In the African tradition, call and response yokes "the word" and "experience" to a higher purpose. For the slave, call and response spoke of freedom. In the Black church, it means "I'm with you, brother pastor." Brian Thomas' column "Call and Response" looks at our cultures, our commitments, our traditions, and our families as we forage to find deeper meaning and connections in the day-to-day.

We played baseball until we could hardly lift our arms up above our shoulders. I never knew that you could injure yourself that way. Back-to-school time already. The hot summer days were still with us, but we had to go out and get our cigar boxes filled with Elmer's glue, one of those thin boxes of No. 2 pencils, paste (I never could tell the difference between glue and paste except by tasting it), and the small box of Crayola™ Crayons that could fit inside of the El Segundo lid.

Of course we didn't have backpacks back then. We carried all of our books and supplies in a plastic shopping bag. All the kids laughed at me; but I didn't care because those paper bags ripped down at the bottom-- especially when it rained. One plastic shopping bag would last me about a month or month and a half. I never cleaned mine all that well-- which is why I had all of those old broken Crayons at the bottom of my bag. It looked liked some horrible trick-o-treat gag gone terribly wrong. But the stale bag wasn't seen until mid-October; the beginning of September meant a new plastic book bag or new things in general.

New clothes, new kicks, and new attitudes.

School would be different for most of us. I was always told about the stuff that I couldn't do. I couldn't throw rocks into the recess crowd, I couldn't ride my bike before I finished my homework, and above all I couldn't play baseball until the weekend. I'm still not certain were this rule came from, but it made me love the sport even more. Sneaking around like it was forbidden fruit.