Can we give them our stories without curling their backs into it, yellowed pages crisp and crumbling like sepia snow into piles we sweep from in front of our bookshelves? Will we love them only; wait and watch them turn to men who fail themselves for want of recognition?
Secret Shame: I don't feel like it.
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I don't typically celebrate these kinds of anniversaries. But I do know that I have need to say that they existed more than that they died. Just like we exist and will cease to. I hope we are all remembered by the lives we lead and that the way life leaves does not supercede that part.
“remember that those who came back physically alive did not come back whole.”
Daddy, 1965
“Dose’s” picture has been on my dad’s nightstand for as long as I can remember. A grinning boy that I’ve finally grown old enough not to see as “one of Daddy’s buddies” and thus an elder but as the boy he was who never got that privilege of being an “elder.” He would’ve been just over 70 this year had he lived.
Dose prophesied to his boys that he would not return home from their tour of duty alive. None of his brothers had lived through their 20s he told them and neither would he. Before the company shipped out, he was working on a tank whose brake was not properly engaged. It rolled over him as he worked; he lived a day or two without much of a head, my father recounts in his typically graphic reflection.
The grinning boy that never became a man…
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chocolate chips chocolate chips all the chocolate chips every one of the chocolate chips
I'm back from a beautiful weekend at the Southern Writers' Symposium...My voice shook. I got anxious. And too warm. And it was still a blast.
the weight her frame withers to betray her grief as you slink into a cause, case, memory, or the Opportunity that pulled at the seams of your village. So you should be aware that you also should not purchase candy, soft drinks, or cigarettes; wear hoods in rain, pray in a sanctuary, swim in a pool, shop and handle goods, fall asleep on a public bench; play music in your vehicle, request assistance when in crisis,
“welcomed her into the world
with the fanfare of 26 sleepless hours,
giddy and chewing bubble gum cigars
for a sugar high to get through a cnn broadcast
of a million men gathered three states over.
passed the day with nods of approval
to the t.v., her and mother sleeping peacefully…”
I was 21 years old, 20 years ago, on October 16th 1995.
That was the day of the Million Man March/Day of Absence.
In what I named “solidarity,” I refrained from attending class. I was a solid student. Mostly. So I doubt any of my professors batted an eye. Besides, almost half of the campus had boarded buses to DC so there was little of the typical foot traffic seen by HBCU campuses at that time of year–somewhere around midterms and homecoming and still warm enough on the East coast to be “out.”
I also refused to go to the part time cashier job I had just started at the Sears department store in the mall. It was a job I kept for an entire week. I quit that day in October because as I told my supervisor when I called to explain my absence, I didn’t “plan to…
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Source: Paradox: Remembering the Million Man March/Day of Absence On Its Twentieth Anniversary
darlene anita scott 