This Official's Waffling, But He's Not Chicken

At the LA Times, Sandy Banks and a thoughtful university official speak up for the well-meaning Filipino chef at UC Irvine who was harshly criticized by angry students for serving chickens and waffles on Dr. King's day:

The culprit in this culinary blunder wasn't some "white chef who is a redneck from Mississippi or somewhere," said Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Thomas Parham, who happens to be black.

He's a Filipino chef, who took his cue from black students "when he wanted to do something sensitive culturally" for the King holiday menu. Chicken was the meat of the day.

He asked black students for advice, and they suggested the chicken and waffles combo.

"This is a guy who takes great pride in creating 'comfort food' for the students," Parham said. "Somebody who was really trying to do something nice, that was perceived differently by a small group of people.

"No racist intent, nothing hostile about it. ... But people who jumped to faulty conclusions without considering the context and intentions."

The Happy Kathy and John Plan

At the LA Times, columnist Sandy Banks touched a nerve when she wrote about "senior living communities." She summarizes the contents of her mailbag here. A sample:

A few readers bristled at the very concept of shuffling seniors off to live separately. "Warehousing is warehousing under any name or at any price," wrote Harold Shapiro. "As a culture we perpetuate this practice whether for the poor or the well-to-do. We essentially relegate the elder in our society to the sidelines."

Others championed their own senior living communities. I was invited to Claremont to visit Pilgrim Place, to Walnut Village in Anaheim, to Glendale's Windsor Manor and to Laguna Woods Village (nee Leisure World) by 88-year-old Walt Wood, who warned me: "you'll have trouble getting a word in edgewise."

The variety and passion of the messages Banks received are obviously signs of our unresolved feelings about old age and how best to care for our aging relatives. Having done some research about nursing homes (not the ideal generic rubric, either) and performed my share of visiting ministry in them, I've resolved never to judge families who decide to place someone in one. First, we can never know all the factors that came into play for those involved. Second, a third party's judgment does no one who's directly involved any good.

And third, I've come to the conclusion that each of us is in training, or should be, to be an old person and that a contented, active, socially engaged old Kathy and John living down the hall or in the granny-grandpa shack out back would also be a reasonably happy Kathy and John at Golden Acres. That's our plan, at least.