Lectito

Sometimes you unexpectedly get a moment of clarity when standing in line at the Dollar General, wasting time on your phone while the lady three people ahead of you writes a check for a gallon of milk.

I came across an article on Twitter, "Closing the Book," by Dylan Landis. She starts off, "It didn’t surprise me, when my parents were dying, that I couldn’t write. But it shocked me, as a writer of fiction, that I couldn’t read." And that sums up what the rest of the article is about: losing the focus or ability to read after a parent's death--or in her case, the death of both parents.

"Holy shit," I muttered under my breath, as I started scrolling quickly, reading it as fast as I could. (Not that I needed to hurry. I am uncertain how fast I can read, but it turns out it's "faster than a check-out line moves on Saturday morning.")

This whole not-reading spell has been going on with me for nearly a year. Calling it not-reading isn't really fair. It's not that I'm not reading: I am reading. I'm not finishing. I still buy books and I sit down and start something and...then I stop. I don't mean for the night. I don't mean because it turns out it's not any good. I just slowly stop and don't come back.

Like Landis, I keep a list of books I've read each year. It's almost September. This time last year, I had read 36. This year I've only read 16. But six of those were for a class I took back in the spring, and in all honesty, I didn't completely read them. So that means only ten books I've read and finished by my own choice.

I've started so many. There's one right now that I love. I took it out of town with me and would stay up fighting sleep just to read a little more. Then I came back, and it's stayed on my nightstand, the bookmark in the same place every day.

Landis doesn't really know why she lost the comfort of reading. She thinks it has to do with a general loss of focus, or maybe that she "couldn't tolerate endings."

I thought about that. Was that my problem? Was it the fact that I'd start a story and it would end?

In some ways, this hypothesis could be supported by what I had been finishing, but not recording: A. Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" short stories. I didn't add these to my book list, because they are part of a larger work (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, specifically) which I would add once totally finished. But while each case ends, the overall story continues. I'm nowhere near the final thoughts of Dr. Watson, so these "endings" are not real.

But that doesn't sound right.

What I personally think is going on is that once Mom died, I lost the one person in my immediate circle who understood books and reading. She was the one who taught me to read, who taught me the pleasure of reading and being read to and reading to others. And we shared so many times reading together when I was little. We came full circle, even, as I read to her from The Beatrix Potter Treasury her last day in the hospital, towards the end of the last time she was really aware. 

Whenever we'd talk, we would discuss what we were reading. She kept up with my reading throughout school. Not because she was a helicopter parent, but because she wanted to tell me if she'd read it and liked it (The Outsiders, for instance), or if she wanted to read it with me because it sounded good (Bridge to Terabithia). And she told me what she was reading. There were always books laying around our house. Always.

It's not that we shared the same interests. I delved into fantasy and sci-fi, and she would read some romance. But we still talked about what we were reading and listened to each other. In some ways, that was more effective: if I told her what Harry Potter was about, then she was aware of the significance without having to pretend she liked fantasy and read it herself. Similarly, I am familiar with the Alex Cross novels' general plot (and still want to sit down and read those someday).

I know the obvious solution is to join a book club or discussion group, but that's not what we did so it wouldn't fill the hole. It wasn't planned or prompted: these conversations were natural. Reading was so important to us that it became part of each day's talk. "What are you reading?" was up there with "how are you doing?"

Over 30 years of that. And now, it's all gone.

It's hard, then, to find the focus to sit down and read, because when it's over, that's it. I guess in a way it is dreading an ending, just not like what Landis described. It's an ending of the experience where you have lived another life for 300 pages, and you come back to reality, and there's no one to share it with.

And why even mention it? If anything, the past 5 years have shown me how everyone has some tragedy, some misery, that they deal with every single day. I'm not special: we are all broken. The best thing you can do is to try not to contribute to someone else's brokenness. The best thing you can do is to try to help them keep the pieces together a little better. And for your own sanity, there are stories: music and movies and TV shows and books and plays and beautiful, wonderful ways to escape and connect. Thankfully I've still got movies and TV, but those were always more "my thing" more than "our thing." And conversations about those stories come up more naturally and often. So there's that, and I am thankful.

I still miss reading, though.

Eventually, Landis said, she was able to read again. But it took time, and effort, and it's not the same. For me, maybe I've found my way back in. Yesterday I stumbled on a new graphic novel at the library. I hadn't read a graphic novel in a while, so I hit up the shelf and came out with 2 others. The same day, while in an empty movie theater, then sitting at Sonic, then lying in bed, I read half of one. Like TV and movies, graphic novels had always been "my thing" separate. They're not just novels; they are art. I still like them. Maybe they'll be the warm-up act, the thing that holds my hand and brings me back into the fold, even if I am alone this time.

"News is only the first rough draft of history."

There’s an article from the BBC about the Chattanooga shootings and the viral social media posts that have come out because of it. They discuss one in particular which claimed a connection of the shooter to ISIS, and it’s brief, but the reporter notes that the FBI has yet to state a motive, and currently nothing connects the shooter to ISIS.

What they didn’t note was how quickly this post, and others, came up. We’re talking within hours of the shooting. I know this for a fact, as I (and countless others) were glued to twitter as reports started coming in. And why not? It’s immediate, after all. If you can’t be in front of the TV, it’s a quick way to find information.

It’s also totally dangerous. I don’t know how many personal accounts with the hashtag #chattanooga came up saying stuff that was completely wrong. And then connecting it back to a news site. The teacher in me says, “well, go to the original and confirm,” but if you’re constantly refreshing your phone to see news of a city right next to your hometown, you’re not going to stop and fact-check.

And there’s our dilemma.

Social media is amazing as far as advancing news. 2009 changed everything. Remember Captain Sully and the plane in the Hudson river? Twitter broke the story first, from some guy on the ferry headed to pick up the travelers. Remember the Iranian elections? People world-wide changed their location to “Tehran” so the government couldn’t locate the real protesters. It all changed from there. The world got so much smaller, man, and in some ways that’s a really good thing.

Except for when we take everything we see online as truth. And in a panic, it’s easy to do. We are used to the immediacy now, so when a news agency waits to release information and updates (because there are many instances where they, too, release wrong information in haste) we turn to people passing along what they heard from someone else, or people making guesses.

Sometimes hearsay and guesses turn out to be the truth. But a 50/50 shot doesn’t make the person who said it right.

This is all coming from spending 10 months every year going over quality research in the classroom. And it’s also coming from coming of age in the '90s, when the mentality was “trust no one” (and thanks for giving us the slogan, Chris Carter). You want me to believe something? You better have credible facts to back it up. Pictures or it didn’t happen, as the saying goes.

But even too much skepticism is dangerous, because it leads to things like the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists. It’s a thin line we tread these days, and on one side is ignorance, and on the other is mass hysteria. Somehow we have to stay in the in-between.

Title quote from Alan Barth

Civil War

When you grow up in the south - the actual south - no one knows how to talk about the Civil War. Especially not after the Civil Rights Movement.

You're ten years old, and you're sitting in a classroom, and the history book's on the Civil War chapter. Maybe your teacher is just out of college, or maybe they've been teaching for decades, and maybe they're from the area, or maybe they moved from somewhere else. Any of these elements could result in a completely different lesson, but what typically happens is "let's not talk too much about it."

There's a reason for this, and it comes down to the classroom. On the one hand, you have kids with kin who fought for the Union. On the other, you have kids with Confederate soldier ancestry. Then you have kids whose relatives were enslaved during that time. Do you as the teacher really want to get into the gritty details with that combination? Probably not, so it's easier to take the "it happened, here's the important bits, now let's move on."

No one wants to talk about the times we, as Americans, as southerners, screwed up.  (And let's put "enslaving a race of people for our own gain, fighting to keep the right to own them, and repeatedly denying them rights once freed" up there pretty high on the list.) We especially don't want to get into this with kids, because kids ask questions and that means we have to be prepared with some sort of answer. It's easier to just move on to another war, one where we were the "good guys" because that's what the kids want, right? We're the good guys.

It's hard to talk about being wrong. I get it.

So we don't talk about it, but then we still use the Confederate flag or name streets after Confederate generals, and we don't question it. Instead, we call it Southern pride and heritage. And we don't really understand what that means and the message it sends. And then we wonder why Black people think we don't understand racism, because as kids we never talked about what the war meant. Or what it means now.

History's usually taught as just memorization of facts and dates and names. Here's the Confederate general, here's the Union general, here's the battle, here's the start and end date. And repeat, and repeat, and repeat. But that's not how it works in reality. Modern pedagogy argues teaching history in context, as a series of events that build and build to create where we are now. Hindsight's always 20/20 but as a student you can understand things better if you see how they are all connected. Unfortunately, that means talking about the past - talking about it truthfully.

And y'know, maybe if we had that conversation early, it would be easier to understand where we are now. Why we are quick to dismiss what happened in Charleston as a "tragic incident" instead of a hate crime. Or why we can say it was an attack on Christians but not Blacks. Why we are fine with saying Dylann Roof was mentally unstable, but not agree that he was indoctrinated with racism left over from the 1800s and before. 

We can't admit this, because we never talked about how clinging to elements of "Southern pride" also means clinging to the idea of "the government shouldn't keep me from owning people," whether we mean for it to or not.

It's been 150 years and we are still failing at conversation. Well, more than that, we are failing to listen and see history beyond names and dates. We as white Southerners have this past that we only see from our perspective - the one we heard from our families and barely from school and in our street names and flags - and we can't see what this means to the Black community because we never talked about it in the first place.

Would talking about it stop hate crimes? Doubt it. There's definitely truth that Dylann Roof is mentally unwell. There are plenty of racists who do not kill people. So it isn't a definite solution. But, it would at least change our response when this shit happens. We wouldn't feel so defensive to proclaim "but not all Southerners are racist!" No, but it's a hard case to make when you happily, and without question, live in an area where your Southern pride effectively reminds a race of people that, at one time, they were owned. They were less than human. 

You can't go back and stop your ancestors from doing what they did. You're not responsible for that. But you are responsible for admitting we've done a terrible job of having actual conversation about our American, Southern history. And because of that, here we are. One hundred and fifty years later we're still fighting it, and everyone's on the losing side.

Milkshakes

I never understood the draw of vanilla milkshakes.

I don't mind vanilla ice cream, but usually it's best when paired with something else. Vanilla and chocolate. Vanilla and strawberry. It kind of cuts through the strong flavors and brings a creamier, calmer flavor. But on its own, it's kind of...bland.

And that is most often highlighted in milkshake form. You can look at the vanilla milkshake and think, this should be good. It's something that some people find pleasure in. I spent money on this.

But then yet, you realize, what the hell? It's really nothing special. It's like milk...really thick, cold milk.

Interestingly, the vanilla milkshake is somewhat symbolic of life when things, well, aren't so great. It's all a vanilla milkshake. You know it should be good. Other people are happy. But it all suddenly becomes sort of bland. It's not really worth complaining about, because, you know, you aren't going to throw the milkshake away. A lot of people have vanilla milkshakes. You remember you should be thankful you have one to begin with, even if it's not like you remember. Because you remember chocolate and strawberry and mocha latte.

And you're not giving up the milkshake you had, but you still remember: those were so much better.

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There's not exactly a resolution to this. It's not some deductive analytic piece where the answer is already formed. I guess it's more of a thought on how many people get in this vanilla milkshake situation, where everything loses its flavor.

Because the funny thing about milkshakes is, they usually come in the same opaque container. You can never tell who has what flavor.