Carrying Memories

Story Corps is attempting to record a story for each of the nearly three-thousand victims on September 11, 2001. A wife or child, for example, describes that day, her emotions, and how she carries forward. Or he might describe their last conversation. The first one I heard on NPR was three or four years back; I was driving to school to teach a Composition class and showed up with red eyes. A little boy had described his grandfather who'd perished in the twin towers.

This morning I cried as a woman described being on the phone with her husband, 9:30 that morning, as he attempted to find an escape route. When the smoke became thicker, and his fate became clear, the two stopped talking about escape routes. She said she wanted to crawl through the phone line and lie with him, and he told her that she needed to keep on living for the two of them.

I didn't cry on September 11. It was too big, too abstract. I was 21 and so worried about our retaliation--who were we going to bomb, what innocents were going to die--that I'm not sure I processed the individual tragedies here at home.

But each of those victims--in the twin towers, the pentagon, Flight 93, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere--has a story. Nearly ten years later, I think I'm better able to grasp these losses. And I take comfort in thinking that someone who loved them carries their memory; shares it. So far, Story Corps has over one-thousand stories of September 11 victims. What an important treasure.

"Is Life Destiny or Determination?"

The main character in Achy Obejas' lovely short story, "We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?" asks that question. The ten-year-old and her parents have literally just gotten off the boat from Cuba, 1963, when the action starts. Throughout the story, the plot jumps from the day they arrive--the processing center in Miami with the well-meaning Catholic volunteer and the convenience store where they're amazed by all the products, where we learn about her father's expectations of America and dreams for his daughter--to moments in the future--the narrator's experience with lovers, male and female, and her father's disappointment and disavowal of her; her father's death of a heart attach in 1990 and her own experience with cancer shortly thereafter; the narrator's constant questioning of whether she and her family would have been better off staying in Cuba.

We'll be talking about this one today: how does the unchronological plot structure affect your understanding of the story and its characters? do you think the narrator is reliable, given that half of the time she's speaking from the point of view of a ten year old? what is the central conflict?

I ask these questions, and we search for valid answers, but I do think the best and most interesting fiction raises questions rather than answers them. Ah, well, as long as I keep pushing for that search for answers - even if it simply yields more questions, that's ok too.

"Where You Have a Choice, Side with Kindness and Optimism..."

~ Me

In Amy Bloom’s “By-and-by,” the narrator deals with the death of her friend and roommate, Anne. The five-and-a-half page story begins after Anne, a young woman living in New York City, has already been kidnapped and killed; the reader doesn’t know this yet. We see the narrator and the roommate’s mother having “interstate, telephonic rum-and-Coke” parties as they wait for news about Anne. But we quickly learn details of the murder, the trial, and the murderer. The narrator, whose name we never learn, doesn’t reveal much about herself. “Every death is violent,” she begins. She later describes what happens to the body as it dies:

The brain cells die fast, and blood pools in the sot, pressed places: the scapula, the lower back, the calves. If the body is not covered up, it produces a particular smell called cadaverine, and flies pick up the scent from a mile away. First, just one fly, then the rest. They lay fly eggs and ants come, drawn to the eggs, and sometimes wasps, and always maggots. Beetles and moths, the household kind that eat your sweaters, finish the body; they undress the flesh from the bone. They are the cleanup crew.

She even quotes something the killer said at trial - “Everyone dies of heart failure” - and she seems to agree with that statement as she describes various people in her life dying: no matter what the cause, it equally hurts. (I’d already quoted Bloom’s final paragraph – “I don’t miss the dead less, I miss them more” – for its precision and detail in an earlier entry).

Throughout the story, the narrator is quite morbid; detached. On first read, my students actually thought she might be Anne’s killer – “She seems disturbed,” they said. That’s a valid response, but closer inspection reveals how consumed the narrator is with grief.

Stories and poetry reveal truths in ways that non-fiction cannot.

Anyway, so where is all this coming from? I’ve had a light schedule at work this week – Monday I didn’t go in to the library because of my eye (now fully open, if a little swollen), and yesterday I finished class early because of the exam – and so I’ve had that time and space to get reflective while experiencing righteous indignation. Yesterday, Haiti was hit by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake, affecting one-third of its total population. Estimates for those made homeless, injured, or killed are likely to be in the thousands.

And then we have Pat Robertson, supposed Christian, believer in Christ, God, and heaven, saying that the quake is a “blessing in disguise” and that the country was “cursed” for a pact it made with the devil centuries ago. Seriously!

Fourteen U.N. staffers, on the agency’s Haiti mission, have been killed in the quake. I’m not going to waste time arguing with Robertson’s outrageous statement. But along with the failure of our media to treat issues seriously, the muck and gamesmanship of politics in general, and my own inability to understand how people can be anything other than kind and grateful to one another, I find myself indignant. We’re surrounded by so much death and sadness that’s not of our own making, whether by accident of man or nature. How dare we diminish others?

We have no control over so much. We have no say over when an earthquake will strike or when the cells of our body will turn against us. But we can control what we say; we control how we treat others, how we conduct ourselves.