He is young enough to be my son

The eight-year-old boy who died. The nineteen-year-old boy who likely killed him.

Or they could have been my students, a sibling. She may have smiled that beautiful smile over my lunch. He wanted to serve and protect. He wanted us to stop hurting people. She came here to learn. 

These people, living and dead, cause me pain. So yes, I want to know them. Not to exploit, or glorify, or justify, or apologize, or excuse. No. I want to know because I want to understand. I want to know why. I want to know if something could have been done to help angry young men with hate in their hearts to see a different path. Because I have the imagination of a mother. And the rage, and the heartbreak, and the ache. They are children. They have mothers. No mother looks at her baby’s face and imagines she will suffer in this particular way. No mother looks at her baby’s face and imagines he will unleash pain and death and torment. So how does that capacity for hatred grow? Where does it begin? I tell myself — the way we do — that my boys are different. But in this way or in that way, they are the same. And I have the imagination of a mother. And the guilt, and the worry.  

If we try to understand, if we seek to know, could we identify other children on a path that could be redirected, could be supported, be SEEN and treated as human and valuable, so they could see and treat others as human and valuable? So that our children will grow — whole, and alive — and without hate in their hearts. 

And still I’m talking about a bomb and a gunfight that killed four people and maimed so many others. For hate, yes. Which is terrible. No doubt. 

But what about the bomb that killed fourteen and destroyed so much in a tiny town? That bomb that people prefer to call a factory or business. That bomb that exploded not for malice but for what? Negligence or profit? That bomb that was not set by radicalization but is so much more eminently preventable if we give it the attention it deserves. So much more readily mitigated. But strangely not causing the same level of anger. I look out at the stacks of refineries and factories within my horizon, and I imagine possibilities. 

So many questions here and there and elsewhere. I can imagine something different. I can imagine something better. But first we have to be willing to value those lives, to look at them, ALL of them, to see them, to ask questions, and at every step to be humane and just.

The Wanderer

I am not ignoring the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. I thought I might try. But no. I am crying over every remembrance. Growling over exploitation. Railing at injustices. Wishing for better in this world. I am almost media saturated. Almost ready to turn off the feeds and contemplate in silence. I am thinking right now, mostly about going back into the classroom after 9/11. 

That was my favorite classroom. In an old building, a half-flight down from ground-level, two walls were lined with multi-paned windows that we could crank open to let in a cross breeze. When we opened the windows, the trees and grass and silent pathways made us feel like we were outside. I couldn’t stand up on the dais to lead a lecture that day. I sat in a desk with a full class. Only one or two people were absent. One of the absent women knew someone missing in the World Trade Center rubble. I ached for her. She returned to class only sporadically for the rest of the semester. Brittle and emotional, she crumbled with the passing weeks. Eventually she withdrew and I don’t know any more of her story. 

But that came later.

On that first morning, a few days after the attacks, I had a hard time leaving the original Micro-Sonar (he was fifteen months old). In the classroom, everyone was muted. I let anyone talk who wished to talk. Without judgement. We listened. When silence had settled on us for some time, I looked around and asked what we should do next. One student—he favored very fancy pens, I recall—suggested that he needed a break. He needed to talk about something else, anything else for a little while. A wave of agreement went around the room.

I climbed back on the platform, with the green chalkboard, and stood behind the podium, opening my copy of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1. The words freed us that day, for a few minutes. I don’t remember what we were reading. That early in the semester of a Brit Lit survey, we might still have been studying Anglo-Saxon poems. 

…The wise warrior must consider how ghostly it will be when all the wealth of this world stands waste, just as now here and there through this middle-earth wind-blown walls stand covered with frost-fall, storm-beaten dwellings. Wine-halls totter, the lord lies bereft of joy, all the company has fallen, bold men beside the wall. War took away some, bore them forth on their way; a bird carried one away over the deep sea; a wolf shared one with Death; another a man sad of face hid in an earth-pit….

From the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Wanderer”

Once Upon Three Proms

As graduations near, Prom season is coming to a close. Recently my aunt, after recounting my cousin’s happy Prom this year, asked if I remember my Prom. 

I attended three Proms with two boys. I married and divorced one of them. At my first Prom I wore a shimmery green dress with velvet bodice and poofy taffeta sleeves and skirt. I bought the dress with earnings from my job as an usher and ticket seller at a minor league baseball stadium (I’ll have to tell you about being a Dukette another time perhaps). At $120, it is still among the most expensive pieces of clothing I have ever bought, topped only by my first wedding dress. The evening was notable for being my latest official curfew (2 a.m.) and a close encounter with a pool table. Aside from the pool table, I don’t remember much about the night.

At my second Prom, I wore the same dress. I added black satin gloves and shoes and a black velvet choker. I can’t remember if I was broke (my paycheck was now eaten by my car) or just didn’t find another dress I liked. I do remember shopping vintage stores around Albuquerque with my best friend. Both of these years we prepared for Prom together, and both years she found the most amazing vintage dresses. One year it was a floor length, black velvet, sleeveless dress with white satin sailor collar, and one year it was a strapless chocolate satin. Both suited her body and her personality perfectly. Our dates (mine different, hers the same) picked us up at my dad’s house. There was a lot of hairspray and giggling and hose adjustment. The night was most notable for the Italian dinner (Capo’s Hideaway), the earlier curfew (12:30 a.m.), and the gobsmacked look my boyfriend’s best friend gave me when I arrived at the dance (followed immediately by the filthy look and cold stare of his date). I had a great time, though I’m pretty sure I missed my curfew.

Dani at 17, getting a corsage pinned on before Prom

By the time I was a senior, my interest in Prom had waned. I was engaged. I was working two jobs on top of a senior schedule full of honors courses and AP exams. I was earning more money than ever, but also planning a wedding and getting ready to move away to college. My family was tense. My best friend and I were frayed. I didn’t think Prom was that important. I offered to work the night of Prom so that my friends could go. Then, the day before, perhaps caught up in the fever of Prom week, I changed my mind. Weeks before, on a whim, I had bought a skimpy little black dress off a discount rack for $12, with no idea when I’d ever wear it. I paired it with my black satin pumps and gloves and velvet choker. I don’t remember who’s idea it was to get my hair teased up into a bouffant up-do, but on the day of Prom, before work, I found myself in a salon with my best friend getting the tease of a lifetime. A bag with silk stockings and garters sat next to my feet. The hair and stockings were my only expenses. 

I went to work. My beehive was a spectacle with my red and white striped polo shirt and made for lively Saturday-night conversation at the ticket window. When I shut down for the night, I changed. I was sent off by my boss, the money counter, and my intern friend Paul. My date picked me up in front of the ball park. The juxtaposition between my fancy hair and my dorky uniform, my fancy, slutty dress and the grimy office were hilarious to me. I have only a vague memory of the dance, of standing in the middle of the crowd wondering where all my friends had gone.

The evening was most notable for the awesome hair, the sexy stockings, the clucking-hen attention of my male coworkers sending me off like I was their daughter, the cleavage, and the profound sense of loneliness in the middle of the crowded ballroom. 

A Box of Paper

I am not shy about taking useful objects out of other people’s trash. I am most likely to rescue such unfortunates if I can use them myself, but I have also been known to snatch items from the trash and take them to local charities. 

Once, when our communal trash spot was an alley, we saved an end table, which we painted bright blue and put in the corner of our living room. Other times we have taken lumber or other raw materials to be used in household projects. 

I lamented an inability to save a large dog house that was being pitched. I don’t have a dog or need a dog house, but it seemed a shame for such a large thing with so much more good use in it to end up in a landfill. Too late it occurred to me that I could have called one of the many charities with trucks to come haul it away.

Trash-rescue is a family trait. One relative saved a lovely sheet set and comforter from a dumpster near her house, laundering the soft jersey back into life. She gave us the mismatched comforter that was in the bag. We dyed the comforter purple and still use it in the summertime, some ten years after the fact. 

About five years ago, a neighbor put out a box with her trash bags. 

I must have walked by it twice before I realized that it was a box of paper. Thankfully there had been no rain that day. I didn’t have the sort of printer that accepted continuous-feed paper (you know, the kind with the strips of holes down both sides?), but I did have three scribbly Sonars. The first time I went to salvage the box, I had the smallest Sonar on my hip, but couldn’t manage him and the box at the same time. I returned a little bit later, surprised to find that the box was more than three-fourths full of crisp, white, unblemished paper. 

In the past five years that paper has been torn off in single sheets, or long strips. It has been folded into countless airplanes, cranes, frogs, boxes, and other origami-joy, as well as wadded into balls of frustration. It has been colored on, penciled on, painted on, cut out, torn up, and traced into dabbles of Sonar imagination. I have written lists, planned stories, and folded envelopes for bits of mail that didn’t seem to fit into anything else suitable for the U.S. Postal Service. The thin, hole-y edge strips have been rolled and twisted into whimsical scrolls, and taped together into tails and ribbons. I frequently find them, forgotten after some frenzy of creation, under the couch. 

I went to get a few sheets of paper the other day, surprised to find that after five years of weekly, if not daily use, the box is still more than one-fourth full. What dreams will yet unfold from those leaves? 

Ma Bell, a Throw Me Prompt

I was reading a Throw Me Thursday post by the lovely E. Victoria Flynn last week on the occasion of her mother’s birthday. Please go read it if you like. EVF feels a disconnection, but also seems to imply a sense of forgiveness of her Ma. Reading the post, I naturally began a reflection about my own mother, on the occasion of her birthday. So, with thanks to EVF for the inspiration, here is what came out.

Ma Bell

I cannot call my mother on the telephone to wish her a happy birthday. I don’t know if I would want to if I could. I found a letter I wrote to her in 2006. Both unfinished and unsent, here with some mild editing of names.

Dear Mom,

I told my oldest child about you today. He’s 6. Beautiful, bright, and perceptive. I didn’t plan to tell him.  Didn’t plan what to say. I just suddenly had a strong feeling that he should know who and where all of his grandparents were. It was selfish in a way. An impulse motivated by me wanting him to know and understand me better.

So I held him in my lap and talked to him.

I told him that you were funny. Fun to be around. With beautiful brown hair that has a lovely white streak in it.  I called you Grandma Cindy.

I told him about dad too. That he was a police officer. Tall with dark hair and blue eyes. Also funny.  That he liked to draw.  I called him Grampa Mac, and explained why.

I told Sonar X6 that I wished he could know you. That you’d be lovely grandparents—full of good stories and good humor.

And then I told him about the hard part. About how he and his brothers won’t ever have the chance to know you that way.

I told Sonar X6 that your mind was sick. That in your illness you made some bad choices. That one of them resulted in you using a gun and shooting dad with it. That you killed him. And now he’s dead and you live in a prison far away.

I told him that it’s hard to talk about. That it was hard to lose you both. That I miss you both.

He was remarkable. He comforted me. That beautiful boy.

Part of me wants to torture you with the joy and beauty of the things you’re missing. All three boys are delicious. I’ve grown so much with them. They inspire me. They make me want to be the best I can be.  And the best of me does not aspire to torture anyone, especially my own mother.

The best of me aspires to be humane to all people. To empathize with each person I meet and to treat him or her with respect and compassion.

It’s relatively easy to be compassionate toward a stranger. There’s no baggage. No heartbreak. No thundering crash as the world crumbles underneath my feet and I’m left choking on the dust and stumbling over the rubble.

With family, with my mother, who has made choices that have shaken my trust in everything I have ever known, compassion is hard to muster. The best respect I have been able to gather is silence.

I know you’ve changed, but I’m not sure I want to know how. I know you have needs, but I’m not sure how or whether they can be satisfied or reconciled or healed. I’m not sure I want to talk with you.  Most days I want my life now to remain anonymous for you. To have a barrier that guards my family from the nebulous threat you might pose to us and our understanding of the world. To keep at arm’s length the pain and struggle that connecting with you would involve. To contain the messiness, keeping it sequestered from my life.

You stung me once, in a hurt that has been miserably hard to release. You said I lived in a dream world.  I don’t even really know what you meant by it. I suppose it implied to me that I was disconnected from the reality of your life somehow.

Full disclosure: I wrote that letter for me. To help me remember. I don’t think I ever intended to send it to my mother. So if it doesn’t sound like the sort of private letter you’d actually mail to someone, that’s why.  

In 2008 I felt compelled to write again. That time the struggle came out not as a letter, but as a blog post. It was the first time I had spoken broadly and openly about my mom to anyone outside of my close confidants. You can read that one here.

When I reflect on these two things I’ve written, my writer brain sees a shift. There is a quiet tender hurt in the pride I felt in talking with the Sonar. There is a bolder desire to move forward and be strong and forceful in the second. The lingering pain seems different somehow. There is more bitterness in the second. In both I show my desire to hold on to the good, even as some form of pain lingers.

I sit here today and know that I have changed.

I clutch close to my heart the parts of my mother that were good and beautiful. I feel like I have allowed some of my long hurt to float free. I still wouldn’t call or write to her. But I can ring a bell, and think of her, and put the words out on the breeze with love.

Happy Birthday, Ma.