Sometimes, your most formative memories can happen at the grocery store.

For Myra Jones Taylor, the first one happened when she was about five years old in a supermarket

parking lot.

And there was this elderly black woman crossing the street with one of those wire basket

tiniestures pushing something and she looked tired and sad.

She was a virus by racial, her dad's black and her mom's white.

And I looked up at my mom and started sobbing and said, I don't want to grow up to be an

old black woman.

And I have no recollection of how she reacted to this, but that is a very, very powerful

and a kind of a shameful memory that I have.

But it's completely tied.

There's a string that's tied between that memory and this moment that happened many

years later.

Myra was now a senior in high school, still grocery shopping with her mom.

Like they always did on Saturdays.

And I was coming down the aisle kind of toward her, we must have separated and we're coming

back down the same aisle together.

And a black woman was ahead of me, an older black woman, beautiful woman, beautiful

gray silver hair.

And I can only see the back of her.

Myra and her mom were both silently admiring this stranger.

And at the time, Myra's mom was metaposal in her feelings a lot.

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