Star-Spangled Diner

Today my son and I went to the local diner we always go to, the place that decorates for every tiny holiday in a way that leaves no surface devoid of sparkle and festivity, and he said, “This place looks like an American-themed restaurant in Japan.”

I knew what he meant.

There was a life-sized Dalmatian statue in a star-spangled top hat. Red, white, and blue elves sitting on the pastry case. Streamers above our heads. Images of fireworks and the flag covering the backs of booths. A coffee station draped in more flags. Red, white, and blue disco balls hanging from the ceiling.

Once our eyes adjusted to the explosion of patriotism, he told me he watched his favorite movie again. I asked him if he ever got bored watching something multiple times and he said no because he always found something new with each viewing. Just as I was thinking about the stories and essays I read and teach again and again, he said, “Just like you reread things you love, right?”

He wants to study film and this was one of the moments when I understood his passion and could relate it to my own. We are both spending time taking apart the art that we love, asking ourselves how the artist made it, sparking our own art-making process.

Last week, I finished Edward Hirsch’s beautiful book, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart and I learned so much. I’ve been wanting to learn more about poetry for a while now and I love the way Ed Hirsch talks about why and how poems work.

One chapter was about Camille Dungy’s poem Requiem, a piece that truly did break my heart.

Hirsch wrote about the way this poem came together for Dungy, based on a terrible accident she happened to witness and how it stayed with her.

I shared the poem with my class last Wednesday night and then I invited them to write about an event in their life or even a headline that never left them, something that haunted them or disturbed them for years. When I thought about this prompt, what came to me was a child abuse case I read about years ago when my son was three. One night when I couldn’t sleep, I looked for every single newspaper article I could find and read them all. I made myself ill. And then I slowly forgot about it, went on with my life. But one day while I was washing dishes and my son came up to me, I looked down at his beautiful little face and realized he was exactly four and a half years old, the same age as the boy in the news who died so horribly. And I fell right back into that horror, became haunted all over again.

The pieces that my students wrote that night were so beautiful, so incredible, and it made me think about the fact that we live in a really hard world right now and people are suffering everywhere in all kinds of ways and sometimes when we can’t forget this or when one particular instance of cruelty stays with us in a way we can’t shake, a path to managing it is to write about it. All my life, making something out of the ugliest and meanest facts has saved me. It is always a place to turn, a kind of home for me.

As Atlas and I sat there together in a restaurant that looked like July 4th had been murdered inside, I thought about the great good fortune to have a home in art when life felt cruel or difficult and how it was one of my wishes for him as his mother when he was a tiny baby, that he would have that kind of rich inner life where ideas and beauty could sprout from pain. And as I rubbed the star-spangled artificial flowers in the vase on our table between my fingertips, I felt grateful for both of us.

Thank you for reading.