As a child, I’d spent hundreds of hours playing The Game of Life. According to Hasbro, you begin life as a phallic pink or blue peg (a fitting introduction to the patriarchy).
“Air-conditioning will give you kidney stones,” Luka said. I was gradually recalling those mundane moments – the ones that had until now given way to more traumatic memories – of a childhood governed by collective superstition: Never open two windows across from each other – the propuh draft will give you pneumonia. Don’t sit at the corner of the table; you’ll never get married. Lighting a cigarette straight off a candle kills a sailor. Don’t cut your nails on a Sunday. If it hurts, put some rakija on it.
I tried to think of a singularly American superstition. I’d learned a few from the Uncles – something about not letting one’s shoes touch the kitchen table – but those were all imported from the Old World. Perhaps a country of immigrants had never gotten around to commingling the less desirable pieces of their cultures. Either that, or life wasn’t difficult enough to warrant an adult’s belief in magic.”
What that? she signed, pointing to one boy’s lunch tray.
Pizza, someone said.
What i-s that? she said. She fingerspelled emphatically, question-marked her eyebrows. Austin understood first. With a flash of recognition, he scrunched up his face and gave her a scolding finger wag.
I-s. Finger wag, he said.
Charlie was disappointed – so ‘is’ and ‘am’ and ‘are’ just . . . weren’t?
How could a language exist without so fundamental a concept? Perhaps, she thought grudingly, her mother and doctors were right about the limitations of signing. Could you have a real language without the notion of being?
But Austin just pointed to Charlie’s hand, then made his own gesture, sweeping up from his stomach out into an arc across the room. Charlie copied the sign, but that didn’t seem to be what he wanted. She stared.
Me, said Austin, pointing to himself.
He patted his chest, then his arms, then held out his hands, flexed his fingers before her.
You, he said.
He took her by the wrists and held her own hands out before her. She looked down at her palms and understood – her being was implied, her potential thoughts and feelings coursing through her body, the names of everything she knew and those she didn’t yet, all in perpetual existence in her fingertips.
Something was missing. Where was the verb ‘to be’? How are you? What is your name? Maybe it was too complicated for beginners.
They spent the rest of the class pointing at objects around the room and learning what they were called, but this only exacerbated Charlie’s curiosity – what might the noun for ‘being’ be, and did the answer to her missing verb lie there? She wanted to ask the teacher but didn’t have any of the words to form the question. That night she stayed up searching online ASL dictionaries, endless scrolls of GIFs and line-drawn bald men frozen in sign. She looked for the sign for ‘to be’ and found several sites confirming that it did not in fact exist, but no satisfying explanation for its absence.”
Most people would probably have a hard time totally fucking up their life in under an hour. But then again, I’m not most people. I’m amazing. I’m like some kind of fuckup savant.
My imagination was captured by Bryan Stevenson’s work and ideas once I read his book, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. I was thrilled when HBO developed a documentary following his story. Fortunately, I was able to view it free of charge on their website (limited time, of course). I stayed up till the wee hours the other night, watching it once the kids were finally in bed, sobbing in silence on the couch. The stories Stevenson tells of his people, of the people wronged by this nation are so raw and real and ones, as he says, that must be told if any sort of healing and progress is to be made in our country and society.
Two quotes that hit me over the head:
In many ways, you can say that the North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war. If the urgent narrative that we’re trying to deal with in this country is a narrative of racial difference, the narrative that we have to overcome is a narrative of white supremacy – the South prevailed.
The Civil Rights community won the legal battle, but the narrative battle was won by people who were allowed to hold onto this view that there are differences between people who are black and people who are white.
We may begin to feel our belonging in the breath – here we may take sanctuary, here we begin to feel our place in creation. Taking refuge in each breath of our life, in each beat of our heart, we find a quiet place of belonging. This refuge, this sanctuary, is neither given nor taken away by the chaotic demands of an unpredictable world. This place belongs to us, and we to it. It is where we make our home.
Wayne Muller in Legacy of the Heart: The Spiritual Advantages of a Painful Childhood
“It’s all about the power of the mind,” he said. “The only thing that will make it go away is your own determination.” He ran his hand over the window ledge and frowned at the smudge on his fingers.
When Rosa was happy our house was filled with music. I could never imagine the silences returning. The light in her studio burned through the night. One summer she painted Corry Head. The gorse blazed like a fireball. Purple heather covered the rocks. She painted it with the mist falling down and hiding all of the color. I wondered if that was what her life was like. Always trying to escape from behind the mist.
–from “To Dream of White Horses” by June Considine
There is so much about his passage that speaks to me. The father’s misinterpretation of how it is to live with depression. The son’s seeming lack of information, yet more complete understanding. The descriptive pall the illness brings – both literally in the dust that builds up and metaphorically in the mist that envelops the person suffering.
Chopping Potatoes 