The Story Doesn’t End
My younger son, sixteen and stretching taller and taller was home sick most of last week, the kind of sick where he’s achy and I feel sorry for him, but not particularly worried. When he got bored between fevers (no phone if you’re home sick) he chatted with me with an ease that isn’t always available to us–this is a period of stretching for him, not just in that obvious literal lengthening, but also in the sense that he is more and more a person all the time, and sometimes that requires a sort of distance from me. This is an obvious part of the story of parents and kids, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how it’s also part of all long relationships. You get to know someone at a moment in their lives, perhaps to have some influence on them by sharing what you know, by offering assistance and perspective, and then you get to know the next version of them, to witness their evolution. The most difficult relationships in my life have been ones in which one of us did not accept the other’s evolution. It’s the great trick of loving–to let the love carry forward, but not the assumptions.
CBAW had our Memorial Day observation reading yesterday. Ten veterans/service members, many of whom I met during very very difficult times in their lives, came together to perform and hold space for the particular grief that is especially tied to the camaraderie of military service. At a time, I saw many of these people several times a week for a years while they navigated difficult medical and professional challenges. It has been years since I’ve been in the same room as many of them. Each of them read work I hadn’t ever heard before. Each of them had a perspective that was different from the one they had the last time I was in a room with them. Though each of them will tell you that my work and presence was deeply important to them in those dark days, in the time since, their growth has been their own. The fierceness with which I am rooting for each of these people has not shifted an iota, but the people themselves have shifted and grown so much. I have grown and shifted a great deal since those days. I am so lucky to be able to witness it in these moments, to be able to co-create with them again and again, and to be able to be accepted as the next version of myself by them. A lot has happened. More will happen.
During the month of May CBAW’s visual art programs were dedicated to a collaborative art project of remembrance for Memorial Day. Designed by Joe Merritt and Ashy Palliparambil and assembled and marketed by CBAW’s own Rob Haney, nineteen artists contributed tiles. You can buy a print here. CBAW gets a portion of the proceeds.
And now for the writing.
Our free write was from this old standby, we used the questions I list there as a jumping point–take one or two of these questions and respond with more questions until your writing takes shape or 8 minutes pass.
The Story at the End of the Story by James Galvin, the opening phrase to borrow: “By now a lot has happened: …” (the colon is important, I think).
By now, a lot has happened: it has been 23(?) years since the first time we were horrified by a school shooting, 21 years since the towers fell, 19 years since Shock and Awe. We are still asking how could this happen? still telling ourselves we didn’t see it coming, and really: we didn’t. How could we live if we could not forget? how would I go on, lamenting that I forgot to put the cover on the grill before the rain came, haven’t replied to this email or finished my taxes, as if any of it matters? As if I could possibly avoid rust by being fastidious, avoid my eventual silence by being prompt, avoid the crumbling of the all the roads out if my few dollars were carefully filed in the government books?
