Today is Martin Luther King Jr.'s actual birthday, not Monday when people who work for school systems and other government agencies will have the day off as a holiday.
I was only three and a half when MLK was assasinated, so all my knowledge of him is through the public school systems that I attended as a child. But even though I wasn't old enough to really hear and pay attention to his speeches, when I hear them now on places like YouTube, his voice makes me shiver... there's something about the timbre of it that just goes right to my soul, like certain pieces of music will make me cry. I wonder what kind of connection was made when I was an infant, when I know my parents had to have been watching the news and hearing MLK speak, that has stayed with me all these years.
The same holds true for certain smells, like the smell of my dad's pipe tobacco that he smoked back in the day, before he quit. I smelled a scent of something sweet and spicy the other day and suddenly I was four year's old and in my dad's study, lifting the lid of the tobacco jar that sat on his desk. This must have been around the same time as MLK's death.
I wonder what kinds of memories our children will have of people in history, what kinds of connections they will make later on in life to sounds, scents, and flavors. They won't connect with MLK like my parents or even some of my friends who are in their fifties and sixties do. They won't remember all the fine details of that day. But, they will have their own memorable days, like seeing the first black man in the history of the U.S. become president. I doubt that day would have arrived without the likes of MLK.
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