Following a past week’s article on words, this week I’ll focus on action. Using the narrative third person, I’ve written this piece.
2011.
The date typed on the page no longer sparked her memory. Unlike 1998, 2001 or even 1989, 2011 brings to mind few thoughts beyond confetti of the millennium and perhaps the pleasing, parallel rhyming of two 1s next to each other. The year 2011 is already full of hundreds of births and blogs, natural disasters, countless deaths and dollars, civil wars and international intervention and approval, awesome and awful demonstrations of nature and of human minds, hands and hearts in coordination.
How are the reactions troubling if times are different?
A light-haired Scandinavian Gustie was recently paging through the 1968 edition of the Gustavian yearbook.
Pictures captured those same chairs in Complex and a few of those same faces were still seen on campus in 2011—those few solid professors. Black and white photos sealed moments frozen in time, like when Gusties protested the United States involvement in Vietnam. Plays regarding the benefits of voting political action positive and life-giving….
Professors who have been at Gustavus for decades, she thought, how much they have seen! Physical, philosophical, social and temporal changes in the student life. What defines our generation of Gusties?
Thankfully, story makers like the skilled teams of such and such, the medal winning individuals so and so and the ever memorable speaker Jane Smith left their imprint on the community. Too bad there’s no easy way to remember it all.
She clicked away on her clicketytappitytap and felt a sense of accomplishment as the computer blipped sent. Somewhere in space, things were getting done. Done with a chapter of her reading, she relaxed and poured over instead her Book of Faces. Faces of the 21st century, teeth white with privilege and Crest, musty books in the library where some good soul takes care of them. Takin’ care of business, indeed! They really sang those words right, she thought.
She peered out the window and watched the snow peel back its blanket atop the hill. Trash into treasure, she waited for the neighborhood thrifter to stroll around and collect the bottle caps and recycle the pop bottles. She watched just till the spring sunlight cut its way to the hills across the valley. Afternoon strolls came and went, but the bottles remained and sighed with complacency at the four-leafed green beer bottles nearby. No such luck for the minority today.
A first glance at this girl ensconced in the couches of Old Main would succeed in verifying shallow assumptions: her gender, her hair color today, her ability to focus on something. However, given the half-’80s half-Victorian, half-hippie, half -millennium clothing, how could one possibly deduce her time period? In the book in her lap reside stories of revolution, bloodshed, merriment, renaissance, reform, struggle and conflict. She glanced at the painted rock below, years of community conversation layered into its painted shell. She wondered what ever happened to those covered up conversations about morality, community and God’s presence in all of it. There’s a poster about that somewhere. A debate.
Time will tell if that will unify or separate, bring a grappling for peace or isolation and alienation.
Her life goes on in endless song, above earth’s lamentation. Someone sang that last year. …Or was it this year, two years or forty years ago?
I forgot.