The Month of Rains

April has come to mean many things to me. April is often when we head south during school vacation, taking time for this little family to regroup in a warmer and less hurried setting. Although this year Max is taking Drivers Ed courses during his week off from school. Driver's Ed for chrissakes!

Two years ago this month I wrote about Mary Gaitskill in The Startling Subterrane of Demons, and published eight other blog posts, including a little ditty about the la la la of anodyne, and a family trip to Niagara Falls (slowly we turned, step by step...).  Last year, in April, I wrote about losing my friend Sheila, and a family trip to D.C. It wasn't the best of months, yet there was still beauty, a lovely diffused  April glow, in its lengthened days. This April has not offered much time to blog, try as I may. And so...

Word of the day is splenetic. One meaning: melancholy (though obsolete).

April is rainy. Around this time, two years ago, I told you that Max loves a rainy day. But that the rains tend to hurl melancholy straight to my mind's warped door. The magnolia has not yet come around. (True. I just looked.) This time last year, I told you April hath thirty days. It hasn't changed.

(If I'm not mindful I could eat a whole 12.60 ounce bag of frozen m&ms in one sitting—in which case, I might become splenetic. In a different way.)

April is National Poetry Month.

(This could be The Blog of Links.)

This month, Lulu submitted her first poem for publication. She's been writing lots of poems. As she did last year and the year before that and the year before...

Here's one she wrote today:

Pages

Dribble dribble drop

There’s another thought

One, then two, then three

The emotions pour out of me

The page is filled with countless words

Ink the color of robin birds

No date or time

This is only mine

It was pouring yesterday when I picked her up from lacrosse practice. Rain and lightning and high winds, barrels and cardboard and all kinds of debris flying across the roads. She tossed her equipment in the trunk, jumped in the front seat and happy sing-songed, April showers bring May flowers!

Yes, indeed.

(I'll let you know when the magnolia comes around.)

The picture of her that tops this post was taken in an April of more than a few years back. Maybe six or seven. Or eight. I can't remember. But it was April all those years ago, and we were in Gettysburg. Lemme tell you, if the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in D.C. doesn't get to you (I know: if you are human the VVMW got to you), Gettysburg will.

After a splenetic meltdown in April in Gettysburg of all those years ago, we bought Lu a wood stock, steel barrel, pink Lady Kentuckian musket. Her brother had gotten a toy rifle the day before (against my wishes) and, thanks to her father, there was no saying No to her.  We walked Pickett's Charge, where this photo was taken, and could feel the low drumming of that war. Melancholy. There were boys on that field. Boys.

Emily Dickinson was thirty-three years old on July 3, 1863, the day Pickett and his troops charged across the open field. Though miles away in Amherst, MA, Dickinson was deeply moved by the events  of the Civil War which made its way into her poetry, in poems like My Portion is Defeat—today.

But it is this beautiful Dickinson poem (that has nigh a drop of rain but water, water everywhere), the unabashed wildness of nature, a long, long way from Gettysburg, war, the wildness of man, that I'll share with you today:

Poem 23: In the Garden

A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad, —
They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, plashless, as they swim.

Happy April. Happy Spring. Read poetry! Write poems!

We Are In Lockdown

We are in lockdown.

The police are on campus investigating an issue.

The children are safe.

These were not the precise words. They may have been arranged differently: We're in lockdown mode. Police are in the building and the matter is under control. The children are not in danger.

Or: We are calling to notify you that the school is currently in a lockdown situation. Police are here. The children are safe and there is no danger.

Lockdown. 

Police.

Safe.

It was 8:08 AM when my cell phone rang this morning, and it didn't matter what the hell the exact words or sequence of words were. Something, a robot, a machine, dialed my cell phone number because that is the number on the emergency contact list kept on record at the school that my children attend. The school is in lockdown, the recorded voice announced, the school is in lockdown, police are there, children are safe.

My bones froze. A second, maybe two, I could not move. Then, Newtown, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Taft Union, Chardon High. No, it can't be that. They are safe. Safe. Upstairs, Michael dressed for work. I ran, ran, don't remember the movement of my feet or ascending the risers, the rush was too great.

"Something's going on at school," I said to him, "but the kids are safe. I'm not panicking." I pressed my hands together, my wrists, the veins, trembling, my heart's chamber os...cil...lat...ing. Something whirred in my head, like the fan Michael turns on each night. White noise. A scramble. No, I won't get in the car. No. I will wait for more news. No, I will call my neighbor. Her son is in the same school. The same lockdown. The same police. Safe.

"What? Let's find out what's going on," he said bluntly—his sober response an attempt to  contain alarm.

I punched numbers on the same phone that had only moments prior transmitted horrific words. My neighbor hadn't gotten the message. I called another neighbor, another mother. She hadn't gotten the message. More whirring: How does this work? Who gets the messages? What does one do with the words? I'll call Lulu. No. What if she is crouched on the floor, in a corner, or under her desk, and her cell phone rings and the killer hears it? No! No. If she plays by school rules, her phone will not be on. It will be in her locker. No. Kids break the rules. She'll have it. But it will be on silent. I won't call. She's safe. Why are my eyeballs tearing? Is this magical thinking? No. I won't panic. Lu is safe. Max is safe. They are safe.

The woman who cleans my house every month showed up at the door. I'd forgotten she was coming. Information about the lockdown is trickling in via text, she tells me. She knows someone who has a daughter or a niece, a relative, at the school. Rumor. Conjecture. Guesses. This is not what the school wants, I'm sure. They want LOCKDOWN. Do you know what that means? It means the opposite of evacuation. It means you are in a situation known as a state of emergency. An emergency holding. You are put in a hole, a quiet cell. A dark, silent hole. Hiding. Something outside of the hole is threatening you. Something threatening is happening. You don't know what's happening because you are not allowed to communicate with anyone within or without the hole. The hole is a safe place where you remain down and locked.

I cracked and sent a text to my son. I know Max's phone, if he has it, is on silent. It is never on ring. In a large whale-like bubble, I thumbed (praying this wouldn't be the one day his ringtone was on): Are you ok? School is in lockdown what's going on?  He thumbed back: Fine ya. A drug search, lk 5 cop cars.

Then Lulu's text: Ya, it might have been somebody with a gun... But we r all good now so it's fine. :)

My body arched into a reflexive exhale, a warm, wheezy stream of air tumbling furiously from my lungs. Still. Lockdown. Anything can happen. Anything, terrible things, have happened. Columbine, Virginia Tech, Newtown... What kind of messages did they receive?

(So far, in 2013, within the first thirty-one days of this new year alone, there have been eight, eight, school shootings in the United Sates of America.)

Students began posting on Twitter: This is for realz! #lockdown; Valentines day and I'm stuck in the corner of TC #romantic #lockdown #BASICBITCHTWEET; this will be a valentines day to remember #codegreen; a senior went psycho and the popos had to come #wesurvived; Police supervised lockdown #awesome #CodeGreen.

On Facebook, kids were updating their statuses: I'm scared. I'm hiding in a corner. We're in lockdown.

At 8:32 AM, my iPhone rang and lighted with another recorded voice message from the school, this time notifying parents, guardians, loved ones, people, human beings who love those kids more than anything else in the entire fucking world, that all was fine. The children are safe. Lockdown has ended. Everything is under control.

An email followed from the school principal which gave me only a vague idea of what happened within or around the school's brick walls. He wrote that their security procedures were put into place as soon as the situation called for it. A protocol was followed which required the lockdown. The lockdown ended uneventfully, the situation addressed.

"In these times we have to treat every concern with the highest level of response necessary to ensure the safety of all."

God. Help us.

The principal had been tipped off by some, I don't know how many, smart, thoughtful, concerned students as to a possible—a possibly very real—threat. He took these concerns seriously and responded the way the world must respond now: swiftly, peremptorily, judiciously. I am so thankful for this. But sad for the world. And I want the details. 

Details. As if the details will offer me comfort. Control.

Now, more stories unfold, evolve, about a quiet, long-haired boy sending messages into the world, trigger warnings, that he was coming undone. Loosened? Mad? Disturbed? Who knows! How many of us are confused and distressed and angry? I can't say what the boy did or articulated. I don't know, I don't wish to engage in conjecture. Truly, I don't wish to engage with anything at the moment. Just the keys of my laptop. It's all I can do to stay sane. Everything else I'd planned for today is finis. We are all so close to sudden ruin. Disaster. Immunity is nonexistent. Safety? Safety is an illusion. Vulnerable is what we are. We don't know what's around the corner. In the corner. Anything can happen at any moment. Any day. Valentine’s Day. While exchanging chocolates and candied hearts.

Joan Didion's words haunt me:

Life changes in the instant.
The ordinary instant.

When my children leave the house I say two things: “I love you. Be safe.” All I really should say is, "I love you."

            I love you, I love you, I love you.

[The photo above was taken with my iPhone at the local library—a former Monastery.]