Well, I'm technically off today (Martin Luther King Jr. day, of course) but I'm actually in, working on a rewrite of a paper (Michelle, I feel your pain, been there, done that, got the whole souvenir postcard booklet. And I hate to say it, but no, it doesn't get easier. Just more expected.)

But I do have one MLK story to share. Okay, so it's somewhat tenuously linked to the man, and it's kind of sad in a way, but here it is:

One day, my mom was in her campus library picking up a book she'd requested from storage. She got behind a student - the typical rich-kid-from-the-Chicago-burbs student, she said. The student was trying to request something her prof had put on reserve, but she couldn't quite remember the title or the author. (It was actually a recording). She was trying mightily:

"It's, like, a speech by some famous guy. It's called something like 'I dreamed a dream.' You know, the one."

I guess the reserve desk person figured it out. The sad part of the story is that she didn't know that it was Martin Luther King, Jr. and "I Have a Dream." (Link is to a site with both text and audio.) I remember in 8th grade English, my teacher played the class a recording of the speech, partly as an example of good rhetoric and a moving speech, and partly because he simply felt it was something that we (fairly wealthy kids in a mostly-white town) should be familiar with.

I guess teachers don't do that any more?

The funny part of the story is that "You know, the one" became an in-joke between my mom and me. Any time someone was trying to describe something obvious and not doing a very good job, she and I would look at each other, one of us would say (or mouth, if we wanted to be more polite) "you know, the one" and we'd both start giggling.