Thoughts and Prayers

 It’s a Wednesday night, entering into Thursday morning and I’m sitting here with a pit in my stomach filled with stone. Another school shooting. Another group of students and teachers shot and killed. More students and teachers and parents traumatized by a gunman walking into an Elementary School and opening fire. The stories are always slightly different, but they are EXACTLY THE SAME. 

It was a 1999 when school shootings entered my world, when we all watched the horrors of Colombine unfold. I was 12. Even then I didn’t really understand it and the effects weren’t really there yet, not for me at least. I remember that year my aunt gave everyone clear backpacks for Christmas because her kids’ school had mandated them in an effort to make school “safer”. It sat in my closet for a few years until it was finally donated in one purge or another. Even as a kid, I thought, “How the hell are clear backpacks supposed to help?” This was the same year Never Been Kissed came out and we saw Drew Barrymore walk through metal detectors and have her metal nail file confiscated, “This is a weapon…” That was a weapon…

I was in high school and we started doing drills. At my high school if you heard “Polar Bear Swim-a-thon” you were to go into lockdown procedures. I don’t remember anyone taking it too seriously. A. the name of our lockdown procedure was inadvertently funny. B. this kind of thing wouldn’t happen in my town…right? I’d known all of my classmates for years. We grew up in the same small sheltered town in Massachusetts. This couldn’t possibly happen here. Senior year, there were a few bomb threats, but it was chalked up to someone wanting to get out of class. 

It’s a Monday in April, 2007. I’m in classes at Suffolk University, enjoying a newfound freedom in both my personal and educational existence. Then we hear about a shooting at Virginia Tech. I heard the story of Liviu Librescu, a professor and Holocaust survivor, who propped the door to his lecture closed so his student’s could escape to safety. I was heartbroken for everyone involved, for this man who lost his life saving his students, for the fear that these things brought. But, I went to Suffolk. We didn’t even really have a campus and it just didn’t seem like a necessary worry. 

It’s a Friday in December 2012. I had just finished teaching my class and went to check my mailbox in the front office. My friend who was the school’s secretary had a look on her face. There were a bunch of people huddled in the front office. That’s how I learned about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Sitting in a school 80 miles away, thinking about how close it felt and how different it felt this time. I wasn’t a student fearing for my life, I was a teacher. These kids were my kids. I read about the victims but this time I saw myself in Victoria Soto, who died protecting her students. She was only 27 years old, two years my senior. I went home that Christmas and had a conversation with my family that if anything like that happened at my school, there was a good chance I wouldn’t make it home. That if forced to make that choice, I would protect my students with my life. This is a conversation and a choice educators should not have to make. 

It was around 2015-6 when we had a lockdown drill in the school that I vividly remembered because I found a student in the hall a full day afterwards shaking and crying. When I asked what was wrong, they couldn’t tell me. They couldn’t say. They’re older sister was walking by so I let her take him to a quiet area to calm him down and we’d get him back to class. She later told me that after the lockdown drill he was so terrified that this could happen here. He was so scared that this was real. Who has the heart to try to explain to a shaking, traumatized, terrified 12 year old that this is, absolutely, a reality. Around the same time, students were speaking about lockdowns and I told them to take it very seriously, to always look for escape routes, and to never look back. I told my students that they are, under no circumstances, to check on me but to run like hell. I told my students point blank that I would hold the door no matter what. One student looked confused and asked what I meant. One his classmates said outright, “She is going to be our shield…even if it means standing between us and a gun.” She was right…but God almighty is that a horrible thing for a student to understand. 

It’s the 2018-2019 school year, and I’m teaching in Morocco. A student jokes about guns, keeps picking things up and pretending to shoot people. When it happens, my whole body tenses up. I sit everyone down and explain that this is not something that we should be joking about. This is not something “fun” but something that is really, REALLY, scary where I come from. Students literally cannot understand or contemplate how this could possibly be the reality that I grew up in or that I taught in before. 

It’s 2022 and it’s happened again. I’m on the phone and someone asks me reluctantly  if I’ve heard. My response, “Oh…the school shooting…” Even I am horrified at my reaction, but I literally have to shut down when these things happen until I am back in the privacy of my own home and have the time and energy to sit and cry and process. 

It. Just. Keeps. Happening. Again. And. Again. 

And every time it happens, “Thoughts and Prayers” roll in….but absolutely NOTHING CHANGES. Nothing. If people mention gun control it’s “stop politicizing the deaths of children”. If people say anything other than “THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS” they are somehow disrespectful? People come out of the woodwork to say, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” “It’s not the guns, it’s mental health in this country!” or “Even if we ban guns, people will get them illegally and then only the criminals will have guns!” 

I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know what we should do to fix this. I just know that I am an educator and I am so tired and so sad and so heartbroken and I’m writing this while blinking back sobs because I am so tired of seeing kids in the crosshairs and I’m so sick of teachers having to become martyrs to save the lives of their students. It’s heartbreaking. It’s horrific. It’s inhumane. It needs to stop. This has been going on for so long…and it just needs to stop. We could really use a hero right about now…if only they were real. So for now, hug your kids tight. Pray that they make it to adulthood, I guess. Thoughts and Prayers.

Feels Like Home

Right now, I'm sitting at my regular café in Ifrane and my life is about to change again in just a few weeks. For the past three and a half years, I have lived in this small, college town and have made a home for myself here. While I'm gearing up to move to a new city with a new job, to begin a new chapter of my life, I find myself reminiscing more than usual. (I am the kind of person who is almost haunted by memories, usually the good kind with a tinge of sadness and regret at missing whatever or whoever I'm thinking of). 

This started because a Facebook post popped up on my feed about Colonel Robert Shaw. For those who do not know him, he is emblazoned in history as the leader of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, an all-black regiment made of freed men of the time after the Emancipation Proclamation by Governor Andrew. His story, and the stories of his men, were famously brought to the silver screen in the movie Glory. In Boston, right in the middle of the Suffolk University "campus" (because our campus was basically just Beacon Hill) there was a monument to Colonel Shaw and the 54th regiment. Suddenly, I was standing on the corner of Beacon and Park Streets, waiting for the light, heading to the Dunkin Donuts across the street. Of course, I live abroad but as the historian in my can't help but try to re-orient myself when curiosity strikes me, so I pulled up a map. Then it's like I'm back in college 15 years ago...

But now writing about it, I'm realizing I was brought back to college a few hours ago. I was watching something online and someone was complaining about the smell of dryer sheets wafting around in the clean morning air, and how it was basically air pollution. Immediately (and I mean that moment you get almost yanked by the hair to a memory), it was 2005 and I was walking across the busy main road to Temple Street and there was a vent at the bottom of Temple that wafted that same smell. To me it was like someone sprinkled candy in the air. My mother had long since stopped using any scented laundry detergent or softener, so smelling it was something I genuinely missed. I was sitting on one of the stone blocks placed between large wooden flower planters, listening to the guy who used to stand at the end of the street and play the harmonica sometimes. Now, fully engulfed in this schlep through my memory, I learned that the Derne Street Deli had closed. I remembered they had this ham and cheese sub that I used to adore, and I used to rely on this place for lunch very regularly. I was a commuter from about an hour outside of Boston, so I packed my schedule into 3-4 days and one semester I remember I was there from 8am to about 10pm...just...yikes. 

Suddenly I find myself about 2 blocks away at the corner of Ashburton and Bowdoin. I'm walking in front of cars to cross Bowdoin, heading to my work-study office at the Government Department on Ashburton finishing my roughly 10-15 minute walk from North Station. There on the corner, is Capitol Coffee House, one of my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE places in this area. I found myself almost sending a message to them, despite the fact that it has been over a decade and there is no way in hell they remember me, just to tell them how much their little place meant to me. The number of times I finished that walk and grabbed myself a much needed coffee before getting to the office. The steak and cheese subs I worshipped over the years. Their croissant breakfast sandwiches where the bacon was so perfectly cripy that watching me eat one was bordering on inappropriate. And my all-time favorite embarrassing memory of them, when my jaw was wired shut and I was so desperate for something I wanted to eat (or rather drink) that I ordered their cheese and broccoli soup and ended up looking like I had eaten Swamp Thing at the office. The small pieces of broccoli did not magically squeeze between my teeth, but instead became stuck in the net of elastics holding my braced teeth together. Not ideal, but hilarious for my friends at the Government Department who understood my desperation and just kindly told me to go brush my teeth. The point? It was always the little things. The places I frequented and became a regular customer and how wonderfully they were to me over the years. The smells and the sounds that make a place home, even for a short while. 

Now writing this, I find myself flashing back to the many places I have called home over the years. There are little things about these places that will always be near and dear to my heart. Mike, the guy who checked IDs at the Cantab Lounge in Central Square, Cambridge who would ask me every time I went when we were getting married. Sitting on the new patio at the The Field, sharing a beer with my roommates. The fact that my little spot in Bishop Allen Drive smelled like Indian food all summer because of the place across the street next to the Co-Op where I used to get spices in bulk for wicked cheap. The VFW where I worked and met so many of my friends, many of them much older veterans, when I moved to Amherst. Riding my bike all around the valley and strapping it to the front of the the PVTA busses. Going for late night post-drinks food at Local Burger. Grabbing a drink at the Yo Ol' Watering Hole in Northampton and striking up a conversation with strangers. 

I moved to Morocco with 4 bags of stuff and nothing else. Since August of 2018, I have made friends who border on being family. I am a regular at my shops. At my regular café, one of the waiters saw me once from a distance and held his thumb and forefinger apart to indicate "Coffee?" and I ordered with a thumbs up. I know people's names, I see them around town, I've met some of their families just in passing on the street. I celebrated my birthday with the family who lives in the house my apartment is in. I cannot express how comfortable I have become and how much I love my life here. But remembering all the places I've called home, it conjures memories of how easily I am able to fit into new spaces. Suddenly, I'm slightly less scared to give up my life here and move forward. I wrote a poem when I was a kid about how I wished to be a vagabond, and now I'm seeing that although I do have permanent places to rest my head, home is wherever the wind blows...as long as I have my cats.