In Atlanta, I walked downtown along the Bike Path of Freedom. It ended into the Martin Luther King Junior Memorial Park, with its lawns barely worked up to a springtime green and jolly man on a lawnmower who smiled and waved at me as I walked by. The air smelled of mown wild onions, which were growing up tall and green in clumps through the yellowed grass.
I walked down the Civil Rights Walk of Fame, where people like Jesse Jackson and Ted Turner have their names in black marble in the sidewalk, and there are plaques inscribed with beautiful quotes from M.L.K. Jr. that ring true today as much as they ever have. At the end of the Walk, a bronze sculpture of Mahatma Gandhi greeted me. He wears his spectacles and his lungi and his shawl, as he did through his life. And there I was, in my jacket stitched on the plane ride back from India from a simple wool blanket, and in my wool pants from Munna the tailor. The smell of chives in my nose. Bills with Gandhi’s face printed on them still in my pocket. What a strange world we live in.
