pink.marigold: Foreign Tastes II

Friday, August 24, 2007

Foreign Tastes II

Some of my fondest memories are of sitting in front of the wood cabinet TV watching RCA SelectaVision VideoDiscs and eating a bowl of my grandfather's chit'lings covered in Louisiana hotsauce. Even though I am a vegetarian now, one whiff of them can send me back in time. So you can imagine my amazement to find this in Korea.

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The meaning behind pink.marigold:

When I was about ten-years-old I grew flowers on our apartment balcony, the bright yellow and orange marigolds being my most cherished among them. One day a single pink marigold appeared in one of my pots. Pink being my favorite color at the time, naturally I was beside myself with joy to see this rarity and paid homage to it daily. But to my dismay, I awoke to find my miracle flower gone, left remaining only its sad stem. The culprit, my baby sister, she picked it when I was not looking. Able to do no more than talk about it again-and-again, the story became a mantra and the mantra the metaphor…Brown Americans (otherwise known as black or African Americans) barely consist of 1% of the world population. Taking into account education*, as one of them, life has been a fantastic journey much spent with some level of conscious awareness that I have the collective perspective of a paltry .1% of the world. All this isolation has made it imperative that I learn to think four dimensionally, using every new experience to build rainbow connections often with those I would have otherwise viewed as an other, while at the same time paradoxically weakening my connection to this .1% from which I sprang. Some might call it assimilation. I call it being a pink.marigold, the symbol for being planted in a far-off pot, isolated from the normal flowers, and miraculously growing only to be "picked" for being so irresistibly unique and beautiful.