field notes:

5.28.2003

I'm in Laguna Beach, getting set for my brother’s wedding this weekend, and his 40th birthday tomorrow. A week of milestones. My part is small.

I'll raise a toast, give presents, stand up for my new sister-in-law, and watch, proud-as-a-parent as my brother launches into the next phase of his life like a cannonball. Not content with just the two major events this week, he quit smoking yesterday in a celebration of life and promise for the future, and they are expecting a child in September. My brother is not content with cautious moves, small steps.

I’ve put together a book of photos and stories from his first 40 years. Doing this, I’ve come to realize that somehow my small collection of our childhood photos is all that we have. For a time, my mother and us two kids moved quite a bit and after one of these moves realized that we had lost our box of photos from her wedding and our lives. Only a few survived, but I always imagined that we each had our own private collection.

It's nice to have the few that we do. And now I won’t be the only one who can pull them out and look at them. I search the faces for signs of the people we have become. Was trouble visible in the freckled face of the sun-browned girl in an Easter dress holding her little brother? Or was it too early to see it then? How about later, after the divorce, is there sorrow in those eyes? Was my destiny to wander quiet landscapes, to live this unordinary life written on that brow?

When I look at my brother's young face I see sweetness and a hint of sadness. All still there. He always felt more deeply than I did, and carried a knowledge of himself in the world that grounded him, even as he knew clearly the trouble that surrounds us all, and all too well the troubles that surrounded us then.

The photos are sweet and nostalgic, but there is too much that is left out. A photo claims to capture a moment, but all that it does is capture an image. Even stories I've remembered from my brother's life tell partial truths. They relay moments and actions as if they were unconnected with all the moments that came before them, and all that would come later. The way I know my brother lives in a lifetime of knowing: of gestures and words, fights and gentle companionship, sorrows shared and games played. If I remember climbing an avocado tree in our front yard, it isn’t a single story that comes to mind, but a feeling that holds my brother and I together, the way the cool branches of that tree held us, not on a single day, but over years and days and hours spent in quiet solidarity while the world around us raged.

posted by Lisa Thompson on 8:16 AM link | comments []

5.25.2003

I heard a story last night that stayed with me through dreams and sleep. This is a story you will not see on the evening news.

A young teenager killed another teenager. It was initiatory killing, showing the gang that he was worthy, he could take a life. He went to trial and was convicted for the murder. After sentencing, the mother of the boy he had killed stood and faced him--said, "I'm going to kill you."

After a short time in prison this same woman began to visit him--asking him how it was for him in there, giving him some money to make it easier for him as he had no family. She kept up these visits over the years and when it was time several years later for him to be released (he was very young and received a short sentence) she asked him what he would do when he got out. He had no plans. She found him a job with a friend. She asked him where he would stay when he got out. He had no where to go. She offered him a room in her home.

He got out of prison, went to work for her friend and stayed with her in her home. After some time, the woman called him into the living room. She asked him if he remembered what she had said to him in the courtroom on the day of his sentencing. He said that he would never forget it, that he thought of it every day. Then she told him that she finally felt that she had succeeded.

She said that she wanted to kill the young man who would take a life, and that was why she began to visit him, to show him kindness, to have faith in him--to develop his own faith in humanity and in himself. Over the years, she worked on killing the other self that had no regard for life. She told him that she had no son any longer, and asked the young man standing in front of her if he would be her son. He agreed and she adopted him as her own.

This story comes from the "other America" that Langston Hughes evoked--the America that still holds our dreams, the America that promises liberty to every one, the America that holds our imaginings of what our land can be. This is a story that holds hope and shines light into that dark place in the nightly-news-america which would have us believe that the prisons are full of evil people, unredeemable, unreachable, unlike the rest of us; that the truest response to victimization is a call to vengeance. This story comes from that dreamed America, discordant, promising.

posted by Lisa Thompson on 10:23 AM link | comments []