Googleymoogley

Nine times nine ago I got some time away from work and spent some time in Vancouver. I really like Canada, specifically BC, just because its so beautiful in the summer.

It was really getting on to fall, but I had designs on it being summer for a few more days. Vancouver agreed, so I drove around the lakes and rivers' mouths. The water was navy blue, and I hadn't seen much like it since Nova Scotia weeks before. But my most amazing sights came completely on accident.

I was five for five that day. I'd gotten about half of what I'd positive projected and came to a sensible end (10 completed HCs, 3 1s, 2 2s, the rest 3s) at that point. About ten miles out of the way, since organizers spend most of their street time hopelessly lost, I came to the end of a culdesac and ended up at the bottom of a hill. And that's when I saw, for the first time in my life, the Pacific Ocean in all of its glory. As if that wasn't plenty, I even got the aurora flash, and a wave of emerald green swept over my car, leaving me seeing seafoam for five seconds. Truly magnificent end to a day, I thought, and I went to my hotel sleepy and happy to be alive.

Today was the last day I saw him.

Dakarai, a great student activist and friend, is probably my best explanation of why I am now pursuing a career in social justice. He grew up in inner Baltimore, on the West side. The time he spent there made him deftly aware of the inequalities of educational opportunities for those that “don’t matter.” School, he said, was a battleground and even getting there was like an obstacle course, so most of the time kids he knew never made it there (Baltimore currently only graduates 58 percent of its high school seniors, and 75 percent of all black male high schoolers in the city never finish high school, according to the Maryland Board of Education.) He was determined to make it, even though he had a learning disability, even though he had to “do a little dirt” to get money for books during the summer. And through all of this, he marched in protests against the war, educated his boys on the block about social issues, and spent time mentoring troubled youth so they didn’t make the same mistakes that he sometimes did. He did it, he said, because “Not knowing is what’s killing us in the first place.” Sadly, he was murdered in an alley behind his father’s apartment as he was packing his things to go back to Virginia State University for his last semester. But even in death he finished college, as VSU gave his parents his diploma posthumously. Dakarai, or “D” as we called him, was my friend and my guide through the real issues of the streets, and I’ll always thank him for that.