Singing For Stevie's Wonder

I remember, in the early 60s, our thirty mile drive from our historic family farm, in all White rural Michigan, not counting the Mexican migrant workers which adults made a point of discounting, on the first of several shopping trips to Thrifty Acres, through vibrantly young all Black urban streets of nearby Lansing. Making Stevie Wonder and I, him singing in all Black city churches and me in all White rural and small village churches, harmonic neighbors in my privately humming heart yet never possible to publicly meet and greet as this nation and this world were meant to sing and dance our regenerations not apart. I didn't know apartheid by default yet but I do remember seeing nearly black as ink skin for the very first time on a smiling brown-eyed boy on a chipped white painted bicycle without rims, and longing to talk and listen with him and laugh with him about the fresh green smell of freedom from training wheels, freedom to create our own fast pedaling breeze across our summer-hot black and white faces and arms, and knowing that I would touch his dark warm skin with loving wonder about what it could be like to become with him, to grow together, to smell and feel and fly our satisfying diverse integrity on a tandem red in-your-face bike, bright shining all the way back from Black-streets Lansing through little White Woodland, spreading across all Black with White Capital Cities on out to woodland farmers, to peddle fly while singing our glad hosanna wonders. As I reweave this first drive by encounter with racial diversity and humane ecstatic curiosity, I imagine asking Mom to stop, pull our metallic gold Ford over so I could ask his thick black-framed glasses name, which would be Stevie, and take his hand to walk his bike back to his home and family where we would live together happily and most prosperously ever after. This was my moment, too quickly passed, to know passion's love at first sight, these sublime sounds and dark satin skin smells of Stevie's Wonder.