verb
Origin:
late Middle English: from Old French reflecter or Latin reflectere, from re- 'back' + flectere 'to bend'http://oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/reflect?q=reflect
On Wednesday, driving from Scranton to Dallas to meet with a thesis student who is working on a children's book and then to teach class, I sang along to the radio when I could HEAR the radio. Wednesday afternoon started dramatic thunderstorms in Northeast PA and they continued into the evening. The cross country team was still running when I parked my car at Misericordia, but I still received a text from students asking if we were having class on account of the weather. The day felt odd all the way around.
I spent the morning with headphones plugged into my computer, listening to the anniversary coverage of 9/11. I paused my work and closed my eyes for each moment of silence. I wrote down the following two phrases from the speeches, the first from a speaker at the Pentagon, "We remember them as individuals with their own stories" and the second from the Twin Towers site, read by a loved one memorializing their loved one, "We tell the stories of your life everyday." I listened to hours of names read and my eyes teared heavily more than a few times. The names themselves didn't bring the tears, the last line, the personal connection was responsible for that. In a list the names, for most of us, are concepts of people. At the end of each section, though, a parent, a spouse, a child, a godparent, a friend would read the name of their loved one and a few words meant for or about them and the concept people would come alive. When they did, I cried.
Wednesday at work a summer picnic was held in the middle of the day, one meant as an opportunity for fun and time to reflect on the employee and company accomplishments over past year. I was asked to participate ahead of time, assisting in coming up with and coordinating games from our particular area of the Scranton facility. I did this. I did not, however, feel comfortable participating in the picnic. In some ways, I feel a bit bad about this. I think about things I might either hear or that I'd think. Isn't it time to let 9/11 rest? Don't you think that carrying on with our lives on this day shows more respect for the victims than stopping what we'd do normally? Why should this still make you upset-- you didn't lose anyone? You didn't know anyone that was there? ...and the list continues. Still, I didn't attend the picnic. Save for the flag in front of the building, moved only half-way up the poll, no mention was made of the anniversary.
It isn't that I disagree-- maybe carrying on with our lives on this day DOES show respect for the victims and their families. I count plenty of people doing that and thank them for that. It isn't right for me. Maybe I should let the day rest-- but maybe I already have. Maybe what's left isn't the day itself, but some concept of that day and days in all our lives like it.
My 9/11 story is unremarkable. I heard about the first plane while cashing a check from my parents at a bank in Dunmore after which I was supposed to go to class. I went home instead and turned on the TV. Kim was with me for a period of time before heading out to go to a job interview. I stayed at the TV for hours and then days and what may, very well, have been weeks. It wasn't healthy. After not going to class that day, I never went back. 9/11 ended my days at Marywood.
I collected newspapers and magazines and still have them stored in a plastic box. I hunted down all the songs altered in one way or another marking the tragedy and the nation's resolve as we started to move forward. Awhile after, when the NY Times published their Collected Portraits of Grief, I added it to my bookshelf along with the American Writer's Respond book published by Etruscan (a press, at the time, I had no idea was housed at a school where I'd eventually end up as a a graduate student wishing to be a writer).
On Wednesday night, driving to class, I sang along to the radio. Heading down I thought little of the songs themselves though one line, from one song, stood out. I met with the thesis student and we started class at 6. I pulled up a few of the 9/11 obituaries from the NY Times Portraits of Grief project to start us off on the writing prompt for the evening.
The Portraits of Grief are beautiful. When you look at the typical obituary, to some degree, you're reading a resume or posthumous application. When faced with needing to publish thousands of obituaries typical doesn't work. And so we can read portraits, snapshots of who these people were and still are to their family and friends, and because we can crawl into those snapshots, we can know these people as more than names off a list.
So we sat in class and with the two phrases, "We remember them as individuals with their own stories" and "We tell the stories of your life everyday" and the couple of NY Times Portraits of Grief we started a prompt: If you were being memorialized, what would a loved one say about you?-- write in their voice OR How do you want to be remembered? We wrote for ten to fifteen minutes. A few of them agreed to read. Most of them created lists sounding like this: "Good friend, loving daughter, honest, caring..." Lists like names unattached to stories. As they begin to craft their personal narratives with the first, smaller draft due this upcoming Wednesday, a list won't work. And so, as a class, we brainstormed how to take these lists of characteristics and roles from the generic to specific, from a list into stories and anecdotes. We talked about meaningful detail. We talked about digging in and digging down until you start to see connections and patterns in ways you never have before and how that applies in their personal narrative essays, in their academic papers, and ultimately in their lives.
We are not generic. We are crafted and shaped and influenced and, like silly putty, rolled up, bounced across a floor, and rolled out to copy what we are pressed onto until we are rolled again, folding what we've copied into ourselves and the ink from those newspaper pages start to color us.
There were an amazing amount of 'I can'ts' as we worked on our idea maps. With chalk in hand, I started my own on the board, continuing as they worked on theirs. "I just don't think like that, Ms. Grove." But they do. I know they do. They're learning how to translate what their heads do out into the world-- into expression. Some of them may not end up doing this onto paper, but their words, spoken aloud, will change. And maybe spoken means something different too, as it often does for me. We're working on it.
A lot of the time the process is dependent on the question from which you've started. If, I asked one student, "What do you worry about rather than what do you believe in, I suspect you'd have less trouble answering. I suspect as you lay down at night, or when you shower, or when you're riding in your car, or when you've slightly disconnected from the hear and now and have moved somewhere else, you do this anyway." We'll see what happens as the drafts start to come in. We'll move forward from wherever they are at.
The storms were nearly over by the time I travelled home. I had the radio on again, and sang along. A line stood out from one and it was, I realized, the same line that had stood out from the same song I'd heard driving down to class. "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table."
As individuals, with stories, we all have an hourglass. We're all given different volumes of sand. All our sand is composed of different broken down 'stuff''. We may have the power to push and pull and stretch or condense the confines of the hourglass itself, and that will impact how the sand flows from one side to the next, And in many ways, that hourglass is glued to the table. There are events, though, like 9/11 and other national or personal tragedies and challenges, capable of flipping those tables right over. 9/11/2001 reminded me what it felt like for tables to flip. I remembered being that hourglass stuck to the underside of the table with the weight of life and the world crushing me underneath. It reminded me of loss and sadness and fear.
If you, on the flip side of the table flip, manage to knock or have your hourglass knocked off that table, pick it up and hold it tightly in the palm of your hand. Lay it sideways and look at how the sand lays when it's balanced between the two sides. Tilt it one way and then the other. Examine what makes the sand move faster or slower.
My mom-mom had an egg timer next to her virtually unused stove in the kitchen. The sand was pink. It was one of the random items in her house I played with...one of the items I found most fascinating. It was not glued down to anything. That is why I played. Because I was free to play. Because the weekend getaways to her house, my books by book-light, my backyard adventures to the creek, were on the land of the free.
Freedom is born when the glue, called loss or sadness or fear or whatever it is holding us captive, releases.
