America

       Columnist Hector Tobar wrote in the L.A. Times of a thirty-year high school reunion in Pasadena of students who were among the first to be integrated by federal court order, a class of kids with multiple skin colors who simply became friends.

       In the column, Tobar quoted the words “equal daughters, equal sons…all alike endear’d.”  The words are by Walt Whitman, which I might have guessed from the affirmative tone.  They’re from the short poem “America.” 

      And here was an American class, still friends in adulthood going back thirty years and more, standing as proof of Whitman’s words.