Telling Stories Short Nonfiction Contest Winners - part 4

Many thanks to everyone who entered stories into the Telling Stories Short Nonfiction Contest. I apologize again for how long it has taken to announce the winners. Thank you all for your patience.

We're very pleased with the winning stories. They are such different stories --- a dating disaster, a travelogue to a surreal land, a travel nightmare, and a mini trauma memoir. We've posted each here with an explanation of what we liked about them.

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This winning entry from Celene Carillo stood out for many reasons — the hook at the beginning, the pace of the storytelling, the self-deprecating humor, the kicker we didn’t see coming. It’s one of those stories that invites the reader for a fun ride that finishes before you feel like you’ve had enough. We’re satisfied but want to hear more about this writer’s adventures in dating. Thanks so much, Celene, for sharing this entertaining tale of woe.

In the House of Vomiting and Despair

By Celene Carillo

It started with the e-mail.

I read it and felt like I’d been punched hard in the stomach.

Sure, two months isn’t a long time to be dating someone, but things were intense. For example, a few years ago I used to dream about a man who built a blacksmithing shop in his yard. I loved this man. I wanted to find this man. So you can imagine how it felt when Mr. e-mail told me he’d built one in his yard just before my dreams started. They even looked alike – these two men – taller, lithe versions of Jon Stewart, and for a while I thought hotter versions of Jon Stewart, which I now believe is impossible in reality.

But I’m wandering. It started with the e-mail, and by “it” I mean the vomiting.

It didn’t happen right away, which is something of a surprise, since immediately after reading the e-mail I stood, faced my friend Jenny and her husband, David, who had both been reading over my shoulder, and said, “I am going to vomit.”

I said it over and over that day and largely thought it was true. The e-mail was like a scourge that had found its way from Oregon, where I live, to North Carolina, where I was visiting my best friend and her family. Perhaps learning a little more about it will help explain why. Here’s an excerpt, paraphrased:

"I like being with you. You make me laugh. But for various reasons I do not
understand I hold people at arm’s length. It might be past relationship baggage or
poor organizational skills. I need to figure out which. I guess what I am looking
for at this point is to find people who are interesting, kind, comfortable and are up
for an activity now and again. I would still like to meet up to play backgammon,
or watch a movie, with no other obligations but enjoying that time."

Activities.

Backgammon.

These were not entirely in keeping with my man friend’s prior behavior, which had included, among other things, pursuing me; bringing blueberries and red wine to an outdoor performance of Shakespeare we saw; claiming full credit for making the first move; being my date at a good friend’s wedding; shooting me that goofy, misty-eyed, “I want to sleep with you” look when I’d go off on topics like plate tectonics or the lottery; and, as it follows, sleeping with me.

It made no sense that this fit, seemingly virile 36-year-old man could suddenly go so Mr. Rogers on me.

Jenny and I spent the evening mocking the e-mail. “Would you like to play mah-jongg?” she asked. “No,” I said. “I am too busy participating in a Parcheesi tournament at the assisted living center. But let’s meet up for water aerobics next week. That’s an activity I enjoy.”

It felt good to laugh at him, at his sudden, panicked retreat. It felt good to toss words around like, “eunuch,” “flaccid” and “emasculate.”

We’d pay for that.

The next day I read my weekly horoscope. It was about purification, and included an anecdote about how an addled Robert Downey Jr. once purged himself of drugs by eating so much Burger King he vomited.

Now, say what you want about horoscopes – go ahead, I understand – but later that night Jenny threw up spectacularly in one brief but powerful episode. She woke up the next morning feeling like she’d been steamrolled. We made no connection to the e-mail, or even the horoscope, and instead put the incident down to old rice.

But it wasn’t the rice.

Two days later the shit hit the fan. Jenny had more or less recovered, and it was supposed to be my last day there. Almost as soon as David left for work, their 15-month-old son puked on Jenny’s shoulder. Then he puked on the bed. We put the incident down to the fact that babies throw up all the time. But an hour later their three-year-old vomited in the bathroom.

As if on cue my stomach started hurting. I was convinced it was autosuggestion. I had just eaten a large portion of tuna salad. This could not happen to me. I had to go work on Monday and hear the results of my Myers-Briggs personality assessment, the thought of which unsettled me somewhat less than my gut at that moment. I had to go and deal with the shambles of a relationship.

Trying to pack proved to be fruitless when I realized I was not packing at all, but instead curled into a fetal ball on top of a pile of my clothes and breaking into cold sweat.

Then the tuna salad came back.

And so, it seemed, did everything else I’d eaten in the past several months. I hurled so hard and so many times I thought I’d lose vital organs. I scared the children. Jenny called David at work to tell him most of the house was vomiting. He felt nauseous the moment he hung up. He managed to drive home before throwing up in the bathroom – it’s the only one in the house, so we carried buckets around that night due to the demands placed on the toilet.

Traveling was impossible. My low point came when I was on the phone with a representative from Northwest Airlines, delirious as another case of the sweats was coming on. “I was calling…I have to make a flight change…to see if you have any waivers…very ill…in the morning can’t fly my stomach…can you please hang on one moment,” I said, and turned to my bucket and vomited in a manner I can only describe as theatrical. When I picked up the phone again I had been put on hold.

Throughout this I experienced ebbs and flows of clarity and cognizance. I remembered what I said about vomiting earlier in the week. I remembered my horoscope. I remembered that goddamn e-mail. Something about it seemed dodgy, like a Ponzi scheme, or like milk left out in the sun.

The only advantage to the virulence was its brevity. When it was over the next day I felt like I had been steamrolled. Jenny and I concurred that the e-mail’s monumental crappiness had somehow invited bad juju into the house. We cannot, of course, prove this, but we don’t feel like we have to. Everything fell into place too neatly – or rather, not neatly at all, but you get my drift.

But we never did stop mocking the e-mail. And neither did any of the other people I forwarded it to, which numbers somewhere in the dozens.

This man and I live in a small town. The first time I saw him after the e-mail he froze for a good 10 seconds before bolting like a prey animal. I imagine this will become par for the course. But maybe I can put it down to his being late for something. Like a game of shuffleboard. Or canasta.

Telling Stories Short Nonfiction Contest Winners - part 3

This winning story from John Givot takes us around the world and places us in the midst our worst travel fear, the one Visa ran an ad campaign on for at least a decade: You’re in the middle of a foreign land and your credit card won’t work. You have no money. No place to stay. No way to get home. You haven’t eaten. What do you do? In this story John tells what he did and what he learned.

Broke in India

By John Givot

It was half past midnight and an army guy had just kicked me off the bench I was sitting on in the train station. He asked me what train I was waiting for. No, I told him, I wasn't waiting for a train, I needed to make a phone call.

The problem, which I didn't tell him, was that I had no money. Well actually, I had five rupees, about ten cents US.

There were so many poor people, I mean really poor, both in life and pocket, that I felt I didn't have the right to ask anyone for money. All around me, people were begging for a few rupees for something to eat. How could a rich westerner ask for the money it would take to make a phone call to the other side of the world, let alone get dinner and a hotel room.

I was in Patna, India, the capital of the state of Bihar, one the most over-populated, poor, and illiterate states in the country. And I could feel it. On the trains and the buses, on the streets and at the roadside stands. There was a heaviness.

I didn't realize it for a while. I didn't know why I felt like I did; yeah I was traveling alone and too far too fast, but still, my health was mostly good, I was meditating lots and whether I was alone or with people I knew, I was happy.

It was on the bus ride to Lumbini, Nepal, from Uttar Pradesh (the next state over from Bihar and in a similar state), that it became clear.

In the days before this bus ride, I had been feeling very judgmental and negative toward the local culture. I kept finding myself saying, "Indians this..." and "Indians that..." And then, while I was meditating in Kushinigar, the place where the Buddha died, or attained his final Nibanna, I felt this hardness on my body, a hardness toward other people. And then I felt it begin to crack. I felt myself soften a bit, and the hardness began to be replaced by compassion. Little by little.

So the next day I am on this bus from Gorakpur to Lumbini. I had gotten on the bus after all the seats where full, so I stood in the aisle. Almost immediately though, I was told to come to the front of the bus and was given a seat. Part of me wanted to say, no, I'm not any better than whoever gave up their seat, but it felt like it would have been offensive to say no at that point, and I was grateful to sit down, not minding that it was under the TV, which was about shoulder height.

Next to me was a nice Nepalese couple and their daughter who was about ten. After an hour or so, the man told me to switch with him so I would have more head room. This put me next to the bus door, where I watched the completely full bus take on more people. The isle was packed with people standing, and just when I thought there was no more room, another family of six would get swallowed into the mass. And then another family of five. It was amazing. About this time another couple, very poor, also with a small girl got on the bus. The woman grabbed my leg to support herself as she sat down on the floor, pretty much between my legs, and I could feel a deep agitation in her touch. With this couple and their baby, came that palpable heaviness. I could feel it, I could see it, and I could hear it in their voices.

After about half an hour, they got off the bus, and the mood completely shifted. It got lighter; the heaviness left with them.

But in the Patna train station a couple days before, I wasn't especially conscious of this heaviness, this "misery," the ignorance and deep aversion, the apathy of people surviving life. I just felt pulled down. And broke.

The thing was, I didn't feel poor. Here were really poor people all around me, and I simply had no money.

A few days before, my Visa card was rejected at an ATM as I was leaving Bhod Gaya, the place where the Buddha became enlightened, and a popular tourist spot. I didn't think much about it, I had some cash, and there were ATMs in every town. A couple days later, in the next town I was staying in, my card was rejected again. I got a little worried and went to the bank, where they told me the problem was that this was a small town, in the city it would work no problem. I changed the last of my US currency, a twenty-dollar bill, to rupees at the one fancy hotel in town, and continued on.

After arriving in Patna after a long day of traveling, I went straight to the museum to get in before it closed. It has a large portion of the "Bhudda relics," bits of his bones, which were left after his cremation. I don't understand why, but there is an intensity when meditating near them, and I had been told by a British guy to go there.

To see the relics, it costs five-hundred rupees, only about ten dollars US, but a fortune in India. So I spent my last five-hundred rupee note to meditate in front of the relics for fifteen minutes, then I meditated some more in the museum and a bit more outside.

Then I was rushing to the next train. Fifteen rupees in a jam-packed shared auto-rickshaw got me to Hajipur, the next train station, which was an hour away on the other side of the Ganges (and the world’s longest bridge I was told, at 7 km).

I arrived late for my train and without enough cash to buy the R60/ ticket anyway. Twenty minutes of standing in line for the ATM confirmed my fears -- my Visa card didn't work. I walked a mile down a dirty, dusty crowded, hot and humid night street, trying different ATMs along the way, not willing to pay for a taxi with my last few rupees. The ride back across the river, this time in the dark haze (the pollution makes the air in Los Angeles look like paradise) cost R20, leaving me with five rupees. I could only hope the card would work in the city, but I wasn't feeling it.

Back at the main Patna train station, and five ATM rejections later, I sat down on a bench and tried to sit my evening hour of meditation, while getting hammered by mosquitoes.

This is when the army guy kicked me off the bench. My five rupees weren't near enough for a phone call, which was about R30/ per minute to the US, but they would buy me a couple of samosas the next day, which I would want. (I had gotten sick the day before, and had only eaten fruit that day, after blowing my dinner out both ends the night before.)

I was exhausted, hungry, broke, without a plan, and didn't feel like I had the right to ask anyone for help. I had already been rejected after asking for help from an office in the train station. Part of me wanted to curl up and escape to sleep, but if I was going to get help from the US, it had to be during the Indian night, since the time difference is about twelve hours.

Surprisingly though, I felt OK about it. On the way down the platform, I walked into a different office, one that had five or six Indian Rail workers passing the time in it.

I sat down and explained my dilemma to one guy who spoke English. He wanted to try my card, so I humored him and we went out to the ATM together. Back in the office, he asked me how I was going to solve "my problem."

I shook my head; I didn't know, I really didn't. Another old guy sitting across the room gestured with his hand to his mouth, asking if I had had "kana," dinner. I shook my head.

He pulled out a hundred rupee note, quite a lot of money and handed it to me. I had to hold back tears.

Forget food though, a hundred rupees is enough for a three minute call home. I asked if I could receive a call on one of their cell phones and I about danced off to the phone guy's booth.

While I was waiting for my mom to call back with info about Western Union, the train guy asked me what my work was. Did I have children? Was I married? What was my religion? Sorry, I don't have a job, no wife, no kids, and no religion. The clincher though, was when he asked me whether I bathed every day. Made me feel pretty pathetic in his eyes. And to give him credit for the last question, I was filthy.

Sometimes we need to get humbled and helped and patched up by those who we think are less and who we think make our lives harder. It makes me realize we are all trying to get by, in the best way we know.

Telling Stories Short Nonfiction Contest Winners - part 2

Great writing can take you places, make you feel like you know how a place looks and feels on the other side of the earth. In this winning story, Zack Barnett takes us to a place few of us will ever see, to the edge of a Ukranian pit mine so large it can be seen from space. What does it look like? How does it feel? What lessons can it teach us? Read on.

A Pit Mine on a Spring Day

By Zack Barnett

How many times have you heard, “Hey, this weekend you and your wife want to go have a look at one of Europe's largest open pit iron ore mines?" That's not an invitation you're going get twice, if ever. After all, this is Ukrainian iron, the stuff they used to make the mythical curtain.

After this winter, an invitation to damn near anywhere would have sounded fascinating. For four months, the ice didn’t melt. It just turned browner by the day. Now, it was turning to brown slush and we were oozing our way into spring. An outing, even if it was to an open pit mine, sounded fantastic.

As newly arrived Peace Corps volunteers in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, we were up for anything to get us out of our dormitory apartment, which, with sheets of wrinkled red linoleum on the floors and walls of dusty chalk, had begun to feel like a prison.

Besides, like my friend Robert says, "You gotta recognize an opportunity when you see it." I think Robert was talking about a trip to Lake Powell or a raft trip the Colorado River.

But this, too, was an opportunity. Lena, a teacher from my school, and her husband picked us up like we were going on a picnic or something. We presented them with some pricy coffee and a box of chocolates, as is the Ukrainian custom. On our way to the mine we happened by Ukraine’s largest steel mill, which is no small potato in a country that produces more steel each year than all but a handful of countries in the world.

The signature aroma of the mill, maybe a mile from our apartment, lacks the subtlety of even a dime store perfume. My iron lungs will probably set off airport metal detectors when we get home from two years of sucking in the smell. An escape from that smell and the brown ice made this outing downright sublime, even if did take an hour or so of pothole slalom to reach the southern outskirts of our 80-mile-long city.

We pulled up to the pit mine's security gate, Lena’s husband got out and talked our way in. It wasn't unlike walking into a national park, only you don’t need to sweet talk the park service. Moments later we walked to the edge of a great chasm, a pockmark on the face of the Earth, like standing on the edge of a popped zit. A little horrifying, but still an amazing sight. The ecological irony wasn't lost on Lena, "Is it like the Grand Canyon?" she asked

Yes and no.

At almost 1,200 feet deep, 1.5 miles wide and almost two miles long, the seemingly bottomless man-made pit is a spectacle. Oxidized ore on one side even looks like Red Mountain in southern Colorado’s San Juans. Roads and rail lines spiral into the pit. Countless trucks ascend and descend. We stood on a small precipice overlooking the operation, not unlike an overlook at a national park. It truly was something to behold. I could have stayed all day watching the excavators dump raw ore into train cars to be hauled up a spiral of track to a giant conveyor belt pulling the ore from the depths to a processing plant, on its way to the giant, smelly mill.

It's one thing to breathe the air of an industrial city. It's another to watch the operations stir up the dust. They say our city boasts its own weather patterns because the five giant pits around town alter the temperatures so much they change the air pressure. They say the bottom of the pit can reach 140 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer.

This place is like an ant farm. From our viewpoint off-road haulers with tires taller than I am and elevating scrapers half a block long looked like nothing more than busy little insects gathering food on a crumby picnic blanket. The sheer size of the operation mesmerized.

Andre, Lena's husband, worked at the mine for three years after he finished university. His job was in explosives. Once a week miners drill holes into the bottom of the mine. Then they throw in a few thousand pounds of explosives and "boom" one the largest open pit iron ore mines in Europe gets a little bigger, loosening rock to be sorted and loaded into train cars.

It’s not too different from standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and reminding yourself that the little winding brown ribbon of Colorado River carved and is carving the Grand Canyon as you watch. I had to keep reminding myself I was watching similar work in progress as I stared into the pit.

Pits and mines like this made Kryvyi Rih an industrial jewel in the Soviet crown. Our region is one of a few on which the USSR relied on for steel production. Here, they mine and make it. What comes from the ground leaves the city as hardened pig iron. Blind, efficient resource extraction and production mark this town.

Locals say that during World War II, the Nazis took over the pit and processed the ore here before sending the steel, along with tons of the black Ukrainian top soil back to Germany. It is said that it took several years to rebuild the ore mining and steel-making operations after the German occupation ended.

Now, a company that owns one of the giant pits boasts that there is enough ore in the ground there for 60 more years. I'm still trying to figure out how a country that can oversee such an operation can't engineer a way to keep its teachers paid and its streets paved.

"We don't have a lot of museums or art in our city," said Andre. "But we do have a lot of mines."

After our visit to the open pit mine, we stopped by a store and bought the makings for a picnic: some fried meat, assorted mayonnaise salads, and a little beer – to kill the germs from stale mayo and meat – before heading out to a reservoir on the Ingulyets River.

"Extreme," smiled Andre as he negotiated his compact car over the lumps of what seemed to me to be an old Jeep track. What we found at the end of the road sent me reeling into a blue-collar Bruce Sprinsgsteen ballad.

There was a small pine forest with families throughout, playing soccer and picnicking. Meanwhile across the lake were the smokestacks, standing sentinel over the industrial empire. It felt like Gary, Indiana or somewhere in New Jersey, maybe.
Still, the day managed to wash the stink of winter from my brain. The frozen brown masses had finally melted from the sidewalk. Buds were coming and fresh blades of grass peaked out from the ground.

Even the vista of the open pit mine had been appealing. Never has fresh air or the smell of evergreen trees found a nicer home in my nose than that day. After a winter slogging through or balancing on the grime of the city sidewalk, a visit to the pit was just the quarry for my citified bones.

Even if it wasn’t the Grand Canyon.


(To see more of Zack Barnett's writing, visit http://zackbarnett.com/ )

Telling Stories Short Nonfiction Contest Winners

We are pleased to finally announce the four winners of the Telling Stories short nonfiction story contest. We will dedicate a blog post to each of the winners and share their stories and explaining what we liked about them.

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Sometimes we have to tell our own stories to fully appreciate where we have been and where we are now. This mini autobiography from Dawn M Tucker gives a perspective on a lifetime of addiction – what causes it, what it begets and what it takes to overcome. Many thanks to Dawn for sharing her story.

Three Words

By

Dawn M Tucker


Why couldn’t I have someone else’s affliction? Grandma Tucker saves every issue of National Enquirer she buys, and Aunt Elsie’s old age insures she only makes hard right turns in the snow. Me? I am an alcoholic.

From the moment I was conceived I wasn’t wanted. Both of my parent’s were married…only… not to each other. I was adopted at nine days old by the man who would become my father. When I was 4 years old he married the woman who would become my mother. We moved into a huge house in Cleveland and I had one sister and three brothers. We were a ready made family, just add water…or alcohol.

I was hit, kicked, stabbed, punched, thrown down, jumped on and choked all by the time I was nine years old. When I was nine years old I got down on my knees and prayed to a God I believed in. I knew there was a God, I just thought he was angry with me. I prayed to him anyway, I prayed for courage.

The courage to kill another human being. I wanted to kill my stepmother, the reason for all of the violence and pain. I thought if I killed her, I would also kill the pain. It was a prayer that was never answered. When I was twelve years old I got back down on my knees to pray again. Only, this time I was praying to a God I was certain had forgotten me.

I prayed again for courage, the courage to kill myself.

It isn’t my lack of trying that has kept me alive. I slit my wrist 8-10 times. Overdosed on pills and even turned the gas on in my oven and blew out the pilot light, in an attempt to drift off to sleep forever. When I put the razor to my wrists, I don’t know that I wanted to die as much as I just wanted something to hurt worse than my heart.

The violence never got better in my home so I found my own way to deal with it. I took my first drink. It did for me what I couldn’t do for myself. It made me pretty, even though I quit taking care of myself. It made me smart, although I often slurred my words. The best part? It took away all of the pain.

I found another solution to all of the pain. I ran away. I hitchhiked across the United States and got in to cars and trucks with both men and women. Most of whom were willing to supply me with drugs and alcohol. Sometimes for a price, sometimes not, though I was willing to pay whatever price there was.


I married at eighteen years of age and proceeded to have children. I drank through all of my pregnancies. When my children were infants I put them to my breasts, and never put down the drink. I piped my poison into them. When they were toddlers they followed me into the bathroom and held up my hair as I puked. They said things like “It will be okay mommy,” and “You’ll be okay mommy. It was never okay, because I was it, and I was never okay.

I guess I never knew what my drinking was doing to those around me. My family avoided me, my children asked me “Why do grownups drink?” I wondered why I drank? I wondered when my children would pick up their first drink?

That was a moment of clarity that finally saved me.

I crawled into the bathroom on my hands and knees like an animal and pulled myself up by the sinks edge. Looking into the mirror I fully expected to see a stranger staring back at me. Instead I saw absolutely no one. I had ceased to exist. I dropped to my knees and said three words that would save my life; “God help me!”

I am a recovering alcoholic with a wonderful marriage, career and life. My children grew up around the 12 step program I attend, and seem to learn much faster than adults (myself included.) I think my life can't possibly get better, but it does.

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Returning to the blogosphere

Dear Readers,

I apologize sincerely. I've been feeling very guilty about how long I've been absent from this blog. All I can say is life took over. Writing, teaching and multimedia projects have meant little sleep in the past six months.

In the thick of the busiest times, I'd wake up in a bleary-eyed panic over how I hadn't blogged in days ... then weeks ... then months. I'd vow to post something that day, but then my to-do list would present itself, all full of angry exclamation points and capital letters.

Looking back now, it felt like six months of back-to-back deadlines.

But I've conquered most of the list and can now turn my attention to blogging. Here's a preview of the exciting posts to come ... the Telling Stories Short Story contest winners, a new web design contest, my latest multimedia projects, author interviews and some great audio slideshows produced by my students.

Stay tuned. I promise it won't be long.

Amazingly Beautiful

Vacation photography has been a hobby of mine since age 9 when my parents took my brother and I on a driving trip to Yellowstone gave us 110mm point-and-shoots to document the family vacation.

We each shot at least an entire role of Old Faithful. They turned out as bad as you might imagine. I remember flipping through picture after picture of the steaming spot on the ground. Disappointing. The photos didn't capture the energy or the excitement or even what I remember it looking like. In 3X5, the geyser looked puny.

But some part of me was hooked and my parents must have recognized it. For the next vacation, they upgraded my gear to a real 35mm point-and-shoot. And ever since it's been kind of a side quest to make photos that look at least half as beautiful as the places I visit.

So I was excited this week to learn that one of my more recent vacation photos was selected for inclusion in the Amazingly Beautiful World Gallery. It's the photo below of the Mesquite Flat Dunes in Death Valley. If you look closely you can see a speck on one of the far off dunes. It's another photographer hunched over a tripod.


I encourage you to visit ABW Gallery. Its name says it all. The photos are inspiring. And I'm so pleased to have a photo residing among such gorgeous images.

Dear Inaugural Committee

On the day of President Barrack Obama's inauguration, I'm pleased to share a guest column from a dear friend. Lisa Raleigh wrote this letter to the Obama inaugural committee in hopes of earning a ticket to the grand affair in Washington today. But her piece is so much more: It captures a sentiment felt across the country. And so I wanted to share it with you.

Dear Inaugural Committee,
When Barack Obama was elected President in November, I thought I would feel only uncomplicated joy. So I was very surprised by the sorrow and grieving that came along with it: sorrow for the suffering and loss of two wars, a bittersweet grief for a long-lost sense of trust.

Grief had not been invited to my post-election celebration, but I did not resist it, seeing it for what it was: an opening of the heart. It’s like the moment when an accident is over and the wreckage is cleared and you can finally let down your guard. This election — and its amazing landslide proportions — represented a homecoming of sorts, a sense that I was finally safe after a long, uncertain journey. Safe enough to feel what I’ve been feeling all along, but have hardly let myself experience — for the past eight years, to be sure, and for much, much longer, nearly a lifetime.

The two wars I am grieving are Iraq and Vietnam. I am a child of the ‘60s and ‘70s , born in the latter days of the baby boom, and now a 52-year-old woman who honestly can’t wait for the post-boomer era that Obama is said to exemplify. Finally, thankfully, I am ready to get past it: the distancing and resignation that have been my defense for so long.

Here’s how I got there: Like so many others, my worldview was formed by indelible images brought into my living room by network news and Life magazine — starting, of course, with the horse-drawn cart of JFK’s funeral. Then fast-forward just a few years to soldiers in triage; Medevacs hovering; body bags on the tarmac; a monk consumed by flames but seated in a perfectly calm lotus; a kneeling man, his face contorted sideways as a pistol is fired into his temple, his executioner just at the edge of the frame. These were overwhelming images for a child in elementary school, for anyone of any age.

But then there were the protests, and this made sense to me. I thrilled to learn of young people marching in San Francisco and Berkeley, not far from my home, but I was far too young to join them. I studied the face of Lyndon Johnson, who addressed the nation again and again, but his expression did not reassure me; he looked more and more defeated over time, and in fact he was. Johnson had concluded that the war could not be won, yet he concealed this from us; all he revealed at the time was that he would not run again. Fortunately, Bobby had the fire; even an eleven-year-old could see that. Bobby Kennedy would end the war.

I didn’t realize my heart was broken when Bobby died. I couldn’t go there. I felt disgust toward at his assassin, but not sadness for his death. It was the beginning of numbness, a protective shell that I would eventually layer with outrage and cynicism, both of which I cultivated throughout my teens and beyond.

Questioning authority is any teen’s prerogative, but my adolescence happened to coincide with Richard Nixon’s presidency, and this was the perfect foil. I didn’t know anything about politics, didn’t feel the need: it was enough that the counterculture reviled Nixon as a schemer. It’s only now, after years of looking back, reading, researching and educating myself, that I know more of the particulars, the machinations devised by Nixon and Kissinger that prolonged the war for years, condemned tens of thousands of Americans and Vietnamese to their deaths and ended finally in the pretense of “peace with honor.” At the time, I scorned this distortion of language as just so much spin (we called it BS then). Yet as uninformed as I was, history has proved this exactly on the mark and so much more.
Today, however, we do call it spin.

Fast forward 30 years. It is March, 2003, I am 46 years old, and I am driving home from work, tears streaming down my face, listening to George W. Bush reassert his reasons for launching an attack on Iraq, which would commence the very next day.

Over the previous weeks, as the Bush administration made its far-fetched case for war, that sense of outrage I had discovered in the Nixon years caught fire as never before and finally found an outlet for expression. I joined millions around the world marching in the streets, protesting the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. But this wasn’t just the realization of a childhood fantasy. This time, I was informed. Not for a moment did I believe that the looming mushroom clouds, ominously invoked in unison by Bush and Cheney and Rice, were anything but a willful delusion — if not a cynical manipulation of our vulnerability and fear of future attacks. But the massive protests failed to halt the crusade; in fact, Bush seemed to welcome the vast scale of resistance (bring it on), allowing him to display his resolve in his reckless rush to war. And so I wept in my car, anticipating the devastation that would come. This rawness was short-lived, however; the sense of helplessness and futility was too big to contain, and gave way to bitterness and resignation. No more tears. Not till November, 2008.

In the early days of the Obama campaign, when I was first dazzled by his eloquence, I didn’t trust my response. Could this be optimism? Hopefulness? Exhilaration? It seemed so incredibly naïve. But then I literally had to ask myself “what’s wrong with being inspired?” And so I let myself be moved. Moved to exuberance throughout the campaign, moved to tears of joy on election night, celebrating along with so many millions of others this shining moment in our history. It was electric, astonishing. What if we all dared to care and dream and stake our claim in the impossibly possible? Now we knew. It felt like coming home — but to somewhere I had never been before.

And yet I was a raw nerve, too.

Just after Obama’s election, George Bush appeared before the press to declare, among other things, that he would make history by leaving his successor two active wars. His tone and body language suggested the profundity of the moment, the awesome weight of responsibility — and the absurdity of this struck like a dagger to the heart. There wouldn’t be two wars had he not arrogantly agitated for Iraq; there would be only Afghanistan, and maybe not even that had he prosecuted that war with sufficient commitment and integrity. A legacy of two unfinished wars does not signify greatness. It is not a point of pride. It is an open wound.

Bush reminded us, too, that he’s a “wartime president” — and even though I had heard him use this self-aggrandizing phrase before, it was a fresh blow in my vulnerable state. The tone-deafness of it: As if wartime is something he has honorably navigated. As if this particular wartime has not been a catastrophe, the direct result of his failed leadership.

It hit full force then: the heartbreak. I found myself sobbing at the spectacle of this cluelessness. The forced language of legacy-making. The incalculable human cost.

They crashed into each other, a train wreck, and I wept for all that’s been lost and shattered and ruined, lives, families, futures, the divisiveness at home, the chaos abroad, the shameless disrespect of our intelligence and trust. Then and now. I let the full weight of it in because I could now afford to bear it, because this particular train wreck was all but over, ready to be cleared. The grieving went on for days, not continuously but always ready to be tapped, the tender core of it: We deserved so much better.

It’s safe to come out now, is what Obama’s inauguration will mean to me. “Safe” may seem a fragile commodity in the world awash in crises, economic and otherwise. But there’s a more elemental kind of safety, I believe: the security in knowing we are now in the hands of a leader with wisdom, maturity and heart — whose vision inspires confidence, whose authority we can trust. And it’s not just the man himself; it’s the millions upon millions who elected him. We have affirmed, together, that this is what we want, and this collective wisdom is a comfort and a blessing, too, a redemption. I feel as if I’ve found something I lost a long time ago.

And so I’m ready. Maybe we’re all ready. To move on.

Thank you for the opportunity to put this into words.

Sincerely,
Lisa Raleigh