I saw Life Magazine's special edition on Martin Luther King Jr at the store the other day and couldn't resist it (at newsstands until the end of this month). Reading it has made me think, of all things, of the Sunday school teacher I had in junior high. Fran is petite, quiet and white. She also was a Freedom Rider. She was born in the South, but moved to California when she was young. Hearing news of protests and demonstrations led her back there as a teenager.

When I was twelve or so, she asked me to read her manuscript which fictionalized what she and her friends had experienced, hoping that I would give her feedback from a younger person's perspective. I was happy to do so, and felt important being privy to an unpublished work. I quickly figured out which of the characters was based on her life, and after reading the first account of her being brutally beaten, I closed myself off emotionally and had a hard time getting through the rest. Those manila envelopes of sheets carefully rolled through a typewriter that once brought such excitement, became carriers of an ugliness that I wasn't ready to understand. I think that my only real advice was to change the phrase "rolling her hair", which wasn't familiar to my curling iron generation. There isn't much of my adolescence that I would be interested in reliving, but I sure would like another crack at that book.