My windowsill holds clay saucers full of boy-toys pulled from the bottoms of pockets: marbles, shells, crystal rocks, sand dollars, wishbones, red rolls of caps. The sill also sports a fishing-net weight my grandfather made. It the size and shape of a small green pear. Half-moons and full circles and eyebrow shaped pieces of rusted metal are pressed into what looks like hardened gray clay. I used it once to press down the dried cornhusks I was soaking for tamales. My father wandered by the sink and said “That’s made of lead, you know.” I threw out the cornhusks and started over.
This fishing weight, when tossed into open hands, causes them to drop down as if fielding a small cannon ball. It packs a solid three pounds – far heavier than it looks.
This is this heft and drag I think of when I imagine my two friends, Virginia Tech teachers both, waking this week, and the next, and the next.
I imagine them coming slightly and slowly up out of sleep, that moment of first dull sound before any sight at all, the moment of far away house-bumps and wheeze winding toward them, or birds high pitched, or a coffee maker auto-timed and on, their son, shuffling earlier than the rest of the house awake.
I imagine them “normal” for that brief second. I imagine them “before.” I imagine them unawake to the memory that everything has changed.
And then, as they turn over toward the day, something formidable hovers. What I imagine when I picture them blink-upright and suddenly fully awake is the fishing weight dropped and landing as if it’s lived there always, in the gut, lead solid and heavy beyond reasonable scale.
They dress; they each pack for the day their own grief’s and astonishments, like folding handkerchiefs, one by one, setting them in piles, then setting the piles beside each other, until the dresser tops are full of white towers of squares. Then, they lift the white loads up, along with the books, the computers, the lunch bags, and the weight, and they head off toward their students who will be sitting at desks - cowering, or hesitant, or numb, or grateful – each with piles of their own.
How do you teach forward from carnage and loss?
My friends are called to enter the room as authorities, as adults, as teachers, as wise, as sage even, as grand-fixers, sorters, smoothers, explainers. They, of course, are only some of these things. They are wise. They are teachers. They’ll enter the rooms and help students script the return to the rest of their lives, the “after” to what is now “before”.
As I write this a storm is blowing in, the trees look itchy and pushed by the rising wind.
As I write this, a mother is eyeing the cigarettes butts she found behind the rhubarb in the garden. Her daughter thinks it was hiding place.
As I write this, a child has finished getting one of the two injections he needs daily, and will need for the rest of his life. He’s five. His parents just found out his blood is lacking something vital.
As I write this, a young man in Iraq emailed me. He’s a reconnaissance marine. He’s in danger all the time. He looks just like his Dad.
As I write this, the country – when we are not planting early snap peas or watching the tides roll in – is teeming with unrest, with unruly rants, with disquiet and rollick and worry.
We rumble, some of us, half awake all night. There are all kinds of weights we must carry.
And, as I write this, my two friends are doing their jobs in two classrooms at Virginia Tech. They are teaching writing, poetry, composition, books, literature. They are teaching grieving, absorption, movement, transition.
