I got caught up in a story on NPR this morning. I was listening to a husband and wife talk about the night of April 3, 1968 when Martin Luther King gave his last speech at Mason Temple, a Memphis church. Audio from his speech was played between their recollections of being in the church that night. That speech. His voice. It's 38 years later, and I hear it and my eyes are tearing up as I drive to work. 1968. When I was a kid learning about the civil rights movement in school it seemed like ancient history to me. But it's jarring to me now to realize how close that history actually is. Rev. King died four years before I was born. Four years is nothing. 38 years is nothing. Time contracts around me, and I see how much has changed in such a short period of time.

Then those thoughts are driven away by the voice from four weeks ago of a woman who told me, when she learned I lived in Memphis, her racist nickname for the city. I had only met her five minutes ago. I stood there in the dark, seeing her white skin and my white skin and feeling tired from all the times someone has showed their true colors so quickly. Feeling guilty for being complicit in any way with such bigotry.

And then as I was driving, I hit that sweet spot on Union, and my nose caught the smell from the Interstate Bakeries factory just blocks away. And I inhaled it as deeply as I could and held it in until I felt lightheaded. And I felt better from the healing powers of baking bread. And I remembered one of Anne Lamott's rules: "Forgive yourself."