A Child's-Eye-View of History

In memory of an event to which I played unsuspecting witness 50 years ago,

I decided to share a poem that I wrote for a poetry class in 2012. 

As young as I was, I am amazed at the clarity of the memory, particularly in the light of not really knowing what was going on at the time. Children do pay attention, but its frequently up to the adults around them to help them interpret what they see.

A Child’s-Eye-View of History

November 24, 1963—six days before my long-awaited seventh birthday

and begged-for blue bike, I hope...

Anarchy and anger crackle. A white-knuckled tension fills the room.

My mother—swept up in mass-hysterics— is crying.

“What just happened?” I ask, sprawled on the couch

fevered, thick-throated, too-sick-to-be-bored, but inquisitive

as frenzied, frightening images unspool before my eyes. Dragged

unaware from  my reveries of red-tasseled freedom,

I am witness to infamy.

Lying there, a junior curator collecting memories  

mined from endless iterations of gray-scale images.

Popping-gun flash, black-sweatered man drops

as chaos erupts around him like brown-sugared anthills.

Along with my lamenting nation,

I am witness—live, in black and white—to the ruby-tinted slaying of assassin.

“What just happened?” I ask again.

I catch the sweater-man’s name—Lee Harvey Oswald.

Who uses three names?

Except for red-faced mothers who are crying, or angry

when you hit your little sister

or come in late for dinner

because you were riding your shiny, new birthday bike

around the block and didn’t hear her call.

Is his mother angry, or is she crying, too?

Margaret Lundberg

2012

In an age of texts and IMs, it’s not so hard to imagine having a conversation with someone sight unseen; we do it every day. Type out a message and hit send, and in a few seconds you have an answer to your question or a comment on your last statement. Speaking with someone not present—even half a world away—has come to feel “ordinary!”

It is this idea—that I could have a conversation with another person simply based on the words on a page—that came to me as I considered the idea of audience in diary writing. If diaries are written to a disembodied someone (as Margo Culley theorized), whether

Friend, lover, mother, God, future self—whatever role the audience assumes for the writer…

then why could I not do the same? Why could I not enter a conversation with someone, not just out of sight, but out of time? I just needed to find the right someone…

When I read the first entry in Emily Hawley Gillespie’s diary—written in 1858 on her 20^th birthday—I knew I had found my “someone.” Emily’s diary presented me with a powerful “I” to whom I could become audience and respond in kind. To be sure we were really compatible, I did a sort of “test response,” a short post which replied to her comments, both spoken and unspoken, and offered a story of my own. When I had finished, I realized that even over the vast gulf of time and space, Emily and I had found a common ground where one author’s voice could respond to another’s.

We were establishing a friendship.

For the next year or so, my conversation with Emily will span a 30 year period of her life—from her first entry at age 20 to her last just thirty years later. Emily and I will share stories of first love, marriage and children, disappointments and growing older. Although she died before reaching my current age, I know there is much we will share and learn from each other. Emily was a witness to history—as am I. And she both discovered and created her identity within the pages of her diary. This is a journey I look forward to making right alongside her.

And when it's complete, it’s a journey I hope to share with a larger world—just as she did. Our conversation will grow into what I hope to be my MA thesis/project—a book that will document our joint expedition.

Would you like to come along?