obligation

warning: images of teenagers attempting to deal with horrifying events they have almost no memory of.

every september the memo appears in my mailbox encouraging me to make use of the events of september eleventh on the actual day. teach something about it in class. it's a little like black history month. "let's talk about nice black folks this month because we don't have time for that sort of thing the rest of the year." and every year i toss the memo in the recycling bin and that's the end of it. september eleventh is just like september tenth in my class. we read. we write. i attempt to keep shenanigans to a minimum. this is because i know how teenagers deal with tragic things. they put themselves smack in the middle of an event they weren't anywhere near and tell everyone they can corner. i learned this september 13, 2001 when we returned to classes. adults came in looking bruised. the kids arrived looking like amped up squirrels, full of unbelievable stories of how they'd escaped death in one of the towers. these were all children who had been in class two days earlier and had been nowhere near either tower. these were children who had never been south of 110th street and couldn't transfer trains without help. at first i couldn't listen. i cringed when they started talking. but then it seemed important to unravel what was happening. a typical conversation went like this:

miss, i was almost killed.
what do you mean?
i mean, that could have been me! (now, this is true for almost anyone, but i recall being patient then)
why? were you there? do you live down that way?
no. i been shopping there. three years ago. my mom took me to the mall there to get shoes once. i could have died!

and the part of me that's a teacher said, "i'm so glad you're okay," because that's why that story existed, but the part of me that is plain old human wanted to say,"you live in a high rise housing project in new york city. it's almost you every day."

so this is how i started class today. all four classes. with this story of my kids from quite a long time back needing to tell these stories. and then we looked at some books. hiroshima no pika, in the shadow of no towers and fireboat. and i asked the question i want to ask all the time. what makes us need to tell stories about tragic events and what makes us need to scoot ourselves closer to the epicenter than we really were? they came up with good answers. attention. admiration. power that comes with special first hand knowledge. to help folks deal with a situation. and that's what we looked at. telling a story that helps folks deal with something that doesn't really make sense. showing that there are tiny bright moments in what seems like endless dark. and we talked about the sort of events people talk and write about that way. war. hurricanes. tsunamis. the blackout. death. illness. they had to write their own stories about one of those topics. and one little boy raised his hand. he wanted to know if it could be a funny story. several others wanted to know, too. and we looked over the list. yes. it can be a funny story. and they leaned over pages and started writing. about being in the dark. about people who were no longer here. about being trapped. about fear. they put themselves at the center of stories that were sad and funny and very, very brave and they actually seemed to belong there in the center, admitting they didn't know how to feel when they looked around.