. Plus, as a special bonus, antihistamine = sedation.)

The doctor's visit went surprisingly well. Alex's 15- and 18-month checkups were utter nightmares. She started crying and clinging the moment we stepped into the exam room, and graduated to hysterical sobbing when the nurse tried to measure her or the doctor tried to examine her. Developmentally normal, our ped was quick to assure us, but still a wrenching battle that left all three of us unhappy and drained.

A couple of weeks ago, coming home from our last trip to Elmira, Alex suddenly initiated a game of "doctor." She had her nail clippers, which have a magnifying glass at the business end, and announced that she was going to use them to peek in her doggy's ears. We spent about 45 minutes on that car trip examining each other and her doggy. Several times since then she has initiated doctor play, as well - always a monotonous (to me; it's endlessly fascinating to her) rehearsal of a well-child visit. One of the children's librarians found us two picture books about going to the doctor, and she's been demanding them up to five times a day.

We started to prepare her yesterday for the likelihood of a doctor's visit today. She was excited to leave for the appointment: "Go to doctor! Go to doctor!" While we were in the car, we talked about things the doctor might do. (Peek in ears, peek in mouth, listen to chest and back.) We also brought her favorite of the two doctor books with her, and re-read it in the waiting room. When they brought us back to the exam room, although she didn't cry, she clung to Michael pretty tightly and rested her head on his chest. We walked around and around the room looking for things that were the same as in her book, talking about what Thomas (the main character) did with the scale, the blood pressure cuff, the tongue depressor, and so on. It seemed to help so much. Alex was calm when the doctor came in. She let her listen to her chest and back without protest, and accepted the ear exam. She only cried when the doctor wanted to look in her throat. Throughout the exam, we kept talking about what Thomas did in the book, and how Alex was being just like Thomas.

The doctor responded very well to what we were trying to do. She let me hold the tongue depressor, for example, instead of insisting on putting it Alex's mouth herself. She even engaged Alex with the book - she flipped through to find out what happens at the end (Thomas gets stickers from his doctor), and told Alex that she could have stickers at the end too. But really, I think most of the work was done by Alex, through play and through hearing and talking about the stories.

You know, they say that "children work out their issues through play," and it always seemed a reasonable enough idea. But it's something else to see how amazingly well it can work in practice.

Oh, and additional good news: we weighed her, and she's gained almost two pounds since the first week of November. That takes her up to the 25th percentile for weight. Yay!