Day 130l: Maggie May & the friendly Frenchman … (September 06, 2019)
The afternoon was melding into nightfall when I flowed into the lovely town of Greenville and discovered that there was neither a library nor an obvious place for rest in town, so I headed into Giovanna’s Italian restaurant instead and asked for my usual glass of water and a chair upon which to sit awhile. And as was indeed sometimes the case (maybe 30% of the time, maybe a but less), the manager on duty (Maggie May) made it her mission to treat me like royalty; telling me to sit down and relax and take as long as I wanted there while she made me whatever pizza I desired (!!!). It turned out that Romain, a French bicycle pilgrim who was trekking the U.S. roadways from Montana to New York before heading on to China, was also on hand at the time, and I split Maggie May’s uber-delicious multi-veggie-with-no-cheese pizza with him as we talked jovially about our respective journeys …
“They want us to be afraid. They want us to be afraid of leaving our homes. They want us to barricade our doors and hide our children. They want us to hate. They want us to hate ‘the other’. They want us to practice aggression and perfect antagonism. They want us to be inhuman. They want us to throw out our kindness. They want us to bury our love and burn our gentleness. And we must admit they had had a modicum of success; enough to have them thinking that their bricked walls will continue to divide and separate us. They think their damned bombs will keep us at war and thereby defeat us. In truth, they are so ignorant they don’t understand that my Soul and your Soul and our neighbors’ Souls and even their Souls too are all old friends. They are so lost that they don’t understand that when they cut you I bleed, and that when they cut me you bleed, and that when either of us bleeds they bleed as well. They are so clueless that they don’t understand that we will never succumb to fear for long; that we will never cave to hate and we will never be silent in the face of injustice & oppression. For our lives are ours – and they will never take them from us!” ~ via Kamand Kojouri
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