I was born in the mid 50's, and like so many Southerners of my generation grew up during the Jim Crow era, and like so many of my generation, was taught and grew up with the impression that the Negro race was inferior to the Caucasian. Surely prejudice resides in the heart of everyone to one degree or another, and thankfully, eventually I would come to the point in my life where I would realize that the philosophy with which I grew up is all wrong. But it would take a non-human creature to help me reach that point.

At 32 years of age I had reached the lofty position of pizza delivery person. Even though I had graduated from high school third out of a class of 143 and had been offered scholarships, I had decided to take a different path. But that is a different story. During the spring of 1986 I made a decision that changed my life forever. I decided that I could do better than pizza delivery, so at the age of 32 I enrolled as a freshman at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Back in the day, I told my fair share and enjoyed my fair share of "N" jokes. It was all in good fun. Whereas I had been raised to believe a certain way, my parents did insist that I show respect to all people regardless of race or color. The brand of prejudice with which I grew up did not include lynchings, but it did include jokes like: "I don't have anything against blacks. I think everybody oughta own one!" Believe it or not, there are still people who tell jokes like that. Thankfully I finally got over it, and although it wasn't necessarily my fault that I grew up that way, I am very grateful that I was able to finally realize the wrongness of the way I was.

In Baton Rouge I found a very nice second floor apartment situated immediately adjacent to the LSU campus. The kitchen and one of the bedroom windows looked out onto the horse and cow pasture of the LSU veterinary college. Beyond that was the levee that held back the Mississippi river. If you've never been to that part of the United States you might not realize that the levee system of the Mississippi River has quite become Pandora's Box. Samuel Clemons wrote about this in his wonderful book, "Life on the Mississippi." Through the years, despite the efforts of engineers dredging the bottom to remove massive amounts of sediment that settle from all that is carried from upstream, the bottom of the river has steadily risen so that today the bottom of the river is where the top used to be. I saw this for myself the first time I happened to look out of my kitchen window in time to see one of those large oil tankers floating by ... above the level of my second floor window!

Anyways, I used to love to look out and see the levee, and the pasture, a gorgeous green was dotted here and there with horses or cows. I was in college now and was happy for the decision I had made. Now I could get down to doing something serious with my life. I was enjoyed college life! For me it was not all about parties, oh no. I loved studying and doing homework. I still do. Today I am a software engineer, and I spend my days reading through and writing hundreds of lines of code, developing highly complex applications or their algorithms.

It took a while to get here though. First I must pay the price of going to class, doing homework, and taking exams. But truth be told I loved all of that. During most of my college career I tried to avoid social entanglements such as close friends, especially girlfriends. I did not need nor did I want the distractions. But I did acquire one minor distraction, and that was in the form of a beautiful, golden cocker spaniel.

Shortly after moving to my new apartment two new tenants arrived. They were two of the most beautiful, tall, sleek, gorgeous beauties I had ever seen, and their beauty was breath-taking. I had never been that stunned by the good looks of a black female. As it turned out both girls were members of the LSU women's track team. I met them in the summer of 1987, and as it turned out the LSU girls track team won the NCAA outdoor track and field championships that year. Eventually, the LSU women’s track team would win 11 or 12 consecutive national titles beginning with that first one. These two girls were pioneers in that effort. One of them, and I hope I can get away with using her real name here, was Esther Jones. Esther was on one of the women's relay teams that one a gold medal in the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea. I didn't get to know Esther all that well -- she was world class and was always on the road. The other girl, equally athletic, was a high jumper. She was the first to show me just how misinformed I had been regarding my prejudice against blacks -- she and her dog.

At the time I met Esther and Leslie I still felt toward blacks the way I had always felt: "show respect, but remember that they are not a good as you." Esther and Leslie moved in, and college life went on. Going to college was the best thing I ever did. At 32 I had a healthy respect for going to class and doing homework. I determined that I would make the best grades I could, and I was into my third semester before I made my first "B." Until then I had made all "A's" taking courses like microbiology, calculus, and organic chemistry. I had grown up in the South, so I had been around blacks my whole life -- but not to socialize with them. I experienced the desegregation period during the 60's and 70’s. The first blacks with which I went to school were three students that integrated my school in the eight grade. I had made friends with them, but the prejudice with which I had been raised stayed with me. Now I was sitting in class at LSU next to young people of all manner of background, color, and ethnicity. I learned early on that Orientals are extremely intelligent, as are Indians, and surprise, surprise: blacks! I still have the computer printouts from tests results. My name was most always placed at or near the top, but more often than not there would always be one or two students that consistently outscored me. I made it a point to seek these students out, and when I did would find that they usually were not Caucasian. As often or not some of these students who would outscore me on a chemistry test would be black.

I had always been taught that blacks are superior athletes to whites because they had been bred to work in the fields. I had also been taught that blacks had thicker skulls and smaller brains, with the result that whites are superior intellectually. Of course, I believed what I had been taught, so how was it that these black students were outscoring me on college-level exams? It didn't fit in with what I had been taught.

Things were great back at my apartment. They got better. One day there was a knock on my door. Leslie was there holding her dog, Abigail. She was going out of town, and would I mind watching Abigail for a few days? I knew Abigail. I had seen the little dog hanging around Leslie’s apartment and had come to pet her and hold her as did everyone in the complex. Abigail had been a gift from Leslie's boyfriend. I observed that Leslie took very good care of Abigail, and I would always say hi to the pup whenever I saw her and Leslie out and about or by the apartment pool. I had gotten to know Abigail and Leslie, and Leslie decided that she could trust me to look after her pup while she was gone.

So Abigail came to stay with me for a few days. In the beginning I was not enamored with the idea of taking on the responsibility, but Abigail quickly wormed herself into my heart. Within a few days, Leslie returned from her trip, and Abigail went home. In the mean time I had begun the practice of leaving my front door open when I was home. My air conditioner did not work very well, and it does get hot in South Louisiana. Leslie’s routine came to be that she would open her door and let Abigail out, and Abigail would run to my apartment and fly through the open doorway, scurrying about the apartment until she found me. She developed the habit of throwing herself into my lap and showing me her belly. I had earlier made the mistake of scratching her belly one day, and it was all over with after that.

Everyday after those few days I had watched over Abigail, she would come down to my apartment for a visit. In the early mornings, Leslie would open her door and Abigail would run out of her apartment, down the walkway, turn the corner and glide straight into my apartment. It became a daily routine. I am a very early riser. I would be up and at my desk studying each morning by 4:00 am, and usually sometime between then and time to go to my first class at 7:30, Abigail would come flying in, waddling and shaking and beaming all over. One morning I had stepped out early and had closed my door behind me. I happened to see Leslie open her door and saw Abigail fly through her door and down the walkway, headed for my apartment. I heard a heavy thud and heard a sharp yelp. I rushed over to see what happened. There was Abigail lying on her side just outside my closed door, her tongue hanging out as she panted. Her eyes looked at mine and for a few seconds they failed to recognize me. The look on her face said, “What happened?” When Abigail finally recognized who I was she broke into that winning smile of hers, raised herself off, and stood by patiently until I opened the door. Cautiously she proceeded to go inside.

"I gotta go to class now, Abigail. You come back and see me when I get back."

Leslie was a gorgeous girl -- tall and lean with a big smile and very pleasant personality. In the beginning she would apologize for Abigail's intrusion, but eventually she would come to accept Abigail's forays are just part of the way things are. Abigail became as much my dog as she was Leslie's. Over the course of the year or two that Leslie, Esther, and some of the other LSU track girls' lived at the complex I became friends with most of them. Quite often before a big meet, all of the girls would gather at the complex and go to a movie. They never failed to ask me to tag along. As a group we saw such movies as "Field of Dreams," and "Rain Man." These girls, world-class athletes, All-Americans, and NCAA national champions would exit the theater in tears, wiping their faces, and I, being the macho man that I was, would be doing the same.

Time moves on, and in college one semester moves into another, then another, and so on. Each morning before I would go to class Abigail would show up in my bedroom or kitchen, wagging her tail, smiling that big smile of hers, looking for her belly rub. Her “mommy” and I had become very good friends, and it was inevitable that the day came that Leslie would announce that she had become engaged to be married. Within a few weeks she was married and moved out of the apartment. Abigail went with her, of course.

College moved on and the great day of graduation arrived. I was thoroughly exhausted and ready to move on to bigger and greater things. President Ronald Reagan spoke at my commencement. On the return walk to my apartment I happened upon a couple walking through one of the several Live Oak groves around the beautiful campus. The couple had their dog with them, and as I crossed their path I realized it was Leslie and her husband. Abigail was with her, and the three of us enjoyed a brief reunion. I held Abigail for a few minutes, and she wagged her tail and licked my face, and the two of us enjoyed a few minutes embrace. I gave Leslie a hug, shook her husband’s hand, we parted and have never seen each other since.

I turned back, though, and watched as Leslie and her husband and Abigail continued on their way. Abigail would look around, but Leslie had to hold tightly to her to keep her from jumping and running back to me. But as they disappeared from view, I thought back on that day that Leslie had knocked on my door and asked if I would babysit her dog. I recalled that on that day I still held to that prejudice with which I had grown up, but that over the past three of four years of knowing Leslie and her dog, of attending classes and coming in second to students who were supposed to be “inferior,” I had definitely come to realize that those philosophies with which I had grown up were all bogus. I had learned from my time with Leslie and with her dog Abigail that among God’s creatures, “red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight.”