The Thin String

Recently I’ve read a slew of books that have characters with a sense of place; they come from a culture rooted in some geographic area, a language spoken to their people and understood.

I don’t have that; I’m an American.

Which is to say I am a cultural mutt.

On one side I have relatives arriving in America in 1637. I have a straight line from there to membership in the DAR (should I want it), to a diary from my Civil War veteran ancestor, to census documents from 1890 on up to 2010. It is an easy shot. I am named after one of these ancestors. I know nothing about her.

Yet it is a shot with no identity. In America, we love to say what we are. We are Italian. We are Jewish. We are Cherokee and Mexican and Polish. I believe I am a mix of British, Dutch, Alsatian, Scotch, Irish, Swedish and Iroquois but nothing about me confirms that. My family has no traditions, no meals we share or prayers we say that have passed down from generation to generation like a loving quilt of identity and home. We don’t have those words that tie us to each other. Every holiday is a rudderless experience; they are new each year and thus wide open. Nothing has any sense of sacred.

We have one phrase from my Swedish grandmother. She is the only one of my relatives of any “pure” culture heritage, and thus the only one who has any. What I know in Swedish is a toast she taught my mother, a silly little bar song to celebrate all the pretty girls in the room. That’s it. 9 words. And the grandchildren, me included, are so attached to this, because it is something. It is a clue; it is our family’s secret language that ties us to what we wouldn’t otherwise know.

Maybe that is it: culture ties us to history, ties us to family and ties us to the sacred. That commonality tells us who we are by telling us where we came from; it serves as the string, collecting the beads of each life and each generation.

To Light, I Gain Power

I’ve been mulling over the Power of Story.

I like to think of myself as a storyteller, and in those rare moments of irrational confidence, I think I’m a pretty good one at that. I love to tell.

There are stories in my life that started as deep wounds. Moments of rejection or loss, embarrassment, pain or fear that, when they happened in real time, weren’t ready to be told because they were too close. They could become secrets or stories.
I find that by telling my stories, by bringing them to light, I gain power over them. They no longer hurt me, no longer reject or embarrass me, no longer act like kudzu around my life. By speaking stories, I beat them. I can choose to make them comical, make them sane or meaningful rather than the very gritty and uncut aspects of totality that experiences are. I cease to relive my stories and I start to witness them.

And so I tell these stories. Because they are mine, because they are part of me, because they are not me.

(I wrote about stories five years ago; here is a bit on memory and story, another bit on storytelling as oral history. I like to talk about stories.)

In Practice

As most of you know, I spent my freshman year of college at Syracuse University before transferring across the street. It was December 21, 1988 when 35 students from that university were flying home from studying abroad on Pan Am flight 103 and were horrifically killed along with 235 other people in what came to became known as the Lockerbie bombing (it was seriously horrific—read the account of how they all died and it'll churn your stomach. No one died from the bombing; they died from falling for two minutes while tornado-like winds ripped off their clothes. Apparently most of them regained consciousness as they fell closer to earth so they knew what was coming as they were strapped to their seats. The 11 killed on the ground (including two families) were literally incinerated; nothing was left of them. The two wings of the plane both landed in a crater where houses had been. They too were burned to nothing. The only way they discovered where both wings landed was by counting the only thing that remained from the houses, families and the wings: screws.)
Every year on the anniversary of the bombing there is a moment of silence on campus and the bell tower tolls once for each student lost. Their photos are featured in the student union with their biographies; 35 students are named prestigious Remembrance Scholars in honor of those lost. Syracuse has a student-exchange program with a school in Lockerbie, Scotland to keep that bond fresh. It is my opinion that SU has done a fine job keeping the memory of those students fresh, even twenty years after the tragedy. Students today live with that tragedy in their minds.

And so I bring this experience to the recent release of al-Megrahi, the only man convicted in the deaths of those 270 people. After serving seven years of a life sentence he has been released on “compassionate” grounds and I am struggling mightily with all of it. Mathematically, he served just 9 days for each life he took. That seems unacceptable to me. But I believe in compassion, I think. I want to forgive, to not feel a sense of outrage that this man is being allowed to go home to die. I want to believe that I believe in compassion, even in the face of utter evil. That the only way to end the cycle of violence is unabashed grace.

But in practice, I'm less forthcoming with forgiveness. I'm American; we sure do love vengeance and grudges even while we extol bible verses when they conform to our existing beliefs. We want to see someone held accountable for every injustice and we want to show no mercy (unless its to us). I want him to pay for his crime, but who am I to say he hasn't already? How are we to sentence one to death based solely on the worst moment in their life? What about all the other moments? How do I know what is in his heart, how do I know the crime hasn't haunted him for 21 years (that would be 28 days per life he took), that it will haunt him until his last breath? I don't. As a Christian I am called to forgive carte blanche, not when it is necessarily easy or justified. And by choosing to only forgive when it is easy, when it is offered, when it is convenient then really, what is my compassion worth?

I don't have a conclusion. This isn't easy on anybody.

Edit it

One of my good friends is a teacher at my old high school, something I consistently forget. I was talking to her the other day and she said an old teacher had asked about me and that teacher wanted my email address; she was planning to come to Asheville for a conference. This teacher had taught my honors English 9 class but was more familiar to me as the yearbook adviser, the person I probably saw the most the last three years of high school, saw more than my family. Junior year I was an assistant editor; senior year was head editor. Yearbook at my high school wasn't an extra-curricular activity: it was life. The high school had one of the top yearbook programs in the nation; it consistently won every major award on state and national levels. This all sounds crazy unless you have ever seen the difference between a nationally recognized book and a regular one. Then it makes perfect sense. But that sort of work requires the amount of time usually only reserved for athletes pursuing college scholarships, and so I was in the yearbook office a half-hour before school started, during two of the seven periods of the day, and 4-6 hours after school. And some weekends. (I wasn't the only one. My senior year we had a staff of 120. Out of a school of a little under 1100. It was actually one of the popular things to do) I loved and hated it, the same feelings that I still reserve for the adviser of the book. I should rephrase that. We always had a complicated relationship. It was the hardest period of my life due to everything outside of yearbook and thinking of that time brings up rough memories. I love her dearly. I had only thought of her in passing these past ten years until my friend mentioned her coming to Asheville, and now it's all I'm thinking about. What am I supposed to say about these ten years? What is there to tell? Much too much, and yet nothing. I don't know how to successfully zoom out; what big markers to hit. I don't know how to edit this.

I don't know if we will actually connect. But if we do, I hope words come too.

Sunshine Patriot

It was Thomas Paine who famously wrote,
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."

After the lofty and somewhat unrealistic ideals of this election and subsequent inauguration it is time to come back down to the scorched earth that is This Country and figure out who she is under all of this. It feels like a reintroduction of sorts.

I recently made a remark about how, in the throws of this major social change, I was once again proud of my country. This is virtually the same statement that got Michelle Obama into so much trouble in the primaries and a statement I made knowing full well I’d be questioned by a few people for it (and rightly so).

I admit it: I am a sunshine Patriot.

Because I believe wholeheartedly that there is a vast chasm between love and pride, a chasm that is often bridged but a canyon that exists nonetheless, and when I don't recognize my country I am not proud of her and that canyon seems endless.

I love my country. By which I mean our relationship is not entirely neat, by which I mean I am indebted to her and our mutual forefathers for this life that I live, by which I mean there is much I would do in her name should she ask me. I love the way our government is set up; how through soaring economic prosperity and terrifying depressions it has survived, through Presidents that span from capable to corrupt to inept it has stayed intact, even through a Civil War that killed 3% of the population it didn’t falter past that core. I love the sweeping landscapes of this country: from red sand mesas in the Southwest to the rugged shore of Maine to the freedom to sit on the levies of the Mississippi and drink hurricanes from that drive-thru daiquiri stand in New Orleans to the smell of the sea and palmettos that is Charleston, SC. I love our great experiment.
Yet as much as my heart is filled with love for this Nation, most of the past twelve years I have not been proud of her and those who represented her. I have not been proud to be an American. I have looked at my passport and wondered aloud just what was my relationship with the country on its cover. I missed her. That Nation stamped in gold did not represent me; she was a stranger. She made cheap symbols of herself be all that there was to hold to, flag pins and all. That Nation in her jingoistic bravado, clandestine power plays and almost cult-like disdain for dissent was not how I knew her. She was too proud of herself, bold in her intent and selfish in her methods. She was acting like a petulant teenager.

So no, I was not proud of her.

And so when a chance came along to see someone in office who could represent me I jumped at it. I needed to see nine kinds of nerd back in the seat of power, needed to believe that the person who was the face of my nation could be the smartest one in the room, needed to know that the whole world was relieved by the outcome, because though they aren’t our country they are our family. Listening to NPR on Tuesday morning I got proud again. Seeing images of the largest gathering in DC history who turned out to simply be in the space where history was made: I was proud. Just the knowledge that my country can change made me proud. My father graduated from a segregated public high school in the shadow of the CIA headquarters and this year he cried in joy as he voted in the first African-American President. I’m proud of my country that we are resilient; that even in these times we prosper. I'm proud to see that she is slowly coming home.

Yes there is a large chasm between pride and love and this week I’m happy to note that when it comes to my country, the bridge is open again.

We Loved Our Generals

I don't think I can really top the hilarity of the last post of proposed ice cream flavors for The Dumbass in Chief so I won't even try, instead I'll tell a little tale about wars that never seem to die.
I was born and raised in Virgina, a fact I bring up so often my friends from Texas even tell me I'm a little nutty with state pride and that's saying something. For the entire 13 years of my public education in the Old Dominion we had a holiday that fell the third Monday of January called "Lee-Jackson-King Day". It was on all my school calendars and official school documentation and I never thought it was odd and had no idea it was called anything else in other places. I thought the whole nation celebrated Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr on the same day, like they celebrated both Lincoln and Washington on the same day in February.
It wasn't until my freshman year of college in New York that I very publicly found out the truth about other states. Since we didn't have classes that day several of my friends and I stayed together at a big house off campus and then got up early to go cross-country skiing. They were standing in the kitchen, all 12 of them, when I slid into the room in my socks and yelled "HAPPY LEE-JACKSON-KING DAY EVERYBODY!!!" to a suddenly silent room of Yankees.
"What?"they asked.
I repeated my salutation, though noticeably it was less emphatic than the first.
"What is that?" they asked.
I told them about the great holiday for Generals Lee and Jackson and Dr. King.
Their faces were all frozen in a stunned grimace.
"You mean to tell us that you celebrate two slave owning, Confederate Generals and an assassinated Civil Rights leader on the same day?"
"I never thought about it that way...but...yeah. We do. What, is that weird?"

(note: Virginia has been celebrating Lee-Jackson Day since 1904, as they are both rather revered Sons of the Commonwealth. When Reagan made MLK a national holiday in 1983, Virginia decided to tack on the existing holiday to the national one and managed to ignore the irony of it all until 2000, when they finally split the holidays again. Today is Lee-Jackson Day in Virginia; the Friday before MLK Day.)