Dear You...

If you're reading this, it no doubt means you've had something to do with helping me care for and teach the two biggest miracles possible in my life. For me, those miracles are named are Grace Rosemary and Calvin Michael Stroh-Simon (the Magnificents). But you can think of anyone's miracles, yours and everyone's, along with mine as you read my note to you.

All week long I've meant to drop you a line and send this cyber hug and feel you hug me in return.  I'm having a hard time handling this week, and I know I'm not alone.  But I've been feeling FIERCE love and appreciation for the people into whose loving hands I place my miracles when my hands don't have enough hands.  I hope you're feeling that love on an enormous scale, and I hope it somehow makes such a painful and frightening time to be on this planet maybe a little less painful and frightening.

I found myself getting a little...let's call it "vehement" on Facebook right after "the incident."  I kept seeing and hearing over and over about how the problem is that we don't let God into our schools, and I guess by extension into our lives, and that's why we're in the mess we're in. And I suddenly knew that I had to get something off my chest before I lost my mind. Not to hurt anybody's feelings, or to be mean spirited about anybody's belief. I hope no one took it that way. It just felt necessary for my sanity, such as it is.  I'll share it here, it might resonate for you:

I don't want to do this. I really don't want to do this. But I'm going to do it. I'm going to come out and say that if I hear one more suggestion that this tragedy is the result of a banishment of God from our schools I will scream. God is not absent from schools. My children are not led through any so-called prayers in school, but they are surrounded by love and kindness every day that they are there, and THAT is God, folks. So let's stop using this horrific event to piss and moan over some imagined attack on organized religion running rampant in our world. Some of the most saintly people you will ever meet don't know the words to any commonly sanctioned prayers and have never set foot into any houses of worship. This horrific event was the result of a person losing complete touch with who he was, losing complete touch with reality, losing complete touch with Love. Let's just get it straight, shall we, and get to the business of creating a world where we take care of each other on a consistent basis because we're all freaking HUMANS no matter where our parents decided to take us on Fridays or Saturdays or Sundays while we were growing up. (Steps down from soapbox a little sheepishly but couldn't keep her mouth shut.)

Some of my friends have asked if they could share this post because it matches how they are feeling, and I am completely comfortable with that. It's not as if words are adequate, or that there's any sense to be made of what's happened. Sometimes I even feel guilty about the level of devastation I'm feeling.  After all, what right do I have to walk around shellshocked and agonized? "My" people weren't there.

But if I'm feeling this way, and if you are too...somewhere deep down we must know something that we don't know we know about who "our people" actually are. So if you're wondering why you're waking up in the mornings like you slept the night through with a few tons of bricks on your chest, this pesky inner knowing might have something to do with it.

Maybe it feels familiar, something like how you starting feeling back in September 2001 and haven't really been able to shake since.

Or after seeing those people, lives that numbered into the 6-digits, washed out into the Indian Ocean while we were still unwrapping Christmas presents back in 2004.

Or what about August 2005--were you like me, were you watching, right on your own TV screens, thousand upon thousands of abandoned souls waiting on their roofs for help that never came right here in the United States of America? Feeling vaguely sorry if, like me, you'd never made it to New Orleans, because so far as you could tell, it might be gone forever?

How were you doing while we were all looking in on Japan last year as it drowned in the Pacific Ocean, and had to keep reminding ourselves that it wasn't a movie we were watching, that the participants were not actors?

How about the year before while we all watched Port-au-Prince crumble? Did you seriously consider adopting a Haitian child, and maybe actually do so?

Have you been in a movie theater since July 20th just this past summer? Maybe to take your kids to the latest 3d extravaganza? Did it feel different than ever before like it did for me?  I didn't want to have to mentally plan an executable escape route while watching the previews before Hotel Transylvania, I love the previews, but I did what I had to do.

And what about back in October when you heard there was a woman out in Staten Island whose preschoolers were ripped out of her arms and washed away forever, while her first-responder husband was elsewhere saving the lives of other children, and all because someone wouldn't open his door and let them in. We're told that the man in the house turned his back to his sliding glass door to make it easier on himself as she pounded and screamed and begged for help. I wonder if that worked for him. I wonder if he's had a moment's peace since. I wonder if I can ever be good enough to wrap my head around the compassion I need to feel for that man, maybe above all others, or else accept that I'm a total hypocrite.

Do you remember where you were when you saw the first pictures out of Columbine?  I do too. Cancun. My first and only Caribbean vacation. I was hoping I wasn't understanding right, but unfortunately my Spanish is good and I couldn't unhear what I'd heard.

Maybe you're like me and one of your dearest friends is from Syria...and while you can call your mother, or email her, or drive a piddly 60 miles to have her hold you, your friend is lucky if she can somehow get word that her mom and her dad and her sisters and her brothers and untold numbers of family members that are lodged in her heart are living safely in a home that is still standing.

I could go on. By now you're probably begging me to stop.

Minute by minute in these times we're living in, times when we can see human suffering on the other side of the world in HD so vivid it's hardly discernible from what you can touch in the room you're sitting in, I'm feeling the need to get the word out, in any way I can, that not only are we here for each other, but that being here for each other has become mandatory. Not some nicey nice sounding Hallmark platitude. Nope. Inarguably and permanently mandatory. And guess what,  we no longer have the luxury of being shy about it. You don't get to feel self-conscious or tentative about it anymore, not if you want the world to survive another winter. Sorry, but those days are gone. You can't even hate people who cut you off in traffic and do stupid, STUPID crap on the roads, not anymore, not if you know what's good for you. You have to unlearn the lie that they're just idiots in other cars that you'll never see and don't mean anything to you. This may be the hardest thing you ever teach yourself. And by "you" I of course mean "me." But I think you're catching my drift.

I'm not talking Nobel peace prize winning behavior either, that's for sure. I don't know about you, but I can't do that.  But I can smile at a bank teller before I  take the money and run. If you're funny, make a harried retail worker at a check-out counter laugh by making a goofy joke.  And for the love-a Mike,  for goshsakes, how about some eye contact while we're at it.  We have become so comfortable not doing this...comfortable with saving our kindness for "our people," like greedy grasping misers who only have so much good will to spare, so better to save it for the people we have to live and work with or we'll run out.  We've become so unused to connecting with people this way that we're almost embarrassed when we do it. But I have a theory that you can't make eye contact with people and not remember that they are "your" people  -- maybe at levels so deep that you don't notice that you know this,  but that's ok, it still works. It's become as vital as clean air and drinkable water that we get this straight, hasn't it?  And so many of us know this already. You know even if you don't know you know. I don't know anything you don't know, I just happen to be more verbose than most. I should be baking right now, I have 6 batches of from-scratch unbaked cookie dough waiting in my 'frige. But instead I'm sitting here running off at the mouth to you. Because for me, written words help get me there. For you, it could be anything that gets you there.  So song as you get there.

If you want to pass these thoughts along, if it feels comfortable to you, go ahead.  Whether it's to someone who works in school and doesn't know how they're making it through the day, or someone who knows and loves people who work in school and don't know how they're making it through the day...well, that doesn't leave anybody out, does it? I guess that's my point.

All my love and support and appreciation and hugs and even kisses (restraining orders be damned),

Your friend,

Tracy

p.s. If you're sick of everything being so heavy and you can't take it anymore and need a break, read the post right before this one about how and why I fell on my ass in my shower the other day, you will laugh at me and it will help.
http://everlovingmess.blogspot.com/2012/12/from-tracys-little-book-of-perils-of.html