Honestly, he gets too many of those looks just being black in Montana. But he’s an amazing, resilient kid. When people take the time to talk with him, he wins them over with his quick wit and sense of humor. And slowly, slowly, change is happening.
We stopped at the old-fashioned burger joint in town just the other day. A stranger saw the hat Kasa was wearing — blaze orange with a German shorthair emblazoned on the front. He walked right up to Kasa and said, “I saw your hat and I just had to ask about it, do you have a shorthair?”
Before I knew it we were talking gun dogs and honeyholes, and Kasa was petting the young pointer the guy had just picked up.
It wasn’t my son’s skin color this stranger saw. It was the shared love of bird dogs and pheasants and cool autumn mornings. We all have way more in common than we sometimes like to think.
That’s a message I’m trying to pass on to my boys. I intend to raise them the way my parents raised me — to treat others the way they want to be treated, and to leave the woodpile a little higher than they found it.