Jamie Lee

This was written a few months after my first husband, Wayne, was killed in a plane crash.  I did not post one of the later edited versions because I decided I like the first version better–raw and to the bone. 

Blunt Force Impact

I can’t find the top of my bedroom dresser again. Flat surfaces don’t stay flat in my life. Deciding it’s a good day to clear it, I empty the tissue paper out of a shoebox and start with one thing empty. I begin picking though the contents and realize that the pile is a collage that represents my life these past two months. It’s not all my stuff. There are two movie stubs, my husbands. He usually goes to the movies alone-a voracious appetite for Hollywood and I’m a picky eater. A boarding pass from Luthansa Air; in October we flew to Germany to interview a man with a deep soul and to experience Europe together for the first time. We landed in Frankfurt and took a train to Kufstein, Austria. I felt strangely at home there.
On the dresser is a single small, tan pebble with a lighter streak running through it. It looks like the tip of a finger. Dachau. I picked the pebble up at Dachau knowing full well it was probably a recent addition, hauled in with a load of rough gravel to keep the mud from seeping up. Atop my jewelry box is the small yellow booklet on Edith Stein, the Carmelite Nun who died at Dachau. The nuns have surrounded Dachau with prayer. We bought the German version of the booklet. Intention? To learn German.

I recognize that I’m distracting myself with this sudden need to clear my dresser top. I’ve just reserved a room in a motel at the top of Rimrock Highway in order to gather my focus to finish the final paper of my master’s program today. I asked for room number nine on the second floor. It’s the last room on the end near the rocky slate wall that rises above Rapid Creek. I can see number nine in my mind. I’ve been there three or four times already. It smells of dust and old carpet and some cheap deodorizer but it has no phone. It’s cheap. And except for the creek running below the rock wall, there is nothing to distract me. My paper is on “belongingness”. Ironic-that I retreat from my husband, my son, my eight-year-old granddaughter to write about belonging.

I sort the stray socks that have lost their mates, separating his from mine. There is a small leather box from India or Guatamala bought at a third world store to support the worker from other nations. It holds my favorite earrings, including the small dream catchers with colored metallic thread catching the dreams. More stones, from Vermont, gathered on walks in between learning sessions in structural thinking with the Fritz’s.

After Germany I drove from Philly to Vermont. It was in the old New England house serving as a conference center that the idea for my position paper came to me. I had not yet made the crossing between an old German man whose work is ancestral, almost Shamanic, dealing with the deep, hidden pools of family and the Fritz’s who deal only with structures. I felt out of it. I picked the fist-size stone up walking alone on the skinny, leafy, Vermont road while repeating a walking mantra to myself. Systems? Or structures. Does human behavior link to long ancestral lines, or internal structures? I resent being asked to choose. Why must I choose to belong? And at what price? This becomes the topic of my paper.

The lone socks on my dresser are mated once again; blue to blue, beige to beige, paired for life, until the next wash day, and then they risk separation once again.

The sand dollar on my dresser is from Orange County. That dollar, and some of the stones, are there by intention-for me to look at. When we came back from California last July, there were two sand dollars. On a beach outside of Santa Barbara I found a fresh sand dollar, before the gulls had plucked its center out. It was the first, perfectly intact sand dollar I’d ever found on all the beaches I have walked. I broke it trying to protect it so my granddaughter could take it to show and tell. The one on my dresser is the less than perfect one.

Belongingness sounds like a too simple topic for a final paper in a master’s program in Human Development, but it is the one I’ve chosen. Not belongingness so much as conscious belongingness. The paper is called a “position paper” and I find that ironic as well, that I should be asked to scan my studies and choose and defend a position. Conscious belonging is about gaining the freedom of self to not just blindly belong but to pick, choose, finger the cities of the self like the stuff on my dresser and decide what deserves care and attention-and what to discard. I tried hard to protect that sand dollar but ended up snapping it into two pieces.

Blind belonging.

The most curious item on my dresser is a small leather box. It’s a toy, probably 50 years old, a viewfinder complete with the small round cards. I can’t figure out how it came to be on my dresser. I didn’t put it there. Usually, it’s tucked high up into the closet; it may be an antique so nobody is allowed to play with it. I take it out of the box. The plastic is that heavy dark plastic. I slip in a card at random and click through the Sonoran Desert, fascinated by the 3-D effect. I stop on a Joshua tree, looking at how it reaches upward, like most living things, especially plants. I met my husband in the desert lands around Tucson and so always have a special fondness for things of the desert. Once we spent the drive between Tucson and Phoenix creating a joke book we called Saguaro Psychology. We personified each Saguaro and gave it a caption.

I put the viewfinder back up in the closet and pick up a book of poetry by Rilke. Poor, brilliant Rilke. I read an article on his life once. His mother lost a baby daughter and later named her son Ranier Marie after the dead daughter. My German teacher, who we interviewed in Germany, would see Rilke caught in the tangle of his mother’s grief and bravely bearing it for her. Belongingness.

I think back to Germany, to Bert’s living room. He is 76 and had just had knee surgery and would lunge his body into the couch so that his legs would land propped on two giant pillows. He would grin every time. To his left was what looked like a giant piece of orangish quartz lit from within by a small bulb. Salt, he said, from the mine at Bertesch Gaden.

Salt. I wanted to lick it like a deer in a meadow. He wouldn’t have minded, I’m sure. Instead I politely and discretely wet my finger on my tongue, rubbed it across the salt lamp, and put the finger back in my mouth. Salt. Bert grinned again, his understanding allowing plenty of room for common curiosity. Later, his wife gave us a small glass jar filled with broken chunks of the stony salt and told us to fill it with water and mix ½ teaspoon a day with water and drink it. The molecules match those of the body, she said. It heals.

When a mind closes around “positions” that don’t align with the current belonging, the current group, we lose out on wide, awakening variety, of not licking a chunk of salt because who would want to risk such social error. If I were back in Bert’s living room, I would flatten my tongue on that chunk and damn the consequences. Out in my living room I have a smaller version of Bert’s lamp that we bought for 22 euros in Bertesh Gaden. I can lick that one whenever I like but, oddly, I haven’t. I only want to lick his, at that precise moment in time.

My position is that we should not be so quick to defend a position. If I fix my eye too firmly on one position, I go blind to all others. I lose fluidity. I lose my right to change. I lose my heart.
I wonder. Had I known I was going to write about my dresser top this morning, would I have paid closer attention? For instance, I can’t recall the movies he saw. I looked, but I didn’t see. I didn’t know I’d be asked, an hour later, to recall it. I want to say Bowling, which would be short for Bowling for Columbine. He saw that in downtown Manhattan a month ago. There should be three stubs that say Bowling because the next day we both went to the matinee. There is a theme in the things on my dresser top and, perhaps, in the things I only imagine are there, like three stubs for Bowling for Columbine. The shootings at Columbine School are about belongingness-or not. Inclusion. Exclusion.

Suddenly, I remember what else was on my dresser top. Two photos. Just remembering them crashes me back into early September. September 4.

The first photo is a long, horizontal picture of my 17-year-old daughter, Lisa, at the wheel of her car. Her smile is big. She has a fabulous smile. Her left arm is extended straight out the window, her wrists circled with two blue bands of uncertain material. With attitude, that arm says. Behind her, a giant, cloud layered sky.

The second photo also has sky, bare of clouds this time. A steel power line structure takes the center of the photo like a giant. And on the earth below, tattered, scattered, and burned is a single engine Cessna belonging to my first husband, the father of my three children. Lisa’s dad. It’s a newspaper clipping that reads, “Local men dead after air crash. Near I-94 in central North Dakota.

The two pictures are incongruent, out of synch. When I called Lisa in the middle of the night to tell her that her father was dead, she screamed. As she screamed, her sister came in the door of her apartment in Lincoln, Nebraska, and they screamed together. I could hardly breath, listening to them scream with me a fucking nine hours away and my son still asleep in his bed in the sunroom.
I realize that my failure to remember these two pictures sitting on my dresser top while I ruminate about stones and sand dollars is my mind’s effort to shield me from this memory, of my children crying and their blade-sharp question, “Do you think he loved us? Really?”

The social scientist, Kurt Lewin said it is not belonging but our own uncertainty of belonging that makes us vulnerable. Rilke writes,

Finally, using both my eyes
I close my face,
And when it lies with its weight in my hand
It looks almost like rest.
That’s so they won’t think I have nowhere
To lay my head.
Blunt force impact. I will despise those words forever.

Later, my children went with their uncle to the site of the crash and threw carnations of all colors gathered from memorial mourners over the site. And then they dirtied their hands with soot and soil, digging like archeologists in search of any sign of him. My eldest filmed the scene which ended with my 17-year-old son washing a chunk of metal that looked like a sculpture of cumulus nimbus clouds. A piece of engine melted from form . . . to formless. His back is to the camera, he squats, dipping the metal in a stock pond on a piece of prairie outside of Bismark, North Dakota. In front of him, an incredible sunset swallows his hurt, taking it back to the earth.

Suddenly, I understand why my dresser top got so piled up these past two months. I don’t know where to put all the things it contains, how to assimilate, integrate–how to fit each item into the greater soul of my life. I can’t file and tuck these things away-and I can’t get rid of them either.

I think again about the position paper, of my tasteless motel room waiting for me at the top of Rimrock where I will go and sit cross-legged on a blue bedspread for the next twenty-four hours and write about belonging-or not; about conscious belonging-or not.