[Note: This entry is an example of an SSW session written during workshop with my freshman writing class at the start of Spring Semester, 2020. SSW stands for “silent sustained writing,” a weekly practice of 40-minute writing sessions conducted throughout the semester where the entire class, including the instructor, “looks at the world as a writer,” selects genres and topics of the author’s interest, and writes. The weekly sessions build into a “writer’s notebook,” that explores what Nancie Atwell calls an author’s “writing territories,” and that approaches the task of “teaching” writing through a process of “cultivation” of a writer’s identity, rather than through specific instruction in teacher-chosen skills. Early in each semester, I try to model how the process works for me–and how it has evolved for me as a writer over time. It’s about writing as a way of being, rather than something learned, mastered, and checked off….]
So it begins again. Another writing notebook. Today is a special day. You can tell so much about a semester’s writing from how it starts. I hope my students can grow into this routine … I feel I need to help it work for them, to model, to get them started. But today is special for other reasons, or rather one big reason. Today is Ang’s birthday, and there’s so much to remember—so much to think about. Loretta will be going to All Saints cemetery this morning to be close to him. It’s her tradition on January 23rd, one that was never quite right for me, and as she says, we all grieve in our own ways. For me, one of the most healing things I could do, one of the best ways for me to “be with” Ang is to write about him, and so the two worlds meld. I’ve had so many SSW sessions thinking about Ang, being with him. I look forward to today’s.
Thirty four, and just under nine years since he left us. That other anniversary, February 5, is in two weeks, and so I’ll need to power through till then, and then start breathing again. Is it this time of year—the doldrums of late January? Or is it the need to reach 10 years beyond losing Ang—that theory of mine that there would be a 10 year adjustment to the loss of him, whereby my life could slow down, stop, turn, and then slowly start up again—with new memories, new foundations, new hopes…. One more year, and I’m feeling that my suspicion was right—the time was needed, is needed. Ten years is about right, at least as a minimum.
On Ang’s birthday the past few years I find myself going back to 1986 and that experience of childbirth, or rather witnessing childbirth, for the first time. That was an eye-opener. But then, everything about Ang was an eye-opener. I feel a need to convey something of Ang to my beloved students. He was so special to me, and they are all special, or becoming special to me, the way students always do. I hope they let themselves go places today that surprise them, touch them, and open up new possibilities.
That day in 1986 was about five days before the Bears played in and won their first Super Bowl. I was a huge fan that year—as was just about everyone in Chicago. I was scheduled to work my security job that Sunday and miss the game … but Ang was born and so I was able to take off. That was his first gift to me, and it was a good one. On the day of his birth, while I was at Walgreens picking up some needed things (diapers?), I saw in the checkout lane a very expensive (to me, at that time) commemorative magazine previewing the big game. It was $5.00. I was very poor at the time and couldn’t justify spending that much on a frivolous thing like a Bears magazine. But Ang gave me the excuse! It was a present for him. And it was, and when I told him about it when he reached the age of reason, he cherished it, he read it, and he kept it close (till it became tattered and lost). But really, standing there in Walgreens, I just wanted that magazine. On Super Bowl Sunday, I placed him in his baby seat, put him in front of the TV, and told him, “Ang, you’re about to see something that no living person has seen, or could appreciate. You’re starting out life well, young man.” And he continued well, becoming a huge Bears fan and sports fanatic, in the healthiest way. He died on February 5, 2011, the day before the Packers won their last Super Bowl, and I thought, wryly, what Ang would do to avoid seeing the Packers win….
But that was not really true. Though he did have a healthy and playful sense of rivalry with the Packers, he wasn’t bitter about their success. Terry reported grousing to Ang about the Packers in one of his last conversations with him. Not only had the Bears missed a very easy late-season opportunity to eliminate the Packers, but they proceeded to be eliminated by them in the first round of the playoffs. As he often did, Angelo transcended the dynamic saying, “Yeah, it sucks that the Bears aren’t in it, but it’s the Super Bowl!” And so, on he moved, with joy and purpose, commencing one of his last organizational acts, collecting baht, and running a pool for the Super Bowl for his friends in Thailand. (We got the winnings the next week when we traveled to Thailand to bring Ang home.) We have pictures of him running the show, organizing things, at a bar, of course, looking as though he were conducting significant business, but really just making squares.
I wish I could create a picture of Ang for my students. I think of my longstanding reflection of “no explanation needed”—the great comfort in there being so many people who knew Ang intimately, and who “got him”—who would remember actions and gestures and stories and tone of voice—immediately, instantaneously—deeply and expansively, without any words. Angelo was a landscape, and the memories of him are the flash of lightning that illuminates the entire territory in an instant, giving you a view of more and more dazzling imagery than you could imagine unless you had first seen it.
In so many ways, he was just an ordinary college-type kid—funny, self-absorbed, conscientious, concerned about social justice, concerned about social outings, tireless, indulgent, generous, the center of attention, the guy in the background, the bursting through life of life itself.
His friends still visit him on Facebook, posting links to news and culture that remind them of him. Sometimes they just call out to him in longing for him. I don’t visit the page much, just as I don’t visit the cemetery, I guess. I’ve been fearful of locking down on one experience of him, becoming dependent on it, and then having it go away. The part that doesn’t go away is my own memories…. The store is limited … but he’s still so alive in those moments. He speaks through them, in a way that seems new and changing. He was such a presence for me, and he always surprised me—so I’m missing those surprises—but I still have the smile, the wryness, the energy, and the illuminated landscape that makes me feel “wow.”
We’ll celebrate tonight, with cake, and one of his favorite meals, probably pizza—though we’ve been debating what he would choose, since his diet changed so much in the last few years. We will gather and be the normal, well-adjusted family we always are. We might tell some Ang stories, but maybe not. We all will continue grieving for this lost landscape—so known, so understood, so appreciated—in our own ways.