For this full moon post I am drawing you into my proprioceptive writing practice, gathering my thoughts, current-event style. This Write has been slightly edited for length and clarity.
On the day of the Annunciation School shooting I was at a coffee shop with my accountability partner, Judy. We had just purloined a free table with space to spread out and got ourselves coffee and made the call on FaceTime to conference in our third, Mel. It was she who told us first, saying her son had seen it on a news release as he was working. They were now sitting together at the kitchen table. They were just a few short miles northwest of us and Annunciation just a couple miles south of them. I had taken 46th street east, just between and drove very close to Annunciation Church as the event happened at 8:30 am, Wednesday, August 27th. The next I got a call from my son in London, he had heard the news from a coworker who had seen it on the news. By the time I went home, I listened to the speeches of our local leaders at a press conference on my way home.
Why do I write about where I was when I heard the news? That is always my instinct, when 9/11 happened, when John Lennon was shot, hearing of George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent riots, always marking the spot where and when I heard. Because there is a sense of split when these tragedies happen, that before and after. Before Minneapolis hadn’t been the scene of a school shooting and now Minneapolis has. And there is a blankness to my response, a distance. I did think about the parents, the teachers and kids in the building, the shooter and how could they have possibly gotten to this place. The world will never be the same. And yet, here I sit with facts, not my outrage, sadness, horror, fear.
And I listened for the details, but didn’t understand them right away. The doors were locked, but was the shooter inside or out? I was not sure if the shooter had got inside and locked their self in or if the shooter couldn’t enter. It was on MPR, when the mayor spoke, that I realized there were claims that the shooter was trans. I haven’t googled beyond the articles in the New York Times. I am resisting the draw of social media and its scrolling for information, as if the cause could also provide an answer. How can this be understood?
There has been green and blue ribbons showing up along our neighborhood streets and last Sunday a helicopter hovered over my house for hours. I hadn’t realized there was a march to support Annunciation families and to call for change and government action until I googled “Why is there a helicopter circling south Minneapolis?” It was either the news cameras or police protection of the march. I had heard that our Governor deployed state law enforcement officers to assist with security efforts as schools started. Our city had been divided into quadrants for them to patrol. He intends to call a special session at the state Capital to address gun laws.
My kids see other things than I do on their social media feeds. The shooter graduated from their high school. Went to Annunciation, a Catholic grade school, for elementary and then transferring into Southwest, our public high school, just like one of my daughter’s good friends had. The shooter would have been one grade below my daughter, we think, but she didn’t know of them.
Yesterday my Neighbor Carol sent Paul’s guest post on Wannaskan Almanac about what he has been doing since the annunciation shooting. He has showed up where the rift took place, making order in the place of grief’s site, and ministering to the loss. Until I read his post, I didn’t know he was connected to the school and the church or what he has been doing in his grief now. I share with you because I value this kind of close-to-home reporting, in this world of hot-takes from far away. That’s also why I felt I should report this. I know many others that have shown up for the first days of school while processing this rift in our fabric - students and teachers and parents and administers. My heart goes out to all of us processing these horrors and losses and figuring out what comes next and how to show up. I’d love to hear from you, if you want to share how things are going.
The follow up questions:
What was heard but not followed? I went back and added this and that in. Details that I needed to google to corroborate. Things got moved around a bit so they flowed in the right place.
How or what do I feel now? Unsure that this is worthy of a full moon post, but these are the things I am trying for you now. This is an example of my daily writing practice, only this one I did on Substack in honor of this Moon. The Dakota named it for the corn harvest. For me this year, it is the Hawk and the shrill call of its messages.
What themes came up? I stuck to annunciation but found that interesting tendency of mine to just want to record where I was when I got the news about these happenings and how that relates to memory
What do I want to take forward to future writes? At the end of this Write I almost brought in my substitute teaching, but I ran out of time. I haven’t wrote about it much here. But it takes up a lot of my capacity and I should write about it more. So that is what I want to take forward, this should-ing I just did.