The Evening News and the Weather

Events can burn snapshots into your brain. I can turn the pages of my album and see myself, a kindergartner, in the belly of a yellow school bus. I look up and around and all the older girls are crying. What happened? JFK has been assassinated. I’m a young mother in Nashville. I pick up the phone in the bedroom and learn that Ronald Reagan has been shot. Again in Nashville, but this time I pick up the kitchen phone, to learn that John Holt, the pioneer of unschooling, has died of cancer. We leave our daughter at college in NY. The next morning we wake up in a hotel in Pennsyvania to learn that Mother Teresa has died. I'm lying. It was Princess Di. Mother Teresa did die the same week, but I don't remember where I was. One September morning in Atlanta, my children are grown, we’re watching TV with my nephew and planes fly into the Trade Center and the Pentagon. Pages later, I’m in my mother’s living room in Missouri with my niece and nephew. Iraqis tear down the statue of Saddam Hussein on CNN. Time passes, the niece and nephew are gone and I am cleaning a client’s bathtub in Seattle. That was the day that a beam of light shone down upon a fish decal. The sun had come out.

Posted by cindy at June 16, 2006 10:48 PM

Comments

Yay!

alternatively:

Poor dweller in dank places.

Posted by: Calamity Jane at June 17, 2006 09:04 AM