Category Archive

I left my phone at home today, which is the subject of a whole other post about how I am entirely too dependent on perpetual communication. Consequently, I missed a call and a message at 11:30 this morning. When I have a missed call AND a new voice mail message, I get those notices in reverse. In other words, the first screen says “1 new message–listen now?” and the second screen says “1 missed call–view now?” I hardly ever view the missed call on screen two, assuming I’ll figure out who it was that called me when I listen to the message.

When my grandmother died in August, the preacher from my childhood days in a tiny West Virginia church presided at her funeral. I adored him, and his wife Patty, my Sunday school teacher, was my BFF when I was 7. They left WV when I was in college, and a few years ago they moved back to the state. They are retired now and living in a small town about 45 minutes from where I was born, where most of my family was born, and where my grandmother lived most of her life and is now buried. At the funeral Patty and I promised to stay in touch, and a few weeks ago I sent her a Halloween card and a picture of Mia and asked if they would be around for the Thanksgiving holiday. I never heard from her.

So I dialed the access number for my voice mailbox, and for a few dizzying seconds I thought the message was from my grandmother. Thought it was my grandmother’s voice saying my name. It was Patty, of course, calling to let me know they would love for us all to get together, but I honestly can’t remember most of what she said. I think there was something about show ponies. Or maybe Shoney’s. I’m definitely going to have to call her back. But later, like maybe tomorrow, because I am still reeling, can still hear her greeting sounding oh so much like my Mama, and I’m not really taking it all that well.

Is it just me, or do you see a stiff drink in my future?

Last night I was looking at some pictures of Mia from over the summer, and I came across one of her lying placidly next to Suzanna the Dog on an afghan my friend Cheryl’s mother made. Mia was staring over at the dog with a look that held the perfect combination of wonder and oblivion; Suzanna was looking all, “I used to lie on blankets. I used to have my own blankets. Now I have to lie on carpet. Hmmmph.” I had put Mia down on the afghan and stepped out of the room for a moment, and Suzanna had jumped at the chance to lounge on the Forbidden Blanket. It’s a sweet picture, and looking at it caused a little pang of nostalgia to erupt in my chest. Before you go all misty-eyed and start nodding your head, thinking I am about to expound on the loss of infancy and how sad it makes me that my baby is growing up too fast, put away your Kleenex. That pang I felt was tied to the fact that I can’t just put her down in the floor for a few minutes anymore. Gone are the days when I can go pee whenever the urge strikes me. Now I have to plan trips to the bathroom carefully. I have to make sure the Bumbo is in the bathroom so she can sit at my feet and look at a book or lick her reflection in my hand mirror or bang on the wall with my hair brush, because now when I put her down on the floor, she crawls away at the speed of a shrill scream.           

Other things have changed as well. There was a time in the not so distant past when Mia would sit in her high chair or the Bumbo and look at a book of my choice for 20 or 30 minutes straight. She will still sit and flip through a book—as far as she is concerned, the best invention since the printing press—but she wants to pick the book, and she doesn’t want to be stationary. Lest you think my child is a delicate flower who crawls deliberately over to the shelf and gazes at the spines, occasionally reaching up to stroke one, ultimately settling on a classic volume penned by A.A. Milne or Eric Carle, let me set the record straight. Picking a book requires unshelving every single volume, usually with some over the shoulder tossing action, like she is frantically saving them from some impending doom and she just doesn’t have time to explain. Sometimes the books in question actually belong to her. After all the books have been freed, she crawls around in them, finding a nice sturdy one to sit on, and then she handles all the ones she can reach. Some she opens and peers into, others she picks up and immediately tosses back into the pile, until she finds The One. Most of the time she chooses a book I received free in the mail called Baby Faces or a Todd Parr title, but I’m not going to lie to you: a lot of the time she picks a clothing catalogue. She prefers Land’s End over Eddie Bauer, and she is particularly fond of the shoe section.           

And God forbid I try to remove a catalogue or one of my personal books from her vice-like grip. Oh, dear people, you should tremble in the face of her wrath! She has been perfecting her tantrum from an early age. I believe I photographed one when she was just shy of six months old, and I was laughing as I released the shutter. Now, almost six months later, the ability to stand while holding onto something has given her tantrum a whole new dimension. Now when she arches her back and flings herself into the space behind her, be it carpet or mattress or wall or water, I do not laugh. I attempt to keep her from cracking her skull or drowning, and I attempt to control my own irrational irritation with her random fury by saying things like, “WHAT is WRONG with you?” over and over through gritted teeth, or, on a good day, in a funny little voice, “What’s wrong little Pookie, why are you so mad?” I’ll tell you, little Pookie is not amused. And actually, these moments of fire and brimstone are not frequent. Not that she doesn’t have a temper all the time, but mostly she expresses it in different ways, different being the operative word. She has typical frustration reactions—throwing whatever innocent object has offended her, for example, or screaming, but her favorite expression of frustration is trilling. Rolling her tongue. You know, like you learn to do in Spanish class. She used to do it all the time, but now she only does it when she’s mad. She is like a cross between a little African tribeswoman and a tiny terrorist. If her first discernable word is “infidel” I am enrolling her in military preschool immediately.            

I kid. Actually, she already has discernable words. When I was pregnant—in fact, I believe it was Christmas Day, the last day I was pregnant—my mom made the statement that she couldn’t wait to hear Mia’s voice. At the time I assumed she meant, literally, her very first utterance, which sounded a lot like a cross between the mew of a kitten and the staccato bleat of a goat. But in retrospect I think she meant speaking voice, a sound we hear a lot around here these days. Mia is a talker. For the past two months or so she has “talked” to herself or “read” aloud in this little under-the-breath mutter (imagine her eyes are narrowed and she is wringing her hands) that makes me think she is plotting my downfall.  But in the past few weeks she has started talking. Conversationally. Like, with emotion and inflection and emphasis on certain words. Sometimes she will say something, and then after a moment of silence (presumably to allow someone else to respond), she will laugh and laugh, as if she just made the world’s most hilarious observation about Republicans or the absurdity of reality television. While I’m fairly certain she is speaking Portuguese or Swahili, I love the sound of her little voice, and when she says actual recognizable things, like Mama or Buh (book, ball, bath, take your pick), I swoon.           

I could write all day about how rapidly she is growing and changing—how there was a time when she would willingly eat whatever I offered her, but now she has to touch it and inspect it, and sometimes she rolls it around in her mouth and then spits it out and looks at me like I just fed her cyanide disguised as a pear cube. Or how she dances whenever anything remotely like music drifts into earshot, and how, if I am singing to her in the early morning after she has finished her bottle and I make the mistake of stopping because I have drifted off, she will jerk her whole body and grunt so I will continue my random hum-a-thon of Christmas carols and gospel hymns. Or how that little four-key piano I bought her months ago has finally become interesting, and how she plays it with her feet while sitting or standing on it, a miniature Jerry Lee Lewis in footy pajamas. Or how she points at everything and murmurs, “dah?” like a question or a revelation, as if she is both questioning and acknowledging the existence of everything she sees. I could go on and on, but my point in the end would be the same: she isn’t a baby anymore, my Mia. And even though I thought I would get all weepy over this fact and pine over the early days and weeks and months of her life, I don’t.            

Here’s the thing: we get very wrapped up in the idea of wanting a baby, and by “we” I mean us, the girls who, for months and even years, chart our cycles and take our morning temperature like some religious ritual and examine our bodily fluids like we’re reading the future; and by “baby” I mean pregnancy, because ultimately, it isn’t really a baby we want. We just don’t know it isn’t what we want, because for all the months it takes us to conceive one, it’s all we can think about. And for those of us lucky enough to actually knock ourselves up, we fixate on this being inside us and our preparation for its arrival. But for me, at least, the baby part lasted all of the two days I was in the hospital. I remember very clearly the day I brought her home: I am sitting in the chair in her room, holding her tiny swaddled form on my lap, and I am on the phone scheduling her first appointment with the pediatrician. I say aloud to the nurse, “I need to make an appointment for my daughter,” and when I hang up I am stunned and overwhelmed by what I just heard come out of my own mouth. I say it again to myself, over and over in my head, like a mantra. Daughter, daughter, daughter. Sure, at the time she was a baby, but even in the two days since her birth she had changed, and in that word I could already see the years stretched out before me, the worry and the frustration and the pure joy and the overwhelming love. She would be my baby for a few months, but she would always be my child, my daughter. It occurred to me in that moment that I had never actually wanted a baby. Ultimately I had been yearning for this more complicated and complex thing, this three-dimensional being with a personality and a mind of her own, and here she is, every single day, a person. I think about my mom and wonder if she misses the infant and toddler versions of my sisters and me, or does she, like me, look at us and think, Daughters, daughters, look at all my daughters!            

Last night as I looked at the picture of my kid and my dog sharing a moment on the blanket, I glanced over at Mia, who loves examining my computer and was trying to catch a glimpse, and said, “Look at how little you were!” And then, frustrated because she couldn’t climb my leg, she let out an angry trill, and when I picked her up she wrapped her arms around my neck and said “MAma,” and her emphasis on that first syllable sounded a little like, “FINALLY!” and I thought, That’s my girl. That’s my daughter. She is every dream I’ve ever dreamed, and all the love I am capable of feeling, and all the joy in my life, and all the sorrow and all the fear, and I can say truthfully that I don’t have time to miss three or six or nine months ago, because every single day she grows in every sense of the word, and my dreams and love and joy and sorrow and fear grow right along with her. I am too busy marveling at who she is in this moment to miss who she used to be. She is like Midas, only the wealth she creates isn’t material, and yet, I am the richest woman in the world.

-I thought losing a grandparent as an adult would be different from losing a grandparent as a child. I was 15 when my mother’s father died. I thought Nanny’s death would be easier somehow. But in the final analysis, adulthood is meaningless where this particular loss is concerned. The death of a grandparent reduces you to childhood regardless of your age. You remember things you have not thought of since age 7*. You feel very keenly the desire to crawl into someone’s lap and cry. The trappings of adulthood fall away very quickly when you pass the casket for the last time, leaning forward to pay your last respects in the form of a hurried kiss. You grasp for that modicum of control you assured yourself you would have throughout this ordeal, but it is nowhere to be found. It is wherever you left your grown-up self, and it has been replaced by an empty feeling so big that feeling small is inevitable.

-In spite of feeling like a lost little kid for the past several days, I did manage to keep my emotions mostly to myself thanks to the one piece of my adult life I couldn’t lose hold of–my daughter. I didn’t want to frighten her, so all of my energy at the wake and funeral was divided between caring for her and keeping myself together. But when I got home last night the get well/Mother’s Day card I had sent Nanny, full of pictures of her holding Mia at Easter, was in my mail box. I had sent it to the rehab center she went to after her fall, but it must have arrived a few days after she left. God only knows where it has been since then, but it was waiting in my mailbox all these weeks later–RETURN TO SENDER, UNABLE TO FORWARD. I cannot bear to open it, and I don’t know what to do with it, and I have given up trying to keep my emotions to myself.

-There was no family brawl. My dad and Uncle Ed, who until last week had not spoken to my Aunt Mary in almost a month, did not ignore or snub their sister. My Uncle Joe, who has not spoken to Nanny, his own mother, in 13 years (because she sold the “family home” and moved out of a neighborhood that was going to seed), and who does not attend family functions, was in attendance. But. When it was time to pay our last respects as a family before we went to the funeral, Joe went out the back door of the funeral home chapel so he could avoid walking past the casket. Ed would not go near the casket but did walk out with the rest of us. There was a definite thread of something–tension? bruised egos? healing but still hurt feelings?–between my dad and his sister. Still, Dad, Aunt Mary, and their youngest brother, my Uncle Palley, stayed in the chapel together, without their siblings, until it was time to go. 

-I’ve never seen my father’s hands so clean. He has been a machinist longer than I’ve been alive. His hands, even when he has just showered, are always calloused and stained from his work. This week they were as clean as Mia’s hands.

-One of the hardest parts of this whole ordeal for me was witnessing others’ grief. My little brother (age 23, 6 feet, 7 inches tall, but still my little brother), who was a pallbearer, a task I cannot fathom. My cousins Kelli and Kristin, with whom I spent countless hours playing at Nanny’s house. My Aunt Mary, who heard the words “I love you” from her mother for the first time in her entire life just a few weeks ago. My dad. When I was little my mom’s sister was in a car accident one winter, and one of my great-uncles saw the wreck and stopped to collect her, cut and bruised and sobbing, from her totalled Granada. When they brought her home I was so overwhelmed by her crying that I hid under the kitchen table. That’s how I felt this week–I wanted a table to hide under.

-I am glad it is over, and it will never be over.

*I was 5 or 6, and Nanny and I were grocery shopping at the Piggly Wiggly, and I wandered ahead of her and around the end of the aisle. When I realized she wasn’t beside me I turned and ran for her and threw my arms around her legs. But when I looked up I realized I had thrown my arms around the wrong legs. I stepped back quickly and spied Nanny right behind the lady I had assumed was her, and even though they were both laughing at me, it was a relief to be reunited with Nanny’s legs.

I was watching the tape that’s been in the video camera since Christmas day, and there’s a scene from my hospital room the day Mia was born that nearly makes me wet myself every time think about it. In the background music is playing–specifically, Joan Baez’s Dark Chords on a Big Guitar. There is a song on this album called “Wings,” which was written by another of my favorite artists, Josh Ritter. My sister Megan likes him as well, and when the song came on I said aloud to Megan, “That’s a Josh Ritter song.” This is the conversation that followed:

My Grandmother: He performed at the Civic Center a while back, and I was going to go but I didn’t, and then we found out the next week that he had died in that plane crash.

Me: Who?

G: John Denver.

Me: I said Josh Ritter.

My sister Charity: John Denver’s dead?

At this juncture my father tells a joke about John Denver’s driving skills that he heard on the John Boy and Billy Show. To my knowledge, Megan never actually heard a word I said. Country roads indeed.

I wonder if this is what Pompeii was like
in the weeks and months after Vesuvius blew,
ash and broken furniture littering the rooms
where children played, friends laughed, where music
and literature, science and mathematics drifted
like smoke through the open doors and windows.
There are no stone encrusted bodies here, clinging
for dear life, no vacant-eyed dogs begging–only
ghostly cats nesting in the wreckage, peering out
from behind an upturned desk, a charred bookcase,
the art studio floor, no longer on the second story–
but there are voices in these eerie halls,
like those I heard in the stone streets that long ago summer,
voices of teachers and books and bells rising
into the air, mingling with the black dust and the sounds
of bulldozers and backhoes come to bury the past.

Note: They finally leveled the building last week. My friend Elaine took these pictures a few days before the bulldozers arrived. Since I was never allowed near the building, I never got to see my room again after the day of the evacuation, so I am strangely glad to have these. There are several more here, with notes and some descriptions.

I couldn’t resist adding some photos of my parents. I couldn’t find the picture of my mom holding me, the two of us wearing matching dresses, her hair past her butt. This shot from our days of touring with the Von Trapp family will have to do. Please note the silk flower in Mom’s hair, her furry pink cape, and the furry puff balls with which it is tied.

As for my dad…well, I told you he looked like a cross between Kenny Loggins and the Unibomber. Most of the pictures of my mom from my childhood looked normal for the day and time, but every single picture of my dad looks like it came from the Manson family scrapbook. Bless his heart. His appearance bore no significance to his personality. Well, not entirely, anyway. Today he still sort of looks like Kenny Loggins, but without the mane and beard.

First of all, thanks, Calliope, for suggesting this topic. I love looking at people’s baby pictures; I love looking at MY baby pictures. I like the idea of revisiting some semblance of innocence, and of trying to imagine how it felt to be two, or four, or one.

That being said, it was hard to choose pictures for this week’s Friday Photo, and not because I was so damn cute. The hard part was deciding which funny looking outfits, injuries, goofy looks, and hippie parental figures I wanted to share with you. It was the 70s, after all, and didn’t we all wear some interesting ensembles? Note the Betsy Ross hat I’m wearing in the photo below, as well as my bruised, scabby knees. At least my face is intact in this picture; I could have posted the end result of this incident (see item 11), but it’s not nearly as cute. And my parents? Yeah, my mom had long hair and wore flowery dresses and tube tops and platform shoes. And my dad? He looked like a cross between Kenny Loggins and the Unibomber. My college roomate, uopn seeing photos of my parents from the late 70s, asked if my middle initial (M) actually stood for Moonbeam. I’ll never tell.

As for the second picture…truthfully, I did pick this one because it’s so damn cute. I mean, sweetness and innocence are just oozing from every pixel of this photo. We were at a petting zoo, and I was a little afraid of that deer, that sad, pitiful, emaciated deer. It just walked up and stuck its head in the crook of my arm. I cropped its skeletal body out of the picture, but if you could see it you might understand my fear. I think it was planning to eat me.

I think I remember the day this picture was taken, when someone (my mom? my grandmother? my aunt Karen?) saw a photo op and took this picture. Or perhaps I’ve just seen other pictures that were taken that same day and constructed a memory based on those images.

It was warm outside. My great-grandmother was with us. She was old to me even then, her coal black and silver hair shining in the summer sun. The whole family was there, in fact, and everyone was happy. My grandfather was talking to my soon-to-be uncle Mike. My aunt Karen was taking lots of pictures, and my mom was drinking soda through a straw. My grandmother was wearing yellow and holding my hand as we looked at the goats and bunnies and lambs. “Look,” she said, “these are just like the ones you and Aunt Stella put flowers on in the cemetery,” and I reached out to touch one but it was warm and wiggly, not hard and cool like the graveyard lambs, and I giggled and clung to her shirt, buried my face in her shoulder, inhaled her Emeraude perfume. I was the only child then, the only grandchild, the only neice, and they all loved me fiercely, and I felt it that day. I stood in the middle of the little barnyard and watched them all taking their pictures, sipping their drinks, talking their adult talk, but they were aware of me and formed a tangible circle around my small form. When the deer nuzzled my elbow I gasped and suddenly I was the center, the true center, and every eye turned in my direction. My own eyes widened in fear and amazement, and my grandfather, my protector, knelt down a few feet away and said gently, “It’s okay, Darlin’, he just wants to be near you just like I do, ’cause you’re so sweet,” and I relaxed and smiled and someone snapped a picture.My grandfather is gone now. My great-grandmother died a few years ago. My aunt Stella is buried in the cemetery where we used to walk, where the white stone lambs mark the graves of children. There was so much I didn’t know then–that children could die, or that any of these people could leave me forever, or that the circle would widen and more children would come and join me in the center, or that someday I would be a grown up, too. What I knew then–what I know now when I look at this picture–was the belief that no harm could ever come to me in that impenetrable circle of love, that when I called out a voice would answer to soothe me, that when I reached out my hand someone would be there to hold it.

Note: This post has been in the works for 20 years, and it shows. You might want to order a sandwich and a beer and put your feet up.

Twenty years ago, on a clear blue day much like this one, I sat in a sunny social studies classroom at Central Junior High and stared raptly at a TV screen that mirrored the sky beyond the 10-foot windows just a few feet from my desk. I was eleven years old, and my fellow 6th graders and I had been preparing for this day for weeks. For the first time in the history of space travel, a teacher was on the shuttle that was to depart Cape Canaveral on that frigid January afternoon. In the days leading up to the Challenger’s liftoff with Christa McAuliffe on board, we had erected a 7-foot tall paper mache shuttle in one corner of the science classroom; we had studied the sky and all its parts: clouds, stars, planets, air; we had planned our days around Ms. McAuliffe’s lessons from space. Looking back, I can imagine that NASA’s educational endeavor was a science teacher’s dream. It certainly seemed to be Joy’s.

I’ve mentioned here that I’ve known my friend Joy for 20 years. Have I mentioned that our first meeting was as student and teacher? She was THE teacher–the first whose opinion about my efforts and abilities truly mattered to me. It was my brief semester-long stay in her class that marked the beginning of my life as a student. It was then that I stopped doing mediocre work and started engaging. You might say Joy inspired me to set my sights higher, to look up. That’s certainly what we were all doing on January 28, 1986–looking up.

I wasn’t in Joy’s classroom as the Challenger sat gleaming in the Florida sun awaiting takeoff. I was in social studies with her good friend Donna, but on that afternoon the subjects had united for the event, and I’m sure, although I don’t remember, that we’d been anticipating Christa McAuliffe’s foray into space with activities and discussions in social studies as well. When the shuttle finally took to the sky we were awed. We cheered and clapped, even though no one really knew what was happening, even when the screen went silent and the plumes of smoke split into multiple directions and plummeted toward the ocean. After what seemed like an eternity of silence–no sound from the sky, the crowd watching with us on television, the announcer who had recently been narrating the event–the door of Donna’s classroom flew open and Joy ran into the room.

When I think about the Challenger two images come to mind: the forked white smoke against the blue sky, which played over and over on the news for days; and Joy standing in the doorway of Donna’s classroom. I think she might have been crying, and I think she said something like, “It’s over! It’s over, turn off the television.” While I’m sure they must have talked to us about the explosion, made efforts to help us deal with the horror, and attempted to bring closure to the chaos that was once our biggest class project, what they said has faded to static, and all the minutes after have dimmed. For me the end of the Challenger lies in that single moment, that open door, my teacher standing there. It is one of my saddest memories.

Tonight as I listen to rebroadcasts of Christa McAuliffe’s flight preparation, interviews with the crew, and the doomed flight itself, I cannot escape the image of Joy standing in the doorway of the social studies classroom. She was 32 years old–just a few months older than I am now–and had been teaching for 10 years, just as I have. I wonder what was going through her mind as she looked at us, if she was thinking about what she would say to us when the smoke cleared, and if she was so overcome by her own grief and disappointment that she didn’t even know if she had room for ours. I find myself thinking about a morning in my own classroom, 15 years after the Challenger went down, when I stood in a similar doorway and looked at the worried faces of my students who had heard rumors that our country was under attack, and I remember the dread that filled me as I braced myself and walked into that room wondering what the hell I could possibly say or do to ease my own fears, much less theirs, as the twin towers fell in New York. For the first time in 20 years as I see these familiar images once again–the ominous fork of white smoke, the smiling face of Christa McAuliffe, the worried figure of my friend in the classroom door–my heart breaks in a new way because I suddenly see these tragic events through new eyes…a teacher’s eyes. It is a profoundly emotional moment for me, because the view from the other side of the classroom door is all promise and potential and possibility, and it is staring back with a look of expectation that says, “All that I hope to be is in your hands. Teach me. Tell me what comes next.”

I complain a lot about my school, but I don’t say enough that I keep going back every day because I love the ridiculously daunting but always entertaining adventure that is teaching. I look at my kids–awkward, wide-eyed, and clueless, trying to be grown-ups but failing miserably, reflections of all that is good and frightening and right and terribly wrong with the world–and I know I picked the right profession. I may not stay in the classroom for the next 20 years, but I will maintain contact with it, because there is no more important task than uniting children with the tools and resources they need to make informed, educated decisions about the world in which they live. We haven’t discussed it, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Joy feels the same way.

When I was a high school senior Joy left the classroom for a job at our state’s zoo. At the time I was bummed that she wouldn’t be teaching anymore. What was I thinking? That was almost 15 years ago, and since then she has traveled to six continents and numerous countries, promoting and observing education; has lead educational trips to Africa and Australia; and has co-founded UNITE (Uganda and North Carolina’s International Teaching for the Environment). I have always been impressed by her job, but UNITE makes me proud of Joy, not only as a friend but also as a fellow educator. Her efforts at bringing together American and Ugandan students and teachers in order to raise awareness of conservation issues and the importance of education are remarkable. Each fall a small team of Ugandan teachers visits NC, and on Tuesday, January 31, Joy and a team of teachers from NC will spend three weeks conducting workshops and visiting schools in Uganda for the fourth year in a row. Joy is proof that being a teacher does not necessarily mean being in a classroom.

Joy and I have a great deal in common as friends. I’d like to think we have some things in common as educators. Back in 1986, as teacher and student, we had the sky in common. When I look at the clouds, or remember the order of the planets, or wonder at the stars, I think of Joy, who helped me navigate and name the parts of the universe when I was just a child, and who now inspires me to be an active and aware part of the universe myself. On Tuesday night when I walk my dog under the night sky I’ll wonder if each plane I see is heading for Uganda, and each morning, in spite of the fears and worries that accompany working in my school, I will try to be the teacher who makes my students want to set their sights higher.

Somewhere in the Universe the Challenger crew applauds us both. Buon viaggio, my friend.

…a poem about my grandfather

Russell Square

The song playing on the country radio station
was “Drivin’ My Life Away” by Eddie Rabbit.
It was raining hard, like in the song,
and we were buying day-old hot dog buns
at the Wonder Bread Bakery Outlet
across from the Woodrow Wilson duck pond. I sat
in the middle of the truck seat, close as I could
get to your denim jacket and Old Spice,
and you stroked my bare arm with your thumb
to the windshield-wiper cadence of the music.

I don’t remember the season, my age,
or if you had already lost the borrowed kidney
that would be your end–just the comfort
of my small frame against your presence,
and the sound of your whistling, and nothing
in particular filling up our days. If I could
I’d go back there to the red truck and rain
and resting my head on your arm–back to ordinary,
everyday, before I grew too tall to sit on your lap–
before your lap became a place in my memory.

I still see you sometimes when I stop
to mind the details of my life: you come
while I am moving soil into the garden,
mailing letters, making grocery lists,
mowing the grass–and once I even saw you
walking away from the tube station
at Russell Square. You met my stare
and smiled, then someone walked between us;
when I found you again you were headed for the bakery,
whistling an old country song in the London rain.

1999

Did you ever have one of those really nutty history teachers in high school–the kind who got just a little too excited about the subject matter, the kind who showed up the first day of the Civil War unit dressed as Abe Lincoln and stood and talked like Abe Lincoln all day long, the kind who, in your senior year, dyed his dark brown hair blonde and started hanging out with a former student and wearing ripped jeans and chains? Ever have one of those?

Neither did I. My history teacher was a 50 year-old single lady who wore her hair in a bun, pinned a butterfly broach to her collar every day, lived with her mom, and looked exactly the same in 1992 as she had in 1958 when she graduated from the high school from which she eventually retired. But the man described above taught next door, and he was all of that and more. He was so exhilarated by United States history that he practically buzzed–twitched–with energy each time a bell sounded to begin class. Friends who had him said they never knew what he might do during a lecture: leap onto his desk and then hurl himself off again to depict those who leapt to their deaths the day the stock market crashed; run from the room and not return for several minutes; cry. Outside the classroom he was equally unpredictable. I knew him because I was a TA during his planning period, so I often ran into him in the office or the library, and he was always friendly, perhaps a little too much so. He never simply said “hello” to me; instead he bowed dramatically, spoke in a wacky accent, or shook my hand. Of course, he was this way with everyone. It wasn’t unusual for someone in my circle of friends to utter, “Mr. W. is insane. Do you think he’s on something?”

Turns out he was. CRACK! That’s right, crack. The history teacher was a crack addict. Hand on my heart, I am not making this up, not one single word. And do you know what the sad thing is? I didn’t even blink when I heard. I probably even said something along the lines of, “Oh. Well yeah, sure he is. It makes perfect sense.” Actually, the truly sad thing is that THE HISTORY TEACHER WAS A CRACK ADDICT, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more out there like him–poor souls who love what they teach but can’t deal with the bureaucracy and red tape that comes with the job, not to mention the “I really couldn’t give two shits” attitude so many students have these days. It’s a wonder we’re not all on crack! I for one will be looking at my colleagues in a whole new light tomorrow.

In a recent post I cited Sharon Stone and Ashley Judd as some of my heroes/reasons for living. I could tell you that I included them because they are drop dead gorgeous, because they are sophisticated and stylish, or because they break bad on screen every time they step in front of a camera, and all of those things are true, but what I love about these two women has little to do with Hollywood or outward appearance. I love them because they care about humanity, plain and simple.

Ashley Judd is the global ambassador for Youth AIDS. In January she went to Africa where she promoted AIDS prevention and visited AIDS-infected children and adults and their families. She held them and hugged them and ate with them and cried with them. You can read her Africa journal here. In an article in SELF magazine she talked of her trip to Africa as a turning point in her life, and of becoming more discerning about how she spends her time and her money. Her resounding message is to do what you can with what you have instead of lamenting that you don’t have what it takes to make a difference.

I have never trusted Naomi Judd’s saccharine demeanor, and Wynonna’s flamboyance does nothing for me, but there is something inherently sweet and sincere about the baby Judd. Maybe it’s the fact that she is an avid Yogi–I don’t think you can truly practice Yoga without intense honesty and self-awareness. Maybe it’s the way she smiles with her whole being. Maybe it’s just that when asked about her own lifestyle by the SELF interviewer she replied, “I buy only what is necessary. I have enough shit already.”

Sharon Stone isn’t quite so down to earth, but these days wherever she goes she raises a large sum of money for charity. Days after last December’s tsunami in Sri Lanka she stood up at a gathering in Switzerland and raised one million dollars for relief efforts. At a recent charity auction she allowed a man to fix a catch that had come loose on her dress–for a fee. She donated the money to the charity. Last week marked the debut of the song she co-wrote for Gulf Coast hurricane relief; “Come Together Now” features numerous musical artists, from Celine Dion to Joss Stone, and every penny made from the single, which can be purchased from iTunes and Rhapsody, goes to Habitat for Humanity and Angel’s Place, a home for terminally ill children in Louisiana. You can listen to the song here, and if you are an AOL subscriber you can watch the video here.

Hearing about Sharon Stone’s charity work is one thing, but seeing it in action is something else entirely. In a live four-minute segment that rivaled every on-screen move she’s ever made, including that famous scene from “Basic Instinct,” she sold the earrings she was wearing to a man in the audience of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” last Friday for AIDS research. Sold them right out of her ears with a signed photo and the promise to giftwrap them herself. For seven thousand dollars. Ellen had merely stated that Sharon was raising money everywhere she went, and her guest replied, “I could do it right now. You want to see?” It was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen on television.

There was a time when I wanted to look like Ashley Judd, to have Sharon Stone’s physique, to have even a fraction of the money one of them makes for acting in a movie. But these days–I like to think of them as my grown-up older and wiser days–I have rearranged my priorities. The truth is, I can be like Ashley Judd and Sharon Stone–on the inside. It’s doubtful that I’ll be taking a trip to Africa anytime soon, and I don’t think the earrings I’m wearing right now would bring a high price from my current audience (9th graders), but there are differences to be made at every turn, and even though I don’t have celebrity to help me with my efforts, I have the same basic tools Sharon and Ashley have: heart, brain, and, yes, instinct.

For those of you who thought the Homecoming field decoration was amusing, rest assured that I did as well. The most amusing part of all was that the “hand” giving the aforementioned finger was actually the wildcat (our mascot) paw that our athletic director had painstakingly painted the day before the big game. I didn’t know this until later in the day, and when I went to the game on Friday night I had to laugh at the efforts to restore the paw to its original state–lots of borders and filler paint.

Many people, including my principal, were infuriated, but personally I think we should expect homecoming pranks. They’re teenagers, after all. When I was in high school the highlight of football season was not homecoming, but the week of the big game against our arch rivals. It was a REALLY. BIG. DEAL. Mascots were hanged in effigy, or left on school property in homemade coffins. Dead flowers were sent. School colors were spray-painted on the rival school’s shrubs. It was awesome. Nothing was destroyed or altered beyond repair, so no one ever got into trouble, and we would spend months after the game trying to think of a prank to outdo the current year’s. That’s what I call school spirit.

Kids don’t have that kind of spirit these days, at least not where I teach. The bird-flipping wildcat paw gives me a kind of hope for the future–that perhaps it wasn’t OUR juniors after all, but the juniors from the school we played on Friday night, and that maybe our kids will jump on the bandwagon next year and return the favor. I’m sure the administration and members of the community would prefer something less vulgar, so I’ll send my ideas, born from school spirit of the past, out into the universe:

The team we typically play for homecoming has as its mascot the Phoenix. The possibilities are endless: Phoenix in a pot of “boiling water”…Phoenix over a fire…Phoenix on a platter. Ah, those were the days.

It’s one in the afternoon on a Monday, and I am sitting at my kitchen table eating Beefaroni and White House apple sauce. Suddenly I’m in third grade again, and I’ve managed to convince my mom that I really needed to stay home from school. I am eating at my grandparents’ table listening to “All My Children” on the TV in the next room, and I can hear my grandfather’s paper rustling from the brown recliner as he reads in front of the picture window. I’m thinking if I’m just quiet enough I can dip my spoon into the brown crockery sugar bowl and have a taste without him hearing me. He does hear me, though, and gives me a Little Debbie oatmeal pie instead. Life is good.

I really am eating Beefaroni and apple sauce, and the kitchen table I’m sitting at did belong to my grandparents. The crockery sugar bowl is resting on my sideboard. I’m sure “All My Children” is on, but I’m watching taped “Ellen” shows from last week instead, and my grandfather and his recliner have been gone for more years than I’d like to remember. I wish I really did have a box of oatmeal pies. Nostalgia is a powerful drug, isn’t it?

I took a “scheduled sick day” today because a) I am exhausted and needed a mental health day and b) I have a paper due tomorrow night and didn’t want to stay up until 2 a.m. finishing it. I have only worried about my students once, and that was much earlier when I was half asleep and had no control over my thoughts. Now I could care less, although what I like to call the Substitute Aftermath will no doubt be waiting for me tomorrow: papers stacked all over my desk, trash on the floor, desks out of order, unfinished assignments. I envy people who can take days off from work without having to make detailed arrangments for someone else to do their work in their absence.

Oh well. At least I will go to bed tonight at a decent hour with my paper written, and I’ll get to enjoy all the benefits of a four-day week. Life is good.

I have shelf-top cabinets and vaulted ceilings in my kitchen. On the highest wall the space between the cabinet top and the ceiling’s surface seems vast and open, so shortly after I moved in I purchased two obscure members of the philodendron family to grace that lofty margin. They grew, not in viney tendrils like the hanging philodendrons you see in offices with their leaves grazing the floor, but in long graceful stalks with huge heartshaped leaves on the ends. The plants flourished under the morning sun pouring in through the skylight, their long arms reaching up to the light. They grew so heartily that I had to stake them to keep them from toppling, and occasionally long stalks would grow at a downward angle, catching the cabinet doors and getting caught among the mugs and glasses.

Last night, with a skillet full of squash and zucchini on one burner and a skillet full of chicken, onions, garlic and peppers on another, I hurried to put away clean dishes from the dishwasher before dinner. In what I can only describe as a freakish blur of events, I opened the glassware cabinet, stashed a mug, moved aside a rogue leaf from the plant above, and closed the cabinet, and then I was covered in black potting soil and one of my philodendrons lay broken at my now blackened feet.

Dirt was everywhere–in the coffee maker, on my recently showered skin and hair, in the sink, on the freshly mopped linoleum. In the skillet of squash and zucchini. I was immobilized by the scene. I put my hands over my face, screamed “ohmygodohmygod” a number of times, and then cried for several minutes. It was not a pretty sight.

Later, when the plant had been carried to the front porch and the dirt had been swept from the counters and then from the floor, when feet and hands were cleaned and the squash and zucchini rinsed and repositioned in the skillet, it occurred to me that I should have taken a picture to accompany what will likely be an oft-told story. Photography was, of course, the last thing on my mind at the time. I don’t handle chaos well. I find it difficult to watch others experience it. I certainly would never think of preserving it. For that reason I have avoided the television news this weekend, all week in fact. But the online news photos of Katrina’s destruction are unavoidable, and they haunt me: bodies floating in flood swells, naked children, hollow eyes and sallow starving faces. Who is taking these pictures, and how are they sleeping at night? Perhaps they aren’t.

Avoiding the constant news updates of what Gayle calls “our new Gulf War” has not caused me to forget the reality of the situation, and I am struck silent, introspective, and am feeling a little hollow myself. I have wandered around my house all day in silence, reading and drinking tea, absentmindedly stroking the cat when he leaps into my lap, staring for long periods of time out the sliding door and through the screened porch. I try to imagine what 12 or 15 or 20 feet of water would look like, try to calculate the height of my neighbor’s house, consider how I would protect myself and my animals should the likes of Noah’s flood rush my quiet street. I cannot conceive of any of it. I walk around and study what is mine, all the treasures of my life, the treasure that is my life, and I am grateful, even though I know, though only from observation, that life can be quite tenuous. The whole world can change in a second. For now my seconds are full of grace and peace and a normalcy I will try to remember not to complain about weeks and months from now when I am bored and restless. For now I thank God I know where to find all the people I love, that I can assure myself with a simple phone call that they are safe. For now I am grateful that I need only a rag and a broom and a dustpan to clean up the chaos in my life.

Today I am reminded that I’m one of the fortunate ones. If you’re reading this, so are you. I wonder, what will we do with our great fortune?

For Dooce, who must have had a reaction similar to my own upon seeing herself with REALLY BIG HAIR, circa 1988, and who actually posted a photo as evidence for all to see (which I will not be doing).

And for my friend Anna, whose bangs are now a quite normal height.

I was in my hometown last week for the first time in several years visiting one of the three people from my middle/high school era with whom I still maintain contact. One of those three individuals co-owns an art studio that is walking distance from the house my family lived in for several years, and if you’ve ever been to the booming metropolis of Southmont, NC you know that an art studio in the same block as Speedy Lohr’s BBQ is a big deal. I stopped in to check it out and was delighted to find the other co-owner, Donna, whom I also know (Southmont is not a big place), in the studio working. Donna was my 6th and 7th grade social studies teacher, and I was friends with her daughter Anna in high school. Much to my surprise she remembered me immediately, and we had a nice time chatting about the studio, her art, my friend the other co-owner, and Anna, who married her high school sweetheart and now has two children.

The whole experience made me nostalgic and drove me to the guest bedroom bookshelf with a glass of wine and a Bangles/Van Halen/Tone Loc medley playing on a loop inside my head. You guessed it–yearbooks. Thinking about Anna reminded me of the many other people I knew in high school, people I haven’t seen in almost 15 years, people I probably wouldn’t recognize now because, truth be told, they’re all shorter and have less hair. And not because they shrank and went bald.

If you attended high school in the late 80s and early 90s, or you were a woman with hair in the late 80s and early 90s, you know that the “big bangs” phenomenon has nothing to do with evolution, and you also know that no woman left the bathroom mirror of a morning without a hefty dose of Aqua Net or White Rain hairspray. Why, it’s a miracle any of us could breathe at all as we emerged from our tiny bathrooms a good six inches taller in a cloud of CFCs and scented shellac. Flipping the pages of my high school yearbooks was like playing “Where’s Waldo,” except instead of looking for Waldo I was searching for the faces hidden in the hair. It was hard to determine individual identities because the pictures had to be taken at a great distance so as not to cut out any of the bangs or wings. And woe be to the girl who also had a perm. With a perm AND big bangs it was nearly impossible to hold your head straight for a photograph, so heavy was your [Cowardly Lion from "The Wizard of Oz] mane. I should know; I myself was a girl with a perm.

I’m exaggerating, of course, but only slightly. I mean, can you imagine what hairspray company stocks must have been worth in 1991?

A few years ago when leg warmers made their mercifully brief reappearance in the hosiery aisle at Target, I shuddered to think what other trends might re-emerge: tapered leg jeans, frosty blue eye shadow, layered slouch socks. But of all the scary fashion fixtures of the past, big bangs scare me the most. I wouldn’t begin to know how to make my hair do that today. I admittedly have a small wing problem when my hair is in desperate need of a trim, but not the kind of wings girls honed to perfection back in my teen years, the kind that could literally lift off and take flight in a light wind. And I’ll take my flat wispy bangs–in 1990, nothing short of fashion suicide–over a few extra inches of height any day. After all, there’s always shoulder pads and platform shoes if you want to look taller. Yeah, baby, now that’s fashion.

It’s been almost two weeks since Charlie died. I’m still taking it pretty hard. For days after I got the news I could hear Charlie’s voice in my head, and I started dreaming about my grandfather again, who has been dead for 16 years and to whom I was very close. Obscure moments from the past school year kept popping unbidden into my head: Charlie coming to my room to get work for one of my students who was in his detention, Charlie emailing the whole staff a hilarious email about animal torture after the marine biology teacher and another coach captured a rogue bat in the gym one afternoon, Charlie wearing the coolest college team sweatshirts (I was always threatening to mug him and steal the Notre Dame one). You might say Charlie has been invading my psyche.

I hadn’t been to my school building since Charlie’s death, but today I had to go pick up some things I need for one of my grad classes, and all the way there I had this feeling of dread in my chest. You see, in some part of my mind, I’m still expecting all of this to be a mistake, still expecting to sit next to Charlie at the first faculty meeting of the year, still expecting to enjoy his dry, mischievous wit on a daily basis. But the rest of my mind knows that’s only going to happen in dreams, like the one my friend Cheryl had recently: the gang from school was having lunch on a teacher workday and in walks Charlie. Just as we had hoped, he hadn’t died after all, but had faked his death to escape some students who were after him. Cheryl threw her knife at him and screamed, “Do you know how many tears we’ve cried for you?” and Charlie just shrugged and grinned (which is exactly what he would do, were any of this remotely possible).

As soon as my feet hit the sidewalk, the one Charlie and I sometimes walked together on our way into the building because we often arrived at around the same time (late), I had to choke back a sob. When I checked my box in the mailroom, Charlie’s empty box, his name already removed, looked like a black hole. Tears flooded my eyes. I escaped to my classroom, which, after nine years, will belong to someone else come August when my department relocates to another wing. I managed to pull myself together and then made my way to the library across the hall. Out of nowhere the sob I’d suppressed and the tears I’d dammed came pouring out. Most of my encounters with Charlie were in the library. We shared a planning period and he often spent his in the media center checking his email or working on grades or, during football season, looking at game stats and plays. We often sat at the same table during meetings, and by the luck of the draw, were often grouped together for staff development activities. At the last inservice he and I would suffer together I got mad at him because he blatantly refused to help with the group writing assignment we’d been given. “I teach P.E., you teach English. I think our jobs here are clear,” he said matter-of-factly, and when I protested he just crossed his arms, leaned back in his chair, and flashed me that shit-eating grin he’s so famous for. It was impossible–always–not to smile back.

At Charlie’s funeral on Independence Day I watched as people poured into the church, mostly young guys and older men–players and coaches–and by the time the service started there were folding chairs at both ends of every row and people standing ten deep in the foyer. Some boys I taught sat in front of me, and a girl who spent hour upon hour in detention with Charlie came in by herself. After the service ended she told me about how she’s no longer dating the deadbeat who got her into so much trouble last year, how she’d wasted a whole school year and planned to do things differently in the fall. “Mr. Griffin would be proud of me,” she’d said, and she was right. Listening to people speak of Charlie during the funeral was enlightening. He did things for kids that few people knew about–made sacrifices of time and money and heart that incited the pastor, who went on and on about Charlie’s spirituality, to compare him to Jesus. Later that day Gayle, who worked with Charlie at another school for several years, and I talked about the Jesus comparison after I asked if Charlie had actually been the spiritual man the minister insisted he was, or if he’d just been exaggerating the way people frequently do about someone who has died. Her response was simply, “Well, he certainly wasn’t Jesus.”

I think I understood what the minister meant, though, and it had nothing to do with Charlie being some kind of holy saint. I think he was just saying Charlie was a good guy, in the same way Jesus the Human was a good guy. He was kind. He did nice things for people. People liked being around him. He gave large amounts of his life to helping others become better at things like living a decent life and football. He loved children and saw the future in them and knew that by devoting his life to them he was making the world a little better. I wonder if he knew just how much. I wonder if he knew he left a hell of a legacy.

But I guess it goes without saying that sitting in that church listening to strangers tell stories about Charlie made me intensely sad. I left feeling more than a little cheated. Things I never knew about him, like his avid love of history, weighed heavily on me. I love history, too, and I kept wondering if he’d read The Killer Angels or visited the obscure Chickamauga Battlefield in Georgia. I wanted to ask him. I wanted to compare notes. I thought about all the kids whose lives would go untouched by his influence. I thought about the empty chair beside me at the next staff development. For days my least favorite Joni Mitchell song of all time–maybe my least favorite song, period–played ad nauseum in my head: Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone….I hadn’t known Charlie long–we worked together a mere two years–but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d lost something irreplaceable, something I hadn’t valued enough when it was within reach.

On my way home from the school, I got a little wakeup call in the form of Sarah Vowell’s book-on-CD, Assassination Vacation. She was talking about monuments, about what they really mean to us, about how they are simply symbols of our connection to their deeper meaning. She said that people put up statues of dead guys and build great monuments in their memory to honor what they did, what they contributed to the world. It got me thinking. The Lincoln Memorial wasn’t erected to showcase what ceased to occur after Lincoln fell, but to remind us of what took place while he walked among the living. For days I’ve been fretting over what we’re all going to miss in Charlie’s absence. I have, as we probably all do when someone dies, forgotten to be grateful for what time I had to enjoy his presence. At a stoplight I glanced out the car window and saw a pee wee football team practicing, and the real truth hit me: those are Charlie’s monuments. Kids and The Team and kindness, not to mention a good prank and hot wings and a toast to friendship at the sports bar–these are the monuments we’ll build in Charlie’s honor. These are the monuments that last.

“Above all rivers they river hath renown,
Whose beryl streames, pleasant and preclare,
Under thy lusty walles runneth down;
Where many a swan doth swim with winges fair,
Where many a barge doth sail, and row with oar,
Where many a ship doth rest with top-royal.
O town of townes, patron and not compare,
London, thou art the flower of Cities all.”
–William Dunbar, c. 1500

I lived in London for four months in 1994 during my sophomore year of college. It was the very best time of my life, hands down, and I have never stopped longing for that city. Eleven years have passed, and still I get sentimental over the smell of diesel fumes or the taste of bread baked well. I have long considered London my spiritual home, the place where my true soul was born. Ask me why, and I can’t give you an intelligent sounding answer. Most likely I’ll just stand there and turn all starry-eyed, staring off in the distance, trying to assign words to the way it felt just to walk from my flat to the tube station on the corner every morning. So why do I love London? As some old torch song goes, “I don’t know why, I just do.”

I glimpsed the headlines about today’s bombing in much the same way you might look right past the person you’re meeting at the theater: I looked directly at it, but it didn’t register. During my time in London IRA bomb threats and store front explosions were not unheard of, and I guess I glossed over the news with the same attitude I had early on the morning of 9/11–it’s probably nothing. I spent all day in my Charlotte class, fretting over an assignment that took enormous amounts of time and concentration. Just before I left I checked my email, and there was a message from my best friend, P., who shared those glorious months abroad with me and who understands firsthand the significance London holds in my life. Assuming I’d heard the news (and had fully grasped its import), she said she was glad it had not worked out for me to spend part of the summer in London after all, a possibility I’d been plotting and pondering for most of the spring. I immediately clicked from my email to the news, and had I been standing I might have collapsed. Oh my God, I may or may not have said out loud. Steve is in London.

I have known Steve since my freshman year of college; he was my College Writing professor August through December. I knew immediately that he was someone I wanted to know for a long time. All these years later we are still friends, more like family, and if friendship operated on a contract basis I would be renewing mine. Steve is still someone I want to know for a long time. His family is like family to me, his wife one of my closest friends, his daughters like surrogate children. Just this past Tuesday I videotaped the girls’ swim meet, and before I left I made sure he knew how jealous I was of his upcoming trip to London where he would be presenting at a conference. He left on Wednesday morning.

I was in London when Steve’s oldest daughter was born eleven Aprils ago. Back then technology was such that we had to schedule a time to use one of two computers sanctioned by the university for checking email. There was no Internet to speak of. We would go in pairs once a week and spend our entire allotted hour reading and rapidly responding to our telnet messages. It was awesome. On April 10 I got an email from Steve announcing the arrival of his first child. She had been born on the 9th, on the very same day my mother, sister, aunt, and grandmother, who were visiting for spring break, accompanied me to Hard Rock Cafe for dinner. While we were there I purchased a tiny HRC t-shirt for the baby who, unbeknownst to me, had been born just hours before I saw that little shirt hanging in the window of the restaurant that faced Piccadilly Circus.

Five years later Steve and his family, now two daughters strong, left the day after Christmas to spend an entire semester in London with students who would have the same life-changing experience I’d once had. I drove to the airport to see them off and stood with my face pressed against the glass until the plane was a speck in the blue winter sky. It was a simpler time, a time when it was okay to accompany your family to the platform and hug them one last time before they vanished into the gangway. I still remember how sad and heavy I felt as they disappeared one by one, the youngest, then three, lagging behind to deliver one last dramatic wave with her tiny pink carry-on in tow. Gayle and I went to visit them that spring, and one of the most vivid memories I have of that trip is the very first day, just after we arrived outside their flat. I pressed the buzzer to announce our arrival, and they didn’t even answer, they just ran down the three flights of stairs to greet us. I’m not sure what felt more like home–being back in London, or being with Steve and his family.

So it’s understandable that my hands were shaking and my knees were practically nonexistent and my heart was in my throat when I read–really read–the news this afternoon. I gathered enough composure to call Gayle and blurt, “You need to call L. right now. Steve is in London.” She said, simply, “Okay,” and disconnected. Somehow I couldn’t bear to make that call myself. If I am ever a tribal woman in another life my name will be Shit of the Chicken. If I’m truly honest with myself, though, I’ll admit that my psyche is fragile this week and I just could not conceptualize more bad news. I am not yet over last Thursday’s bombshell–the death of my friend and co-worker–and really, I’m not over the crises from the Thursday before that. I was in need of a buffer, a conduit to keep me from overloading my circuits and blowing all my fuses.

My phone rang in the elevator. If you’ve ever tried to use a cell phone in an elevator you know what happened as I ding-dinged down the elevator shaft of Charlotte’s Mint Museum of Craft and Design: “I——–Steve——-plane——–tube——–flat——–chaos——–.” WHAT? WAIT! I screamed, just as the elevator landed and the doors slid open to reveal a sizeable crowd of people. “I was on an elevator!” I muttered as I slinked through the crowd. “Say all of that again.”

I haven’t actually turned on the television this evening, but surfing the web has told me all I need to know. Many of the places damaged today were places I frequented when I lived in London, and seeing them broken and torn gives me a feeling similar to the one I experienced when the people who bought my grandparents’ house cut down the blue spruce and willow trees that served as a backdrop for the scenery of my childhood. The new King’s Cross Station was being constructed in 1994; when I returned in 2000 I saw it in all its completed glory. Scenes from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Glenn Close’s The 101 Dalmations were filmed there. I rode the tube to the Russell Square stop on the Piccadilly line at least three days a week; the building where our classes were held was right around the corner from the Russell Hotel, and I liked to sit in the square and read on those rare occasions when I was early for class. I never felt awkward or out of place among those people, always felt at ease in the shoulder to shoulder crowds moving in unison down Edgware Road.

The call went like this: “I talked to L. She has heard from Steve, and he is okay. He said he thinks it all happened before his plane ever touched the ground. He said the tube was closed so he had to walk to his flat, where he plans to stay until the chaos has settled.” As I fought to regain feeling in my limbs and negotiated with my heart for a slower pulse, I resisted the urge to start spitting curses at the likes of Tony Blair and George Bush for inviting this kind of tragedy, for I’m convinced that they do, they invite it right in and then pound their fists in outrage and start shouting words like “retribution” and “justice” and “somebody will pay.” Somebody will pay? Yeah, and it’s us. I am still resisting, or trying to, anyway, because in a world that is truly (sorry, Mom) fucked up, I have my family, and my extended family, and my friends, and for one more miraculous day we are all intact.

(That’s my oldest sister in the picture. She was 8 at the time.)