Musing On Barack, Bobby, Jane & Joe: The Week That Was & What A Week It Was

As weeks go, this one has been a hell of a roller coaster ride and one fraught with historic importance.

On Tuesday, there was an African-American clinching the Democratic nomination and on Thursday a reminder of how quickly the people we admire can be taken from us with the 40^th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

Both reminded me of the people who made me who I am – my parents, Joe and Jane Mullen.

My father's parents were dirt-poor Irish immigrants who trace their lineage back to the potato fields of County Mayo. My mother's father was a German Jew who arrived in America with 12 cents in his pocket and her mother an Anglican who traced her lineage way back to Charlemagne and beyond.

Irish, English, German, Scottish, Swedish, Moorish and Lenni Lenape blood courses through my veins (thanks to blood pressure medication), which may explain my feistiness, a trait that family and friends tells me sometimes borders on the obnoxious. So sue me!

But a better explanation is that my parents taught this mongrel blogger well. This included their view that people were to be judged for who they were and not who you think they should be. While this was sorely tested at several points in my life, including when I ditched a well-paying newspaper job to apprentice to a carpenter at minimum wage, they indulged me my excesses.

Joe and Jane were civil-rights activists. I will never forget my father, who was a lapsed Catholic, telling me in an atypically candid moment after going to a civil-rights protest march in Washington that it was like being in church.

When our letter carrier became the first black to run for the local school board, my father volunteered to be his campaign manager. The guy won, but my parents lost some friends and my siblings and I the companionship of the kids next door, whose mother forbade them from associating with us because our family not only consorted with blacks but invited them to swim in our pool. Little did she know that two of the visitors to our home were an out-of-the-closet gay couple, a rare thing for the 1960s, as well as a lesbian psychiatric nurse who taught me to drive a stick shift on her bright red MG Standard.

Now I'm rambling, so I need to get back to my point: My parents loved their country, but neither slavishly nor unconditionally.

They were proud of my Army service, but detested the Vietnam war. (They went to antiwar protests, too.) They were law abiding, but my father became bitter that his government would consider him to be a criminal because his children provided him with ever so thin marijuana cigarettes to ease the nausea and pain of the primitive cancer treatments that did as much to kill him 27 years ago as the cigarettes he had smoked with abandon since his early teens. (My mother, stricken with a horrible progressive neurological palsey that robbed her of her body but not her ever keen mind, bravely decided to stop eating and passed on 8 years ago.)

Joe and Jane would have understood Michelle Obama's oft-disparaged and widely misinterpreted comment that she felt proud of America for the first time in her adult life as she spoke at a rally for her husband earlier this year.

I shed tears of joy for my parents when that husband finished speaking the other night. And I shed tears of sadness on Thursday thinking about standing with them as RFK's funeral train passed not far from our home on its journey from New York to Washington, although these tears were mitigated by the knowledge that while a flame was snuffed out with Bobby Kennedy's passing it has been rekindled with Barack Obama's coming.

Joe and Jane would agree.