"I'M HERE"

I had so many plans for my next post. So many amazing, exciting, and thought-provoking things have happened this week. Instead of it leaving me with facination and an awe of the world and the people in it, the very end of this week has left my good friends, my little brother, and I wishing we could find a cosmic Ctrl-Z button.

I got up early this morning to meet my sister and a good friend at Starbucks before we all had to head our separate ways for work. I was a little worse for wear—my honorable plans for going to bed early being devoured in a good book—but feeling confident I’d been fine after a nice, hot mochachino. I stopped into my mom’s room to say good morning and goodbye when my mother told me something that will leave all of us reeling and trying to cope with the traumatic aftermath for months, some of us years to come.

Growing up very isolated on a farm, my younger brothers and I turned online for our social life and close relationships. We got started on an online highschool, and were active in their forum and the knock off created by one of the students, and there my youngest brother and I have been for the last five years, discussing deep thoughts, chatting, hanging out, sharing our good and hard moments, writing stories—pretty much sharing life—with a bunch of kids from all over the country and about a dozen internationally. In a way I don’t expect any of my face-to-face friends or coworkers to really understand, that group of kids, though only a few of us have met in person, came to be very close. Because there were none of the trappings of social stereotyping, age didn’t matter much. I am several years older than the average age, and I forget on a regular basis.

My brother found out first what my mom told me later: one of the girls died yesterday afternoon—she was killed. I stood there in shock for a minute before asking who. When struck with a horror like that, before you know which of your friends, there is a moment when you run through all of the possibilities and the bile in your stomache starts to churn. In any group of friends, especially highschool kids it seems, there are the ones that seem most susceptible to violence, those who live in sketchy neighborhoods (or in the case of the international kids, countries) or diffecult situations. Then there are those that never cross your mind as vulnerable—the untouchables. And as is always the case, the answer to the question, when you finally ask who was lost, seems to come at you from left field.

The family wanted to keep the matter private, but as the day wore on the media got ahold of it as they so often do, and we watched the progression of events as the story began showing up online, first without her name, then her name and photograph, even with quotes from our school newspaper. For some these articles brought home the truth they flat out denied to be true. For me it feels even more surreal. (For the sake of the originally desired privacy, I won’t post the links to any of the articles here or any identifying information. Any of you here who trust in Jesus’ salvation, please pray for us and for her family as well.) I tried to go to work this morning anyway but melted into a puddle on the floor two minutes before we opened. I just got in my car and drove. I didn’t have anywhere I was going. I just wanted to drive for a while. Finally, I turned around and headed to a nearby bookstore and journalled for a few hours until I could work up the nerve to go home. When I came home my brother was already online, and I joined him there in the chatroom shortly. There we’ve been on and off for most of the day, along with almost everybody who knew and loved her from our group. The news will continue spreading throughout the forum over the next few days as people come in and see the memorial that has been posted. Sadly, for some, that was their first news that something was wrong.

The chatroom has kind of been an online wake since late last night. For the most part I’ve been really proud of everyone and how we’ve handled our grief. Everyone has their differences in how they confront a tragedy, especially one as senseless as this, and as my mom predicted, we’ve had a few hot tempers as grieving styles clash. My own not withstanding. One of the hardest things for all of us to swallow is the fact that because we only know each other online, the rest of our corners of the world won’t really understand. We’re all apprehensive about telling anyone that the friend we’re grieving was from the Internet, afraid that their attitude will be, “Oh, so you didn’t REALLY know her.” Yet at the same time, even though she meant so much to us, the very fact that we are spread all over fifty states and beyond, we won’t have any of the traditional outlets for mourning. None of us can go to her funeral or even simply sit in each other’s presence. In her death, we will only have what we had in her life with us—virtual chatrooms and forum threads. Yet even in that, there is a strange opportunity—I PMed her this morning to say goodbye. I was in the middle of doing it when I suddenly thought, “I wish none of this had ever happened,” and then before I realized it, the rest of the quote from one of her favorite books continues in Gandalf’s gentle voice, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you.” I don’t know if loved ones can send comfort from heaven, but it sounds like something she would pass along.

I realized today that the question you hold in the back of your mind when your friends are online—I wonder if the first time we meet will be in heaven—has already been answered with this young friend. . . long before any of us expected or wanted. As the manhunt for her killer mounts, we sit infront of glaring screens, trying to hold onto some semblance of yesterday, some little bit of before . . . We remind each other to eat. We tell each other how much we mean to each other. We wonder how to go on. Occassionally, one of us will write “THIS SUCKS!” in the chatbox to let off steam, which is usually greeted with a chorus of, “agreed” or ironically, “amen!” We share funny stories, and try to handle her own edioms with delicacy. For a while there was a discussion if we should leave her nickname as she had—reserved for the use of only two in the group, my brother and one of the girls. In the end they decided they were cool with sharing, but not to blame them if she slugs us when we get to heaven for calling her “that” all this time without her permission. We try to keep our tempers cool. We’re not yet trying to make sense of it. I think most of us recognize that we won’t ever be able to. Oh, God, this hurts! Only having a scrap of information on how she died, and that bit of information being not enough and way too much at the same time. Our “little handful” left behind her own quirky, fourteen-year-old humor as our best medicine, as one of the guys so valiantly pointed out by saying, “You know, I can just see her finding herself in heaven, looking back at the rest of us and saying, ‘YES! I got here first!!!” For now, that has to be enough.

But I think what will remain the most precious to us in these last twenty-four hours was a guesture from the moderator team by locking the thread where she last posted to leave her as the final participant there. At 2:30 yesterday afternoon, only an hour and fifteen minutes before her attack and death, she had popped up on the chatbox thread where kids would post saying they were on. Nothing but the smiling face of a little girl on her signature image and two words, "I'm here."

MY JOURNEY TO NOW . . . TO BE CONTINUED

I’ve been reading a lot of blogs of other families who have or are in the process of adopting from China and it makes me so impatient! When I was eight years old (back in 1995-96), and I overheard my mother talking with a friend about China. Being the child that I was, I wanted to know what the conversation was about. Though the memory has gotten worn around the edges, I still remember her explaining the one-child policy in China to me and the cultural preference for boys. I was a fiesty little kid, though with a big heart (my mom got me to give up my pacifyer as a four year old when she told me that there were some little children that didn’t have any pacifyers—she then proceeded to take my carefully wrapped gift of my “suckers” and put them in my saving’s box), and I told my mother right then and there that someday I was going to adopt, “Ten little girls from China.” And my mind has never been changed.

Through most of my highschool years it was really put on the back burner, so much so that as as a junior, I didn’t remember ever saying it until a long time friend who hadn’t seen me in a few years asked, “Are you still going to adopt those ten little girls from China?” Between that question and another conversation with a close family friend that had adopted three children from Vietnam, I started to research adoption. At first it was just international adoption in a general sense, but I found I sat up straighter and paid more attention to the articles I read on Chinese adoption. After a few long days, maybe a week, I gave up all pretenses of researching adoption as a subject and started devouring everything I could get my hands on about Chinese adoption. Check out this site: http://www.tussah.com/lara/chinasto.htm, you’ll find the website that really started the ball rolling for me.

About half of the links were disconnected, but in the page after page of links to family blogs and adoption journals, I got a better picture of what it actually looked like to take the journey I had been so adamant about as an eight year old school child. They were touching, thrilling, exciting. Each story became a fast passed, page turner for me. Yet in many stories there was a reference to British journalists that had found something about Chinese orphanages that was appalling. I remember pausing in one story, halfway intent on finding out what these references was about—my finger poised over the google search button at the top of my screen. “No,” I decided. “If it’s really bad--really, really bad . . . it will only drive me out of my mind. I’m seventeen, and there is nothing I can do to get those kids out. I have another thirteen years before I’m even old enough to submit a dossier (formal request to adopt). It will only drive me out of my mind.” So for three months I made a very concious choice in favor of ignorance. I continued to read, to research, to pray, to swallow up everything in sight, but I would not go looking for the story behind the vague references. I didn’t want to know.

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. The same little spark of curiosity that had first asked my mother what she was talking about nine years before, that had brought me to this place of obsession, got the best of me. I had to know. So I started with simple google searches, typing in the pieces of information I DID have to try and locate the pieces of the story I didn’t. What I found broke my heart. Whoever said that ignorance is bliss must have had the same journey to discovery I had that day. I read about Kate Blewett’s documentary, The Dying Rooms. I read about the conditions she had discovered in the mid ‘90’s in China’s orphanages. Most heartrending of all--I saw my first photograph of Mei Ming. I can’t explain it all. She does it far better than I could. If you want to hear her story, go to this link and watch Blewett’s documentary: http://www.channel4.com/fourdocs/archive/the_dying_room_player.html. I warn you that it is upsetting, but important. Too much of what happened to those children happened because the rest of the world looked the other way. It is important to remember them. If a picture is worth a thousand words, and twenty six letters can conquer the world, than this video is more important than any amount of writing can convey.

This was my first experience with shocked, horrified grief. I didn’t speak of this discovery for months. I felt that hollow empty feeling you have when you wake up to the world and discover there is true evil in it. Evil so far above your own painful experiences that getting up in the morning almost seems futile. In the midst of all of these emotions came the realization of the year the documentary was made—1995. I had been eight years old. THIS publication, making China the talk of the Western world, had most likely been what had started my mother’s conversation (when I finally did mention my discovery, my mother already knew about it), which prompted my inquiry, and lead me—nine years later—to discover the story and the children that had started it all.

Kate Blewett later said she could never return to China—if she did she would never be able to return home. But because she went that one time, thousands upon thousands of other Westerners took up the next stage of her journey. The children who came after Mei Ming and the others who died of sheer neglect had the alliance of soccer mom’s and every day dad’s on their side. Many of them were adopted, and those left behind have receieved better care than their forebearers. That’s the only way I can live with what was done to Mei Ming—knowing that what happened to her made a difference to her abandoned sisters.

To this day I carry her memory with me everywhere. From time to time I’ll look up at a girl (usually white, like myself) that is about the age that she would be now if she had lived and wonder where she came from before she was abandoned, who she looked like, wonder who she would have been had she survived. And then the real hard question—could she have made a greater impact than she did if she had lived? I read the blogs of others that have Chinese daughters, and see their children’s faces and think of the girl that brought their plight to global attention.

I can’t ever have the ignorance back, and sometimes I miss it. Four years later I still can’t escape the knowledge, but I don’t think I would choose to. I don’t think of it every day the way I did when I first discovered it, but I still think of my intent desire to adopt every single day. I am encouraged by others (http://always-in-myheart.blogspot.com/ ) who have gone ahead and shared their stories. I laugh to myself sometimes that I have had the longest waiting period of any adoptive mom—I’ve been waiting for thirteen years and have at least another eight and a half before I can even submit a formal request, at which time the REAL waiting will begin.

Being just old enough to start to see a pattern to my life, start to discover what was REALLY going on that I didn’t see at the time, and how quickly the last four years have gone by since I first started researching everything on Chinese adoption I could find, INCLUDING blogged luggage lists,:-) I can only imagine how I will feel when I look back at myself ten years from now when I’m making my own luggage lists and freaking out about all of the things adoptive China mom’s seem to freak out about.

I was just thinking last night as I posted about my Jewish flavored upbringing and read another blog (http://journeytojaden.blogspot.com/) about celebrating the Chinese Moon festival in honor of their son’s heritage. My poor kids are going to have such a weird, culturally diverse identity! After my upbringing with the Jewish holidays, I’m definitely continuing that. After experiencing the Mexican quensenara (the daughter’s coming out), I want one of those for my girls. And if my kids are going to be from China, and I’m going to be incorporating a lot of ethnic holidays that aren’t even part of MY biological history, I really ought to include the Chinese New Year or something. Wow, I’m having a culture shock just thinking about it.:-) In the meantime I’ve got a few books on Chinese history I’m reading, and I’m trying to get my eight year old “Chi-Mexican” friend (his father is Mexican and mother is Chinese, so he speaks Spanish, Cantonese, and English) to teach me a bit of the language. I think I’ve got enough to keep me busy before I can start my paper chase.

Thanks to all the mothers of Chinese children, especially Karen (http://always-in-myheart.blogspot.com/), for sharing your stories. You have no idea what an encouragement they have been to me. There is nothing quite like reading things that are written without the benefit of hindsight—people who write books can easily gloss over things or make them more palatable, because as they write, they know that by the end of the story everything works out alright. Thanks for your daily glimpses of joy and panic. I’ll try to remember them when my turn comes.

THREE WORDS OR LESS

I have written and rewritten this post so many times, trying to get all of the unusual, complicated pieces worked down to their most basic ellements to avoid this being an entire documentary of the strange pieces of my life that seemed to come to a head this weekend. Each little detail could be an entire post all by itself, but to tell it all right now distracts from the real impacting moment I had at, what I’ve been calling, “a family wedding.”

I have always felt like I was born into the wrong skin. My father, growing up in an old Southern family, was mentored, couselled, and really raised by the black staff that worked at his family’s home, so I have always grown up with an appreciation for the African American community, and in the dance community been called black a time or two. In my middle school years, I had felt it a crime my skin was so darn white! My mom grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in St. Louis, MO. So while she was not Jewish, all of her friends, classmates, and highschool boyfriends were. Coming from a broken home, she found a great deal of stability in her friends’ homes, and so she grew up celebrating their holy days, hebrew blessings, and traditions. So when she was married and started her own family, she incorporated the hebrew calendar into our formative years.

I had always felt a mixture of excitement and frusteration at this. I liked the holidays, the symbolism, the blessings; they had been part of my life since before I was born. The frusteration came in with having been raised in a culture I couldn’t claim. In all of my twenty-one years, I have never been able to explain in three words or less why “mossel tov!” comes to mind when a lightbulb breaks (reference to a Jewish wedding tradition) or why I feel excited at the scent of chopped parsley (part of the Passover sedar), or any number of other things that are completely foreign to the mainstream of the culture. Any time I dared to voice these thoughts to those around me, it was a precursor to a long explaination to which the general sentement was, “That’s . . . weird.”

In the last ten years something called the Messianic Movement has emerged as a subset of evangelical Christianity. The thoughts behind this movement are the same basic thoughts that pricked my dad’s interest in this culture almost about eight years earlier when he had a crisis of faith—Christianity is built on the foundation of the law and the prophets. But while many of my friends joined the bandwagon around the time this movement was born, it had already been alive and well in my family for over two decades, not counting my mother’s childhood.

My father, a controlling and abusive man, had studied the Old Testement, Hebrew, the Talmud, Jewish history, and the writings of the rabbis for eight hours a day all of my highschool years, ontop of work. When he left, I let him take some of my identity with him. I couldn’t celebrate the holidays anymore. We gave away our Passover plate to the close friends that had been celebrating the holidays with us for years and had moved into our old home. Slowly in the last two and a half years, I have been able to reclaim this part of my heritage a piece at a time. While my dad was with us, I had defined this part of my upbringing as something I wasn’t—I wasn’t Jewish, so I couldn’t really claim any of it as part of me. I think some of that had to do with my internal distancing from my father.

In the last two and a half years, and especially the last six months, I have learned to identify with yet another heritage other than my own. Working in the food service industry, I discovered I had a lot in common with the Mexican value system and family ideals. Several of my friends had called me a Mexican stuck in a white body. One started calling me "prima" (cousin), because he insisted I was really Mexican on the inside. I have worked alongside them, been invited to their homes, gone to their family events, their weddings, their quensenaras. In some ways it fit so well, and I looked past differences as best I could. Yet in the back of my mind, I was aware of the culture that raised me, most especially as I chopped parsley for a garnish alongside one of the Mexican women I worked with, and tried to explain why I would occassionally take a sprig of it and dip it in salt water before eating it (Passover tradition)—she didn’t understand; she just called me the Spanish word for cow.

Last Sunday night we went to the wedding of an old friend, one of the girls I had grown up with within this movement. Her extended family had kind of been an extended family to me during highschool, getting together every six months for Passover and Succoth for that week of time. I felt less threatened by my non Jewishness in that surrounding. We used to joke about the poetic redemption of having three of four surnames within her extended family as well as my father’s being German and speaking Hebrew blessings during a holiday of a people our people had pursecuted.

We drove out to the nature reserve where the wedding was to be held, and we stepped into a sea of yammikas, tzit tzit, and “honorary family.” Her wedding had a remarkably Jewish flavor, complete with the glass breaking in remembrance of the Temple’s distruction, the Hebrew blessings, and the dancing—which was always the best part. I hadn’t realized how very much this was part of my heritage until I inwardly let out a sigh. For the past six months I have been attending weddings with just as many and just as foreign traditions and symbolism with my Mexican friends and loved every minute of it, but though these traditions would need just as much explaining as the Mexican ones had for me, they made sense to me and I understood many of the blessings even without the translations by my “uncle.”

I looked around and was struck with a sense of pride I had never had for this part of my upbringing. Jewish or not, this was part of my history, part of my heritage. I looked around at the others dancing in the circles with me: not a one, besides my own siblings, could claim twenty-one years of this. If anyone who hadn’t been born into bloodlines of this culture could claim it, it was me. The feeling was very similar to the feelings I had as I hugged and kissed the bride’s family. One of her uncles, the one that I have known since I was ten years old and have always had a very special relationship with, said to me during the reception, “Having you guys here . . . it’s like all of the cousins are back.” They weren’t my family any more than I was Jewish . . . I guess that gave a boost for my identifying with my own history.
Today, two days later my legs are killing me—too many pulled muscles from fancy footwork and high kicks—but I am finally feeling full, the first time in a long, long time. The inward struggle of “where do I fit” is diminishing. I am who I have always been, only now I can say it . . . but I still can’t explain it in three words or less.

CREATIVE WAYS TO CLEAR OUT THE GENE POOL

Okay, so my kid brother—He’s fifteen—drank hygrogen peroxide tonight. Teenagers.:-) For those of you that know him he’s not usually . . . maybe I should stop now.

It’s Saturday. For a family in food service, it’s more like week-highlight than weekend. All except for the last member of the Unemployed Sibling’s Club, so he was home alone all day. Apparently, to piece the story together after the fact, he got busy working on things around the house and forgot to eat or drink anything except for a bowl of cereal this morning. I’ve done it before, and it won’t kill you, except that when his friends came to pick him up for band practice tonight, he got a bee in his bonnet and decided to race their car. Why, I don’t know—he’s a boy, and he’s fifteen. Enough said. Well, at the end of the race he was feeling a fair bit sick to his stomache from excercizing that hard on an empty stomache and without fluids, so the mother of the family picked up the nearest water bottle in their car and said, “Here, drink this.” Well, apparently one of her three teenage boys had filled it with hygrogen peroxide (no idea how to spell that) for sports cuts. My brother ended up throwing his guts up.

He has thoroughly enjoyed having my sister and I tag-team babying him and making sure he eats and drinks all night to counteract the poisoning of his system. It’s almost as good as the time my oldest brother got “TBS” mixed up with “TSP” when he was taking Benadryl and overdosed. Teenaged boys . . . Poison Control is a wonderful thing.

The moral to this story, as observed by my other younger brother—don’t drink hygrogen peroxide.

GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

Last Tuesday I’d had a hard day at work. Not one of those days with fireworks and explosions, more the slow steady drip of dissallusionment as “little things” started to pile up. About a month earlier, someone had stolen a tip from me, and I had no way of finding out who. A few days before, I had noticed someone had ripped a recognition that I’d done a good job on a project off of the wall. And that afternoon my boss had sat down to talk to me about something that wasn’t my fault, but rather a disorganization on her part. I felt like going home, curling up in bed, and not getting up for a long time. When I got home, I felt like I needed a good long drive to shake out all of the wrinkles I felt on the inside. Usually when I feel that craving, I get on the highway between my first home and my second home—my mom’s hole-in-the-wall restaurant, but I had a feeling that drive wasn’t going to be near long enough. Then I had another idea.

You know how we all have things we were always “going” to do? We may have lived in St. Louis and never gone up the arch, or in Houston and never seen the NASA museum. When you grow up halfway between Nowhere and Off the Edge of the Map, there aren’t a lot of noteworthy things to do that anyone would recognize you never did. But for me there was. I’d lived on a farm for the second ten years of my life, a good hour or so away from where I live now. Down one of the long stretches of a country mile there was an old cemetery you could barely see from the road, just a blue doorframe tucked in among the row of orderly trees trimmed back by the city. If you looked hard, you could see the outline of tombstones in the shady clearing under the trees. I had always wanted to stop and see the names, read the dates, wonder who those people had been. But I had never been the one driving, and whomever I’d been riding with on any given day had always had somewhere to be.

Today, I had a license, a car of my own, and a need to drive without a destination. So I changed out of my work uniform into something more comfortable, pulled a stack of computer paper out of the printer, dug around until I found the stash of crayons, and then drove down to the corner to buy three dozen locally grown roses--if I was going to do this, I was going to do this right. Then I got in my car, rolled down the windows, and weaved my way in and out of post-Ike traffic until I got out on the old highway my family had burned up for years, driving to and from the city. The closer I got to Home the more I started scanning the treeline, not remembering precisely where the blue doorframe was, and afraid I would miss it. It was a strange feeling for me. I’m in the middle of six kids, so the idea of doing something alone that no one had done before me has always been a sensation I have loved flirting with, however small an experience. Besides, of all of the kids, I have done the least traveling. Between my older siblings and my younger ones, we’ve hit every coast, and even both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, I’ve always been the midland kid for some strange reason. While they’ve been from California to New York to Galveston, Texas: I’ve been to Arkansas . . . but then, so have they.

In recent weeks I have tried to sit on a craving to just start driving and figure out where I’m going when I get there. To drive across country, to see something, but I have had no idea where to go that would feel exciting enough to quench the thirst—or how to pay for the thirst of my gas tank. For now, all I could do was squint along the treeline for the marking of a cemetery full of strangers. Finally I saw it and pulled off to the side of the highway. I gathered up my crayons and paper in one hand, and my bunches of roses in the other. I was alone in the middle of nowhere in a place I’d never been before—it felt so good.

I walked up the steep incline and passed through the blue arch, only to discover that it wasn’t the true entrance into the cemetery. Walking a few more feet I unlatched the gate and stepped in among the stones. I set my bundles down for a moment and stood over the nearest stones. Two, modern-looking, tan, marbletop stones lying flat on the ground. At first I was struck by an imagined request by an anceint man or woman that must have requested, recently, to be buried in the family plot, but then I looked at the date of death for each of them: 1918 and 1948. Then a new possibility struck me. As I glanced around the little plot, reading a few stones with similar dates, but much more weather-beaten—someone must have returned to this old plot to replace the fading stones. These two were surrounded by ancient stones whose words and secrets were fading fast. I reached down to the grass where I’d left them and picked up a sheet of paper and a blue crayon. Holding the paper up to one of the nearest headstones, I began to rub the crayon over it back and forth, and slowly the words started to stand out white against the waxy smear. I saw a name, a set of dates, and an inscription. I continued this down the row of tombstones, making note of the ages at the time of death and any little details I could. Many were young, forties, fifties, sixties. One of the younger men had written below his dates, “Born in Alabama.” I wondered why this was important to be remembered by those that had carved his inscription.

As I moved on to a new row, the ages became even younger, I pushed the weeds, grass, and moist earth away from the base of one, small headstone and discovered a ten day old infant lay beneath, and had for over a hundred years. Moving on the next I read the name “Aline,” discovered by the dates she had only been five years old, and then beneath it lay the inscription faded by time and illuminated by my rubbing, “Darling we miss thee.” Beside her lay a four-year-old boy of nearly a hundred years. They had probably known each other briefly. He had the little poem that had touched me so deeply the day I had gone with my family to my mother’s old family graveyard—“Born on earth. Bloomed in heaven.” Beside him lay another infant, curving over her name--I could only guess had been Ida--were the words, “Gone but not forgotten.” I stood there for a moment more down than before I had made the drive and yet strangely uplifted. Here I was, a young woman who had driven past their resting places, walked the fields where they had once lived, grown up alongside them, returning fifty, one hundred, one hundred and fifty years after their deaths to remember them—Gone but not forgotten.

The last one on the end of the line of lost children was another marbel stone in the same fashion of those I had assumed to have been replaced, and I assumed it had been as well. It was small, about the size of both of my feet side by side, I guessed. It bore no name, no date, no inscription. One simple word—Daddy. Why? I yerned for some reason, some answer, some explanation, but the very lack of one made it beautiful, intimate—made me envious. Someday when I bury my father, I won’t call him daddy. I don’t call him daddy now. Who knows how long it will have been since I spoke to him last or he spoke to me. I assume I’ll be contacted, but where from?

I looked up. I had missed two towering headstones off in the corner of the graveyard. I knelt down beside the first. I had to use my crayons for this one. “Clemma Dean Kimler,” I read . . . she had died just before her twelth birthday. Beneath her dates, like a few of the children, she had a slightly varied form of the born and bloomed verse. I sat in silent respect for her. Remembering that I had been her age when modern research had saved my life with the insulin injection. What if undiagnosed diabetes had been what cut her life short?

The tombstone beside her was by far the most intricate of any I had seen. It was curved on top of a square base, but that wasn’t what struck me so much as the intricate and almost completely faded carvings almost filling the top of the curve. I did a rubbing to find lacy scrollwork surrounding a hand pointing upward as if to heaven. Beneath it in better defined cut stone was the name “Daisy” and then a recognition for the husband that had burried her. Beneath it near the base of the stone were rough ridges that I recognized had once been clearer words. I worked hard with corners of pre-used paper (I didn’t have any more) to get the jist of what was written there. Something about a happy spirit and a pure heart. She had been twenty two years old, only months older than me. I felt a strong connection to this woman, the creativity of the tombstone, the words of love written about her—she had been my age.
I got up and unbound the roses from their newspaper trappings and walked the graveyard once more, placing roses at the graves. I had wished so much I’d had enough to place one at every grave—even the ones whose stones had been so beaten by time there was nothing but a worn, broken rock marking the fact that someone lay beneath it, but I didn’t. The sheer wonder of it all thrilled me. The stories that I could only guess at, the fact that I would never know these people, and more quieting still—that they would never know me, the strange girl that walked among them now, decorating their graves. It made me wonder if anyone would ever do that when I was gone and everything about my personality had been lost by the world, perhaps by everyone—completely forgotten. What of the people who didn’t even have any words on their headstones, just inicials or nothing at all. I was still here wondering. The thought of that comforted me. I wondered who the children had bloomed to be. The parents that had lived their whole lives without them, seeing them again for the first time, fifty, sixty, seventy years later as another child, perhaps fifty or sixty years old themselves, buried and morned them. I wondered. I wondered. They were long gone but not forgotten.

TWENTY SIX LEAD SOLDIERS

I never thought I would have a blog. I never liked the idea of writing in a public outlet, but then I thought: "What? You never liked the idea of writing on a public outlet? You want to be a proffessional writer, and you don't want to write publicly?" Do explain, my dear, occassionally foolish self.

Carl Marx once said, "Give me twenty-six lead soldiers and I will conquer the world." He was reffering to the alphabet, the written word. Adolf Hitler once said, "If you tell a lie long enough and loud enough, people will believe it." Both of these men used these truths to dominate others. Though they used these tools for harm, they had picked up on a brilliant truth. So what if you didn't use those twenty-six lead soldiers to conquer? What if you used them to liberate? What if you didn't speak that lie long and loudly? What if you spoke the truth to the best of your understanding and ability? If the war of the world is being fought in a battle of words, then the only way to counter the attacks on freedom and justice is to respond in kind.

Those who have a voice of any kind must use it, even if you are only just learning how.