From the Editors
February 9, 2005
I just walked past a pretty bad car accident in Oakland. A woman, to avoid an oncoming car, slammed into and slid under a parked car whose primer gray bumper now rested delicately on her candy apple red hood.
By the time I passed, the EMT had pulled her from the wreckage. Her open door revealed a limp airbag and shattered glass along her dashboard. The paramedics covered her with a silver reflective blanket, protecting her from the sudden burst of rain, but she had nothing except her puffy down jacket to protect against the wet asphalt the men had laid her down on. Her face, through its cocoa colored skin, was already beginning to bruise, and a tiny rivulet of blood ran from her nose.
Before I saw her, I could hear her crying; the mundane city landscape of trashcans and electrical poles hid her away from vision until I only inches away. She was weeping as if she’d lost something, as if something had gone terribly missing. Perhaps she mourned her lost fearlessness, that innate sense we all have until some mortal event fractures it into a thousand pieces out on the street for everyone to see that nothing can touch us, that we are safe from all harm. Once that is gone, no one is ever the same.
A small import carrying two blond women was also involved in the accident. The woman from the passenger seat stood outside the car as I passed, stretching her shoulders and arms, and pacing. I was coming from physical therapy, and I silently wished she wouldn’t have to go as well for whatever injury she tried to stretch away. A cop kept the driver seated in the car, and was giving her a play-by-play of the action. I don’t know if he was trying to make her feel bad, or if she just couldn’t turn her neck to see. Big, silent tears fell from her eyes as the cop narrated.
I noticed that she resembled Brooke, my soon-to-be sister-in-law who’s moving here next month, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how I was probably going to be listed on Brooke’s emergency contact information for all the forms she’d be filling out soon for jobs, apartments, and doctors. And then the accident became too real, too personal for me to take, and I had to stop watching and walk away.
My students often ask me what to write about and how to know what makes good writing. Those questions are not the same thing. I tell them to write about what they know, or what they would like to know more about. To write about what moves them, confuses them, and, most importantly, what scares them.
That might be my own bias. I’m afraid of a lot of things. And in order to puzzle out those fears, I make myself write them down and explore them. And by explore, I mean I list in my journal at night what scared me that day, and then I meditate on the list, all the while staving off sleep by re-imagining the ways I might be braver.
I don’t do this every night. Sometimes I write comedy routines that I will probably never perform. Other times I make lists of things I don’t understand, like this:
Things I Don’t Get
- Monty Python
- The Upright Citizens Brigade
- [My fiancé] Corey’s closet mess
- Arbor Day
- Why I’m afraid of things
–Jennifer Meccariello
