September 11th and a Pizza

Americans of a certain age can reflect on the events of September 11th, 2001 and tell you precisely what they were doing during those morning hours. It is a defining moment for those of my generation. We have no Pearl Harbor. No grassy knoll. No man on the moon. We have 9/11. I can faintly recall the day President Regan was shot. Aside from hearing my mom cry, there's nothing particularly searing about that moment. I was young. And Regan lived. September 11th is different.

People were transfixed by indelible images of people staggering across the Brooklyn Bridge to flee the ruins of mangled steel left behind on the island of Manhattan.

By late afternoon the world bore witness to tender moments of family members posting flyers for loved ones who they would never see again. I too had felt an indescribable closeness to these people who struggled some three thousand miles away. While filled with empathy I could not help but think about myself.

Constructing memories

We'll sit together, the daughters and I, playing card games. We mostly play Uno. I've taught them how to talk trash. Respectfully of course. And while laughing and gently prodding each other, I will use references from The League: "It's your turn! Hurry up and go, Chalupa Batman!"

Earlier in the week I learned that a former student had been killed. It had been so long since I heard his name or thought about him that I couldn't be sure if he even passed through my classroom.

The gift of your presence

I think it was roughly a week after the shootings at Sandy Hook that the NRA's head, Wayne LaPierre, finally stepped forward and made a statement regarding the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut. LaPierre called for an armed guard at every school.

I spent that week watching CNN's vignettes of the young children killed. I mostly cried. Then I wrote this  . . .

Kindergarten essay

After the shooting took place in Newtown, Connecticut I felt compelled to say something and I used Twitter as the vehicle to do so. I wrote it in a stream of consciousness guided only by the thoughts of my daughter who is in Kindergarten - the grade level initially reported for nearly all of the children killed at Sandy Hook.

Stream of consciousness coupled with Twitter's character limits provides obvious challenges to what you are trying to convey as a writer. Twitter can be weird with archiving old content so I thought I would preserve it by importing it to this site. I also wanted to revisit some of the idea in what was described as an essay by some.

The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for...

"The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it."
~Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

I went traveling in 1999, wanting to see as many places as possible. Scheduled to be gone for three months I took great care in packing my backpack with all of the necessities needed for such a journey. This is a complete lie. I took no care at all when it came to packing. I jammed my rucksack full of things I thought I would need 20 minutes before I left for the airport and it made the bag insufferably heavy. When I arrived in New Zealand I grabbed an airport locker and loaded it with anything I could. I scaled my life down to the bare minimum. "What do I really need," I asked.

I dumped anything with weight. The bag would have been lighter had I left my books in the locker but I couldn't bare to do it. The books went with me.