“Goodness is about character – integrity, honesty, kindness, generosity, moral courage, and the like.
More than anything else, it is about how we treat other people.”
~ Dennis Prager
I had chosen the quote long before today but it fits Lance Hughes to a T. Recently, Cindy Sutton found this photo of Lance from the early 1970’s and today posted it on facebook. It made me smile big. Lance was the most handsome man I’d ever laid eyes on, but he was so much more. His heart was huge. He showered his friends – his people – with love and affection. I never met anyone like him. A friend recently loaned me a book called “Neither Wolf Nor Dog” by Kent Nerburn. Nerburn, a white man, was invited to talk with, and write down, an old South Dakota Indian man’s story (hence the book). Lance often pops into my head as I read the old man’s wisdom. There are many similarities between them. Lance and I talked about a great many things before he died, like how he was raised a white man and still managed to embrace his Creek ancestry. Once that true identity was intact he went on to do great things, like shutting down the Kerr-McGee nuclear facility in Gore, Oklahoma when he was acting director of Native Americans for a Clean Environment. So, I look at the handsome young man in this picture and think how lucky we all were to have known him; How thousands of people have benefited from his hard work in the office and in the courtroom, and how a handful of us extremely fortunate people were fed with laughter and food in his kitchen where he loved to make anything with chocolate. These hipster kids, they would need to know Lance Hughes to even begin to understand what hip really is. Hip is on the inside. The beard is just for show.
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