a belated apology
I was listening to a story on NPR this morning, and I am now compelled to apologize for the behavior of my older self. From the time I was 4 until I was a freshman in high school, I lived in Somerset, NJ - a small suburb near New Brunswick, home of Rutgers University. My Dad commuted on the train into New York City every day. It was a small town, really. Central New Jersey was like that - lots of small towns, all up next to each other. I went to school with a somewhat diverse set of people. Mostly white, but also black and a few Hispanic. We had Protestants, Catholics, Jews. A few people that stood out more than others - Hyeop Cha, who was Korean, and Namita Gupta, who was Indian. I'll clarify that she was Indian, not Native American, as that becomes important later on in this story.
We all went to the same elementary school for many years. Fourth grade was a big year - it was supposed to be our final year in elementary school before we moved up to middle school. One of the big transition events was that all the 4th graders from the whole district went to Stokes State Park in Northern New Jersey for a week.
So there we all are, many of away from home overnight for the first time. We're camping in cabins, staying up late, doing summer-camp like stuff. The student-teacher ratio is very high, and we're spending a lot of time unsupervised. I don't remember what the impetus was, but I still remember sitting around with several friends of mine when Namita walked by. Someone made the "Native American" gesture of the fingers flat over the mouth, with the "Whooping" kind of sound. It seemed to upset Namita, so other joined in. 'Cuz that's funny to 4th grade boys. Eventually, she cried and ran off. I felt bad about it then, but didn't say anything.
Life went on. I was pretty smart, Namita was pretty smart, we had a lot of classes together through middle school and Junior high. We weren't close friends or anything, but we were friendly. Then, I went to a private high school while most of my friends went to the public high school, and then during the middle of my freshman year we moved to Houston, TX.
I ran into Namita again later in life - sometime in High School. I don't remember all the circumstances, but somehow we discovered that we lived in different parts of Houston. I think she was coming to my school for some sort of competition. We talked for a while about old times, about the culture shock of moving to Houston.
Anyways, that's a lot of lead up to this. I listened to the story this morning. It was about an Indian girl growing up in the US, and some of the difficulties she faced. It made me think of the difficulties that Namita must have faced, and how I was one of those difficulties once. And I'm sorry for that.