THE MAN I CAN'T REMEMBER

THEME: DOING THE RIGHT THING

The most important human endeavor is striving for morality in our actions.  Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it.  Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to our lives.  ~ Albert Einstein

A man changed my life one day in his office. I was one of eight or nine people he probably saw that day, certainly not the most dramatic or deeply felt for him, a university-based counselor of many years’ experience. I only saw him once, but our encounter showed me my path and gave me a nudge to follow it. I owe him a lot, but I can’t repay it because I don’t remember his name.

As my college career wound down, I was suddenly faced with the eventual dilemma of any English major –how would my ability to crank out a paper on imagery in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” translate into a career? Too bad I waited to contemplate that question until late in my final semester, but I’d been living in the moment, not in reality. The moment contained much drama and tumult, as the Viet Nam War raged and so did protests and marches. The working world seemed very far away.

I was unfamiliar with indecision. I’d always known what my next step would be. Now, I was about to step into the abyss. Why had no one warned me that I’d have some serious career decisions to make? Yikes!

That distress sent me into the college counseling center and across the desk from the man I can’t remember. I don’t recall what he looked like, but I do know that he spotted my counselor-like nature and sent me over to talk to his old pal, the head of the Department of Counselor Training. From there, I entered the program and walked out two years later with my Masters degree.
          When I began, in addition to enormous relief at having direction again, I had lofty thoughts about reducing suffering in the world. If I could provide an authentic human connection with people who felt alone in their worst days, it would be worth doing. And I had some indication that I’d be good at it.

I’d had a rare glimpse of that possibility because the YMCAs I frequented in high school and college were piloting encounter groups, where a small group of strangers would come together, attend to the dynamics of the moment, and develop new skills to connect and become self-aware. The hope was that such groups would help with community building and personal growth, and ultimately societal change.

As I sat in my first groups as a fifteen year-old, I was a spectator. Too shy to speak up, I learned to listen and watch. Pretty soon I was able to take the emotional temperature of the room and of each participant. I could sense how the session was going, who was on the verge of an outburst, who was detached, who was suffering. I had no idea that I was in training for my eventual career.

After the first session, shamed that I had not spoken up, I struggled to come up with what I would have said if I had been able to. That question became my focus in each subsequent group. Once I finally became able to identify what I could have said, I began a long project to improve my timing and be able to come up with it and out with it in the moment. If one of the leaders’ goals was to help participants conquer their own limitations, they had a success story. I was still shy, but I was no longer tongue-tied.

I began to watch the leaders to attempt to figure out which one would say what next. I began to see the spaces where they could. When I stepped back, I could see the amazing fact that if you put strangers in a room with a common mission of communicating from the heart, differences went out the window and community happened.

I wanted more of that. I just hadn’t figured out where to get it until my encounter with the man in the counseling office. My friends were about to run off to teach math, help deliver babies, surf in the Pacific. I would learn how to save the world, one person at a time.

It wasn’t long until I learned I’d have to modify that goal – I would try to help one person at a time improve their functioning. It would be a matter of helping them find their own resilience, not saving anybody. I could only support and witness them as they overcame their suffering. I got adjusted to my limitations, and set aside the grand ambition.

Others didn’t stop so short. Beginning in the 1990s, I began to hear of medications that had the potential to eliminate traumatic memories entirely. And later, techniques that promised to allow the memory to persist but removed the crippling emotions that were attached to it. Now that so much more is understood about memory and how it is formed and stored, and about trauma and its effects, various points of intervention can be identified that weren’t available in the past.

For instance, I was taught in graduate school that once formed, memory was fixed. Now it is known that recalling a memory opens a door to modifying it, or even erasing it. According to the theory of reconsolidation, each time a memory is retrieved, it changes and becomes possible to alter.

I was also taught in grad school that the brain was fixed - it could deteriorate but not improve. Now it is known that brain plasticity allows it to regenerate, form new connections, and even become freed from its traumas.

As more wars have created more victims of PTSD, and their suffering has become well-known, the stakes for figuring out how to use these new understandings has gone up. If we ask our service members to kill and risk their own safety for our cause, while we sit in our living rooms watching sports, should we l least offer to remove the scars that remain?

Early on, scientists discovered that a beta-blocker medication called propranolol interfered with the initial storage of a traumatic memory. Later, it was found that the same medication may also be able to interfere when the memory is called up even years later.  Studies continue with other medications that may be even more potent and have the potential to expunge toxic memories entirely, although they may take other nontoxic memories with them.

Another technique called EMDR, for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, involves no medications, but eye movements guided by a therapist trained in the procedure. It is often successful in blunting the traumatic emotional content of a memory. Other similar noninvasive methods are also in use.

While these interventions are being further developed, several questions present themselves:

Who should receive these dramatic interventions, and when? For example, should a rape victim wait for an intervention until after the trial is over so that her testimony will include the expected display of emotion?

If we become able to erase the terrible events that happen to us from our memories, what does that do to our personhood?

And the ultimate ethical question, should we go ahead and implement every intervention that we become able to do? If not, what will hold us back?

Who will decide which of these measures is appropriate for which individuals? How bad does it have to be to justify the complete erasure of memory?

 The man I can’t remember and I didn’t have to ponder such large questions. He went to work helping me find the answer to my question about what I want to be when I finally grow up.  He asked me good questions: when I’d been the most energized, who I knew that I especially admired, what I thought I could be good at, what I would be proud to do. He didn’t try to erase my discomfort, but did put the right questions in my head, and it turned out I had the answers. Then he handed me some tools to act on those answers, and said goodbye. I sure hope I called back to thank him.
             Future helpers will have a far larger arsenal of tools to work with than he did. They will regularly meet with people in far more distress than I, who may end up forgetting far more than their counselor’s name.

CBH – O4/12

THE LAST THING YOU WANT TO LEARN

THEME: FOR THE SAKE OF THE CHILDREN

There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children. - Nelson Mandela

Once a year, a group of slow-moving people gathers in my driveway to accomplish a major feat – walking across the street. They have cancer and are in the active phase of treatment which may weaken them physically, but not in the ways that count. They head toward the Wellness House, a cancer support center that sits across from my house. Instead of staying home which they could easily justify, they come out to kick off the 5 and 10K walk that raises funds for the center. There are balloons, music and prizes. While the walkers set out, runners pace around trying to stay loose in the early morning air, dressed in team T-shirts with a loved one’s picture on the front, or a team slogan like Cancer is a word, not a sentence. MORE . . .

The whole event is bathed in grief. No one wants to be there, wearing a picture of a person they love. No one wants to watch someone find it hard to walk across the street. No one would wish this trouble on another.

But life being what it is, you don’t get what you want; you get what you get. And what you get gives you a chance to learn things you never wanted to learn. So the people show up, and what comes out is the resolve that rests underneath the grief.

Anytime of the week, I see folks walking through the doors across the street for a support group meeting, or lecture, or exercise class. Some of them have cancer; some of them love someone with cancer. I feel glad for them that they have this place to go. I feel sad remembering my friend and her family who had no such place to go when she faced cancer back in 1990, when her children were young teenagers.

The ones that hitch my heart the most are the children, hurrying in to join a bereavement support group. The arrival of grief into a child’s life introduces reality, roughly and suddenly. It begins with the illness: Instead of Grandpa being the guy you love to play with, he becomes a sick person you have to take it easy around.  If Grandpa dies, the child begins a lengthy walk with grief, and the adults who remain must learn how to help.

Some of the basics of helping children to grieve are well-understood:

§     Let them see you cry, and tell them that it is normal.  It gives them permission to express emotion when they need to. And it lets them know that they don’t need to hold theirs in to help you.

§     Communicate clear and realistic messages. “Grandma died.” “Her body stopped working.”  “It cannot be fixed.”

§     Avoid confusing statements like “She’s gone away,” or “She’s sleeping,” or “She’s gone on a trip far away.” Children are concrete thinkers and will misunderstand those references and wait for their loved one to show up one day.

§     Watch how you portray God. Instead of implicating God in the disappearance of a loved one, as in “God needed her so he called her home,” promote him as a source of comfort and help, if you so believe.

§     Don’t be afraid to ask questions of your child, and encourage him to do the same. Find out what your child knows about death, and about the terms you are using to explain the death. Your conversations may need to be repeated again and again as your child grows in understanding. You may still be talking about this periodically for years, as kids need to reprocess their grief as they move through developmental stages.

Other realities about grieving children are less well-known:

§     Kids are masters of intermittent grieving. They may seem in the depths one minute, and then ready to dash out to play the next. It is as if they have a circuit breaker that saves them from overload. Be assured that this is normal.  In fact, the rest of us might be smart to learn from them.

§     Kids often believe that they are responsible for the death of a loved one. Since they naturally believe that the universe revolves around them, they overestimate their power, and their responsibility. They can imagine that anything they did wrong could be the reason for a loved one’s death.

§     Grief is not one-size-fits-all. For children as well as adults, there are wide ranges of emotion, as well as different styles of grieving. Everyone has an individual grief footprint. Avoid imposing outside constructs like stages of grief or expectations about timing.

Expect siblings to grieve differently from each other, because they will. Make sure they know that and reassure them that as long as they do not stop themselves from grieving, they will be okay.

§     It is important to involve children in story-telling about the deceased, and in rituals of remembrance. But judge carefully how and when to carry this out. There is no rule about whether a child should attend a wake or funeral. That decision can even wait until the last minute, and the child should have a chance to weigh in.

Whether they attend or not, let other rituals emerge over time. A visit to Grandma’s favorite picnic spot, or cooking a meal made up of her favorite foods, or remembering her birthday by going through family pictures can all be healing. Children can suggest their own favorite ways of remembrance.

§     Finally, make sure they know that grief gets easier over time, even though it never fully goes away. Tell them that the power of good memories grows, and the intense longing lessens.

This year when the day for the walk arrives, I plan to concentrate on the children in their T-shirts, who are doing what they can, and their parents, who are showing them how.

CBH 03/12

SHE COULD HAVE HAD IT ALL

THEME: TAKING A LEAP

All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience. ~ Henry Miller

I get temporarily popular every time a celebrity overdoses, suicides, or runs into some sort of ditch. Given my therapy background, people want to hear my attempt to explain such behavior. With Whitney Houston’s death, the question seems to be a three-parter: Why couldn’t she 1) kick that Bobby Brown aside, 2) get clean and sober and stay that way, and 3) get back to singing like she was supposed to?

There is an angry question lurking just below: How could she have a gift like that voice and squander it? 

As I sit here I contend with dueling earworms.  With Whitney singing, “I will always love you…” and Adele belting, “We could have had it all…” it’s hard to think. But I’ll take a crack at it.

I will stipulate that the behavior of an addict is incomprehensible to the normal bystander. Broken promises, lies, financial ruin, lost jobs, fractured relationships, and all the rest render the addict irresponsible, weak, pathetic, and stupid in the eyes of others. Their behavior looks and feels intentional.

The people who care about them eventually need to take a step back to save their own sanity. Into that space, especially with celebrities, others who don’t actually care about them step in ready to take part. Plus, anyone in the vicinity who shares their affliction helps to keep it going. It is a powerful system bent on its own continuation, and might help explain Bobby Brown’s continued presence in Whitney’s life. Whoever sent him away from the memorial service at least made a point.

But how does the addiction take a death grip on an otherwise capable, even exceptional, person like Whitney?

I have a laundry list of explanations in my head, cobbled together from years of observing and theorizing. Pick your favorites.

*One theory says that all the addict wants to do is chase the exquisite pleasure of his or her first time. Maybe, research suggests, the pleasure that an addict gets from using his substance is on a whole different level than most people would experience. The problem is that the pleasure is never to be found again.

*Addicts describe their disordered thinking as if they are constantly spinning, which only allows them to encounter reality occasionally on a brief fly-by.

*Some describe finding that the first time they ever felt normal was during their first use. Later, many can feel normal only while under the influence. Worse, as they become physically addicted, to not use becomes painful due to withdrawal symptoms. It is no longer a matter of pleasure, but pain.

*Once life becomes too painful to face, drugs and alcohol provide escape. Pain can originate with losses, or failed expectations, or runaway expectations, or the depressive effects of the chemicals, or a hundred other sources. Once an addict finds his way to oblivion, it becomes a regular destination.

*Addiction is a disease that takes charge over the body, mind, and spirit. It makes the decisions, dictates the feelings, and drives the behavior.  The individual is no longer a person with free will, but more like a host to an aggressive parasite.

*What goes on is an expression of cellular changes, the interaction between brain chemicals and receptors, that expresses itself in egregious behavior.

*Outside influences of people, places and things can start things up, keep the process going, or encourage relapse. Bobby Brown and the music industry come to mind.

*The individual hasn’t done enough “research” yet to become convinced that the problem is unmanageable and that therefore entering recovery is necessary. Denial slips into and out of place. The lucky ones hit bottom in time.

*Finally, it is indisputable that the addict misses a lot, being under the influence and possibly in a blackout for many crucial experiences. What they can’t remember is not part of their experience, and therefore does not motivate them toward change.

Those ideas and theories form a mudball of cause and effect. They may all be true, or not. They certainly make clear that there is no one simple answer.

If it’s hard for me to understand, it’s even more incomprehensible to the addict. And no one is more disappointed in the addict than he or she is. They wish for normalcy. But achieving it in the face of addiction is a big order. It requires large doses of knowledge, support, and hope. The longer the track record of failure, the less accessible those become.

Meanwhile, the addiction offers its own gifts: immediate pain relief, oblivion, escape. Whether the addiction seeks to chase the sublime or escape the intolerable, it’s an ironic struggle. While the body and mind duke it out in a private battle, it cannot be won without outside help, practical or spiritual, or both. How to make that happen remains a mystery for many.

Maybe we should confine ourselves to other question: Do we have gifts we are squandering? At least we can do something about that.

CBH 02/11

MY BRAIN ON FREDDIE MERCURY

THEME: GOOD INTENTIONS
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be. ~ Douglas Adams

Sometimes I wake up with a song in my head. Often the tune quickly dissipates, like the last wisps of a dream I can’t hold onto, fleeting and forgotten. I may recognize it as part of a commercial jingle (“1-800-588-2300 Empire”) that I hear all the time, or a line from a familiar song (like “This Land is Your Land” which I heard the other day). Its unimportance helps it go away.

But other times, the song stays with me all day long and into the next. My blood seems to pulse to its rhythm, and the words run like a news crawler in my brain, no matter what else I’m doing. When it finally lets up a couple of days later, it’s a relief.

Usually I know exactly where it came from, and that it’s my own fault. It follows a binge of sorts, like when I play the Leonard Cohen Live In London concert album intending to hear “That’s How the Light Gets In” just once, you know, to check on the lyrics and remember exactly how he said it (“Everything has a crack in it/That’s how the light gets in,” that perfect line). My good intentions are then overrun by a need to hear the whole thing, and try to place myself back into the concert I heard at the Chicago Theater a couple of years ago, a better-than-church transcendent night.

And then I play it again, and a few more times over the day, until I have worn a groove into my brain that sleep won’t erase.

But it isn’t just Leonard. My periodic visits to You Tube to see Freddie Mercury and Queen’s Live Aid set, which pundits call “the greatest live performance of all time,” set me off too. Just this fall, I commemorated the 20th anniversary of Freddie’s death by viewing the entire Live Aid performance, let’s just say, more than once.

But then I woke up to an exhausting, sweaty full-tilt version of “Radio Ga Ga” first thing in the day. I’d prefer to listen to Freddie when I invite him, not when he just decides to show up. I guess the truth is that since I invited him in the first place, it’s just that he never left. All right, more truth. It appears I can’t stop my binges once I start. Like all addicts, I believe I can control my conduct, but also like all addicts, I can’t control the consequences.

But it’s not all disturbing. Today I woke up to Temple Grandin, the autistic brilliant animal scientist portrayed by Claire Danes in the movie of the same name, belting out “You’ll Never Walk Alone” during the scene of her college graduation speech. A few days before, it was the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” which transported me back to my college dorm room when everything was ahead of me.

My friend Lorraine helped direct my attention to all of this. She seems to have a related and more mysterious version of this song phenomenon. She wakes up every day with a different song in her head, but not one she can pinpoint a connection to. The day we had lunch, she reported that Leon Russell’s “Delta Lady” showed up, not that she can remember hearing or particularly liking it. Her preferred playlist –Beatles, Eric Clapton – never appears and she wonders why. She is on the case, and has learned that this condition has a name, involuntary musical imagery, sometimes called musical imagery repetition or MIR.

Well-known prestigious scientific journal Wikipedia reports research showing that 98% of individuals experience this phenomenon, which it prefers to call earworm. Apparently women find that it lasts longer for them, and are more irritated by it than men.

Clearly, I have a touch of that too. I don’t know where “Good Vibrations” came from for instance, except that I must have a vault in my brain where all rock and roll tunes and lyrics from the sixties and seventies are stored.

I realize now that I was warned of trouble of this sort early in life by one of my favorite childhood stories. Robert McCloskey, the Make Way for Ducklings guy, wrote two Homer Price books, a series of stories about small-town boy Homer and a peculiar bunch of friends and relatives. In one, his Uncle Ulysses installed a shiny new jukebox with changing-color lights that cast a mesmerizing glow on his “up and coming” lunch counter. A mysterious stranger came in, installed a new song on the jukebox, and disappeared. Customers were entranced by the song, but then could not get it out of their heads, no matter what they did. Worse than that, they could not stop singing it. Soon, the entire town was afflicted. (Lyrics: “In a whole doughnut/There’s a nice whole hole/When you take a big bite/Hold the whole hole tight…”) The ultimate solution (spoiler alert) was to go to the library and consult the wisdom of Mark Twain. Why Twain? Because in an essay, he had posed the dilemma of getting something stuck in your head and not being able to shake it. Lorraine and I and Wikipedia are not the only ones to ponder this.

I’m sorry to include this last issue, in case it brings to life some buried demons, but Homer got me thinking about the songs that I take pains to avoid completely, lest they re-infest my brain. First, and worst, Disney’s “It’s a Small Small World” (“It’s small world after all/It’s a small world after all/It’s a small world after all…” until you want to scream). Then there’s Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” (“to give me hope to carry on/You light up my days and fill my nights with song” – that’s for sure). And, affection for Julie Andrews aside, there’s “Do Re Mi” (“Doe a deer, a female deer/Ray a drop of golden sun…”) ad infinitum. Maybe there are bad song receptors in the brain that bind with such “doggerel” (Twain’s word) and won’t be extinguished.

In fact, maybe that’s the message. While I go around thinking I’m in charge around here, my brain is doing plenty on its own. It plays the songs it wants to hear, thinks the thoughts it wants to think, and lays down its own pathways, at least until I catch on and try to get it in line. Until then, I guess I have a soundtrack all my own, even if I’m not the one holding the baton. 

CBH - 01/12

WRITING YOUR WAY HOME

THEME: HOME
I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself. ~ Maya Angelou

By day, it was a typical conference room with moveable tables and stackable chairs. By night, or at least this night, it became a salon, a home away from home. The tables made a cozy U-shape, so everyone could see and be seen. Table cloths covered each, and antique-style lamps shed soft light. Plates of sweets and coffee took up the table near the door. Wordless music played quietly in the background.  The words would come from the dozen women who filed in, late because there was childcare trouble – too many kids with too many needs, more than had been expected. The chaos of resistance and misplaced toys and unfamiliar places took its usual toll on both mothers and kids. New childcare recruits were summoned to help, and we could begin.

These women looked tired. They had all experienced domestic violence and were finding their way out, either through shelter or education and counseling or groups for moms and kids. They had children to care for, jobs to find, homes to make. Homes that would be safe.

Each one seemed to exhale as she entered the room and looked around. Some wandered to the other end of the room to see the art exhibit that had been produced a couple of years before by another group of women, and their children. Others went straight for the tables and a few minutes of solitude. A frisson of anxiety hung in the air. Each had volunteered to be here, and we, the organizers, had implied certain promises: Come, write, tell your story. It will do you some good; and if you choose to share, what you write will help others understand.

Karen called us to order, offering words of welcome and assurances of confidentiality. She introduced John the facilitator, a writer himself and teacher of writing. He first went around the circle and asked each woman to share her past experiences with writing, which varied from lifelong journaling, to nothing since middle school, to college creative writing classes, to songwriting. He listened, asked questions, used their names. His message: No matter what you have or haven’t done about it lately, you are a writer who deserves a place at the table.

Meanwhile, the rest of us organizers sat in an outside circle, checking our watches and tapping our feet. We started late, Childcare ends at nine, Let’s get them started our brains chattered. It turned out that John was getting them started.

He played a video that his high school students had prepared for the occasion. A succession of students read poems they had written in his class. Each line began with “I remember…” (a prompt that was originated by artist and writer Joe Brainard in 1975 and is often used in writing circles.) Some of the poems were lighthearted, some painful to hear. The students modeled honesty and courage.            Meanwhile, through his conversation, John was busy establishing himself as a safe and peaceful man who had respect and appreciation for his wife. More exhaling.

We’d given each of them a nice journal, but when it was time to write, most requested the copy paper we had stacked in the corner. More space? Easier to crumple and discard? Anyway, they wrote in silence, right away, I remember…. The music clicked off in the middle. No one noticed.

John called time about 25 minutes in.

“Now, who would like to share?” he asked.

There was an immediate volunteer who read her recollections of childhood summertime, her grandmother, and fireflies.  Another followed with remembrances of high school, another on the births of her children. The reminder was clear – these women were far more than domestic violence survivors. They had lives beyond trauma.  

As each read, the rest listened intently. They laughed together. As each finished, she received a thank you from John. As time passed, the volunteers came more slowly. The tone changed. Imbedded between the fond memories started to appear darker and deeper things. The poems began to speak of red and swollen eyes, and wishing to turn back time, and feeling like an outsider even at home. Vivid details appeared, the kind that people focus on to escape the intolerable, a red flower pot, rainbows of light on the rug.

The room transformed again, from writing salon to sacred space, where the truth could be told in safety.

When John brought the evening to a close we asked everyone to evaluate the experience to guide us for the future. They wanted more writing, more participants, more chances. They wanted us to share the project with colleges, museums, radio audiences, Facebook, schools, libraries, and online.

We asked everyone who would be willing to share her words to let us make a copy to keep. Some did, others almost did but held back at the end. Some wanted to expand their piece and turn it in later. Now a box sits in the office labeled Our Story Project, locked for privacy but open for submissions anytime day or night.

They left to pick up their children with goodbyes and thanks. The organizers stayed to deconstruct the salon and turn it back into a meeting room so it could host a breakfast for donors in the morning. We didn’t need to deconstruct the evening. It was a success and there would be more.

We were just about done with the cleanup – the leftover cookies were packed for the next day, the lamps and cloths and power strips set aside for pickup by the volunteers who had supplied them, and the tables were rearranged into a breakfast-friendly layout.

One of the organizers came back in with a message from the child care staff.

“I don’t know what you did to those women in there,” she’d said, “but do more of it. They were completely different people when they came back to get the kids. They were smiling and calm. It was like they’d all had massages.”

 Another transformation. We had invented the first writing spa. Come. Make yourself at home. Think of only yourself for a couple of hours. Express yourself. Find out you are not alone. Be heard.

I’ll let you know when and where you can read their words.

CBH - 12/11 

WHAT PHOTOGRAPHS CAN DO

THEME: REMEMBRANCE
She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes. ~ Frank Deford

My father is 14 or 15 in the photo, posing with the big band he helped organize in high school. He wears two-tone saddle shoes, neatly tied. They look new. The photo has been hanging on my family picture wall for 15 years waiting for me to really look at it. I finally did.

In any old picture, the first thing I notice is the shoes. They hint at normal life, intimate suggestions of routine and circumstance. As I study his picture, I imagine him tying them on that morning, and wonder what was going on in those minutes: was he bickering with his sisters; what breakfast smells wafted upstairs; what was on his mind?

His eager and confident face hitches my heart. He has no idea that he is almost halfway through his life already, or that he will find a great love and have a child. Or that he will die suddenly and not be able to finish what he started.

It was around 1930 then. The Depression was two years old. Across the world in Germany, where his family originally came from, Adolf Hitler was winding up ten years of speech-making, positioning himself to head the Nazi party. My father doesn’t know about that either, sitting there holding his saxophone.

                                                                 *****

I climbed down off the bus into a busy parking lot lined with busses. Leaves crunched underfoot. It was a cloudy October day toward the end of our tour of Central and Eastern Europe. We waited behind a group of children chattering as they trailed their teachers though the gate.  They quieted as they put on the hearing devices their docent handed out, and filed out the back door, leaving room for us. Auschwitz was a busy place.

Our docent was Magda, a compact blonde woman with a lined face and matter-of-fact manner. She must have been a child in the era she would tell us about, if she’d been born at all. She led us under a gate with a sign proclaiming, “Arbeit macht frei,” which translates “Work sets you free” or “Work brings freedom.” This cruel and ironic legend was used at the entrances of all the Nazi camps except one. It seemed to promise the Poles, Jews, gypsies, handicapped and others who the Nazis determined to eliminate that there would be a way out.

                                                                        *****

The next picture on my wall shows some of my husband’s ancestors, captured in a formal family tableau, wife seated, husband beside her, adult children and their offspring lined up stiffly on either side.

The seated woman is Seraphina Studer Ruder, whom my daughter discovered when she did a family history project in middle school. Next to her is Fridolin, her husband. The names that bring smiles to our lips didn’t seem to cheer them up any. They both look pretty grim.

They’d left Germany in 1855, missing Hitler by 34 years, to settle in a German Catholic enclave in the middle of Illinois, and set themselves to farming.  They posed for this picture about the time Hitler was denied entrance into art school in Vienna, for the third time.  Had they stayed, would their children and grandchildren have been drawn into Hitler’s plans? If he’d been accepted into art school, would there have been any plans?

Hints about their lives jump at me. Their chairs rest on a rumpled shag rug. Her shoes, partly hidden by the nap, are petite and worn. His are dress shoes, well-used and scuffed. That morning for the picture, I imagine they put on the best they had, knowing they were laying down a record for those of us who would follow. It must have been a hard life with little leisure, in flat farmland that must have compared poorly to the hills and mountains of their youth. 

                                                                        *****

Magda led us to a long row of tidy red brick barracks, with a guard tower at the end of the road. Barbed wire ringed the area. She explained that the barracks had been built several years before the war for the Polish military, but turned out to be tailor-made for the Nazis’ purposes. Some buildings housed small numbers of SS troops, others crammed in hundreds of prisoners. We entered the first building, noting the terrazzo steps worn down in the middle by thousands of feet.

Large black and white photos hung on the walls, illustrating Magda’s talk. They captured the arrival of families, who stood together in ragged lines, children clinging to their parents’ knees. Their clothes are mussed, their shoes dusty, their faces grimy. None of them knows what is ahead, that soon they would be separated, men from women, children from mothers. Their faces are stunned and unknowing; exhausted people who couldn’t imagine the unimaginable.

We are told that the photos were taken in secret by two SS officers.  Their motivation is unknown. I prefer to think that they were moved to preserve proof of what they couldn’t stop. Their action allows the 1.3 million people who visit each year to better take in what happened here. Without the photos, it would be impossible to believe.

We climbed the steps to the second floor of the barracks. Magda explained how prisoners were herded from here to the basement and told that finally they would have a shower. They were told to leave their suitcases and remove their glasses, clothing, and shoes to retrieve after they’d bathed.

Once the “shower room” door was locked, primitive gas canisters were dropped through chutes in the ceiling and minutes later, all were dead. Their bodies were transported to the end of the row of barracks to the new crematorium, by Jewish prisoners who were spared in order to carry out this duty. Back in the barracks, belongings were gathered up and stockpiled.

She led us to a series of large rooms. Lights were low. On each side was a huge glassed-in case, floor to ceiling. The first was filled with suitcases carefully labeled with name and address as if they would be needed again.  Thousands of wire-rimmed glasses filled another.

Behind the glass in the next room sat an enormous pile of shoes, everyday necessities turned into horrific trophies. No one spoke in the room.

We came next to the children’s window that held toys and baby blankets, and a mountain of kids’ shoes, turned every which way as if scattered at the front door after school. To look at one pair was to imagine its owner, so we looked away. We filed by, eyes brimming.

The last pictures were of the liberation of Auschwitz in March 1945. Many Nazis had fled by then, marching hundreds of prisoners into the countryside. Soviet liberators ushered emaciated survivors in striped uniforms down the path we had just walked on. Some prisoners looked directly at the camera. Had they dared to expect this?

                                                            *****

On my wall, the post-war pictures begin. In a four-generation snapshot, my toddler husband sits on the lap of Fridolin and Seraphina’s son, his Buster Browns dangling. Parallel pictures from our two families stand side by side, showing two ex-soldiers, glad to be back to normal life, neither knowing what is to come.  

My husbands’ parents laugh, barefoot at a well pump, holding him high. Sixty-some years later, they still laugh together. Mine lean into each other, dressed for a night on the town. My mom wears a sophisticated career girl ensemble and high heels, my dad a business suit, all shine and polish. I would be along in a year or two, and he would be gone a couple of years after that.  

Whether caught up in waves of history, or in private tragedies, it is just as well that we can’t tell what is coming. But it is a gift when we have pictures to hold the moments still where we can visit them, for remembering or trying to understand.

CBH 11/11

A Happy Story about Borders?

THEME: WHAT A CHARACTER
Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It seemed like a nightmare. Borders on Michigan Avenue was closing? Where would I go to have a tea and look down on the Water Tower park at throngs of shoppers? What would I do when I could no longer browse the crazy assortment of off-brand books in the basement, or look through the ironic Christmas cards on sale in January, looking for the perfect ones for next year?  Where would I find another store with such character? If this iconic location could fail, what did that portend?

Soon there was an announcement. False alarm. It wouldn’t close after all. Phew! That was close. But the fear had been planted.

Months later, the worst came true. They would all close, even the suburban one I had been going to since my kids were small and I was brand new to the area.

I visited the wake for my dying Borders three times. The first time, facing only 20% reductions and abundant piles of gift items I couldn’t relate to, I tried but couldn’t find a fitting remembrance.

The second time, I bought a travel book for an upcoming trip to Europe and was out the door without even trying to find the perfect goodbye. A prickle of guilt followed me. As book prices climbed in recent years, even though Borders remained my psychological home, in reality I had often defected to the local used book store, and of course, amazon.com where I could buy new or used whenever I had the whim.

The third time, the discounts were up to 60 to 80%. The pile of unrelated-to-reading items had grown. The lap robes, tote bags and stuffed animals posed the question: Did the store go down the tubes because they lost focus and invested in items that no one would buy? Or because of defection by people like me? Or was it that they didn’t jump on the e-book bandwagon fast enough? Or all of them?

In the Psychology and Self Help sections I found some gems – Altered Egos, The Brain that Changes Itself, The Power of Story. Finally, something worthy to remember Borders by.

The checkout clerk was unreasonably cheerful – she was losing her job and I was the one who was sad?

On my way out, I passed a large sign, a letter from the store manager. She thanked customers for 20 years of loyalty, and reviewed some of the good times we’d had over the years. She apologized to the author scheduled for a book signing in October after the store would be closed. She asked customers not to worry about the employees, who were stocked with happy memories and would surely land on their feet.

Below the sign sat a stack of cards. “Please leave us a message. What did this store mean to you?”

I scribbled something about my kids growing up there, and me too. And good luck. And I’d miss them. And I was sad.

As I drove away. I wondered how the supposedly evil big conglomerate that was going to mean the death of the small independent book store – remember the plot of You’ve Got Mail? –  morphed into a refuge, with cozy reading corners and coffee, not to mention play space for kids, that felt like home?

I talked with friends from other places who’d said their own goodbyes to Borders with similar regret. Until I talked to my friends Linda and Van.  Every Sunday they have a ritual – they trek to the Borders in the Quad Cities, listen to music, enjoy their coffee, browse newspapers, pick up a book or two,  rain or shine.

They figured their fate would be the same as the rest of us, until their creative store manager Kit Whan heard about Books-A-Million, the third largest bookselling chain, expressing an interest in acquiring some Borders sites. She decided it should be hers and started a campaign. 29,000 letters and emails later, Books-A-Million brass stopped in to see what all the fuss was about. They signed on and offered employment to any interested Borders employees.

So they will live happily ever after, with any luck, although I am sure there will be a certain adjustment period. Instead of a nightmare for them, it became a dream; as if the lover who just spurned you fixes you up with a new guy, not as handsome or familiar, but definitely promising. I hope it works out.

A happy postscript: Books-A-Million is taking over 13 other Borders locations, bringing happiness to other lucky duck communities. The rest of us will just have to grieve for a while. Then we’ll have a big decision to make: are we going to take up with that Barnes and Noble guy, the buttoned-up corporate one who lacks the warmth and personality we’re used to, the guy we wouldn’t give a glance to before? A tough decision that.
CBH - 10/11