Güd wrtr

FROM THE NEW GLASS-WALLED STUDENT SERVICES BUILDING AT SACRAMENTO CITY COLLEGE, A JOURNALISM INSTRUCTOR EXPERIENCES CAMPUS GUNFIRE.

 Sacramento Magazine | November 2015

By Jan Haag

Four p.m., the second Thursday of a new school year, barely September on the campus I’ve considered mine for more than a quarter century. I sit in my new office in the new Student Services building at Sacramento City College. It still feels foreign to me, as though I’ve begun a new job, as if I don’t quite know my way around yet. I have moved across campus from the old “temporary” building where I spent two decades teaching journalism and advising the student newspaper and literary journal to this new glass, steel and brick structure.

I am an old fish in a new bowl, relearning how to swim.

Journalism shares the second floor of the STS building with the photography department. After several years of going steady, we’ve now moved in together, jokes the photo department chair, who was once our student on the campus newspaper. (Yes, I’ve been doing this a long time.) It is a unique pairing at Sac City, long known for turning out nationally known photographers and accomplished writers and editors.

I sit before my brand new iMac in our office suite. Out in the general area sits Vienna, the news editor of the print version of the Express, and beyond her in his new office, photography professor Randy works at his computer. I’ve been thinking for a half hour that I should head home but, as always, there is so much to do.

Suddenly, on my computer screen, a Facebook post pops up from a colleague.

“Sac PD is reporting shots fired at City College. If you’re there, take cover.”

My old news instincts kick in. “Randy!” I holler as I head out my office for his. “Sac PD says there’ve been shots fired on campus.”

As I reach his doorway, I see Randy at the screen, searching in the electronic way we all do now. How times have changed, I think. Once upon a time we’d have been on the phone. Now we’re looking at Twitter feeds and Facebook posts.

“It seems to be over by the softball field,” Randy says.

I go back to my computer and start searching, too. “At least two people shot,” I read.

I hear Randy walking toward the glass door that leads to our second floor landing. He’s moving fast, a long lens on his Canon, a photojournalist to the core, ready to go find the news and make pictures of it.

“You’re going out there?” I say, before I can stop myself. I was married to a news photographer; my longtime partner is one of Randy’s former Sacramento Bee photo colleagues. This is what they do—they run toward the fire, not away from it.

“Yep,” he says, whooshing through the big glass door.

Then I focus on Vienna, sitting in the office area, working on a computer, her cell phone to her ear. She’d been working on stories for our first print edition. She’s also a producer for Channel 13, and she appears to be on the phone with her newsroom.

Sitting near Vienna is Steve, the college district’s locksmith, who has been in our area rekeying one of our new doors. He’d been here the day before, too, explaining to me that institutions have to make choices between security and accessibility. “That’s the problem,” I’d said. “I don’t want to work in an institution.”

So now we sit, encased in our institutional glass building, and I am suddenly aware of how vulnerable we are. Before we are even told by officials that we should “shelter in place,” I know that we are birds in a clear cage, sitting ducks, should someone come along with a gun. I had thought of this before, spending 20 years in what was essentially a trailer across campus. Anyone could’ve easily walked up the ramp or the steps and barged in with a gun. Fortunately, it never happened, but I thought about it every time the news reported another school shooting.

Too many, too many.

Still, the former news service reporter inside me clicks in. I’m texting with Kris, our online Express editor who’s off campus, working with other student journalists, getting updates from them, talking about sources and what to post and where.

Vienna appears at my office door. “I want to go out there and see what’s going on,” she says.

She’s a grown-up, but she’s also my student, and I allow myself to say I am nervous about her proposal.

Steve stands up. “I’ll walk with her,” he says. “We’ll be OK.”

Vienna perks up and I blink. “Uh….” I begin, but they’re already heading for the door.

“Be careful!” I yell after them, thinking duh… as if they wouldn’t be. Thinking I can’t lose another student to a violent death. Thinking what if there’s someone out there on campus with a gun and an itch to use it?

Randy returns, maybe 15 minutes after he walked out. I whirl in my chair. “Did you get to the scene?” I ask.

“Oh, yeah,” he says, heading for his computer. I follow him.

Within a few minutes I see an image of someone on the ground under a blue tarp, someone dead, with cops talking off to the side of the photo. That person whose name I don’t yet know lies in a staff parking space next to the softball field, not 20 yards from Sutterville Road. Someone has died on our campus, and my heart falls, my gut twists. This has never happened here before.

Now it has.

I turn back to my computer, to monitor the tweets and posts and messages on my phone, and to respond and tweet and post myself, a long-ago reporter turned into a 21^st century journalist, pressed into service because of a crisis.

============

I’ve lost three students this year: Maui, Emma and, we learn the next day, Roman Gonzalez. He wasn’t my student, like the other two, but he was our student. Though we later heard that this was possibly a gang-related shooting, I cannot help but mourn for this young man. He was killed and two others were wounded, and yes, one of those two was arrested on a parole violation and later released. It would be easy to say, well, they brought it on themselves. It would be easy to say, see? We weren’t in danger, most of us. They weren’t after us. The scenario we’ve all been fearing didn’t come true.

Yet.

Four weeks later to the day, I was again in my office when Randy told me about reports from Oregon that perhaps 10 people were killed and more wounded at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg. I shuddered, especially after I learned that the gunman had committed his carnage against a class of English composition students, killing eight of them and their teacher. The day before, we’d heard, an angry student hit one of our own English professors during class.

But the day the shots were fired at my school, as I sat in my office—as Vienna and Steve made their way near the scene and where she did a live report with her station—I thought of our journalism and literary journal student Maui, a fine writer and very capable copy editor. She had taken her own life in April, in tremendous physical pain, not wanting to deal with it any more. I thought of Emma, our lovely Express photo editor, 20 years old, jogging in Seattle in July, struck by a train as she crossed the tracks. And now this young man.

Roman Gonzalez shouldn’t have died. But he did, after a fistfight quickly escalated into a knife fight and then someone—a someone who walked to the street and disappeared—shot Roman, who was our student. Who, I like to think, was trying to better himself through education, as are all of our students.

Too, too much loss and sorrow.

And too, too much uncertainty. The not-knowing hours are the hardest during a crisis. Not having a lot of information about the situation, a lot of pseudo-information flying around in the ether of cyberspace. Not having official word from administrators—that would come much later, when they knew more. Eventually, after locking us in for a time, campus police returned to our building, looking stern, to tell people they could leave but to head for the perimeter of campus—don’t go through the center—to their cars, to light rail, to go home.

Randy and Vienna and Steve and I stayed till 7:30 p.m., a good hour after we were told we could leave. I later learned that the college president and public information officer were there until 1 a.m.

We all had so many unanswered questions. We didn’t begin to have all the 5 Ws and the H we teach our newswriting students to find. We had three whos, but no names of anyone. We had a what—shots fired, people shot, someone dead—and a where, our college, and a when, a bit before 4 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 3, 2015. But certainly no why or how, as there rarely is in a breaking story. Those details come later. Sometimes.

And so, after the students had gotten stories and quotes and photos on the website, on Twitter and Facebook, those of us on campus went home, though the students continued to monitor sources and post updates and text each other until midnight. Already we’d heard that counselors would be available on campus for the next two days for people to come and talk. There would be a gathering on the quad the next morning with the district chancellor and college president speaking.

============

When I walked out of the building into the dimming light on the day everything changed, I walked along Freeport Boulevard, under the great redwood trees, many of which were planted as saplings in 1926, when the campus was brand new. Twenty-six of them stand, some almost a century old, tall and magnificent in front of the college. My sandals crunched on the browned and downed pine needles, geometrically arranged by nature under those trees.

Now we are one of those schools, I thought. Now we are on a list of colleges where violence took place and someone died.

In the coming days our student journalists would be applauded for their quick and careful reporting. The president of the college would come to class and thank the staff for that, even buying them pizza. She would weep a bit as she talked to them after days of supporting her campus, being strong, comforting others, the epitome of compassion and grace.

We are united by tragedy, all of us.

And on the day Roman Gonzalez died on campus, walking to my car, I stopped, struck by that thought. For some reason I looked down. There, atop the rusty pine needles lay a single black feather, new and intact, on a sturdy, pointy quill. I bent and picked it up because I like feathers. Because at other times in my life, I have found lovely feathers literally strewn in my path. It never feels coincidental. It feels like a blessing.

I picked up that feather, perhaps dropped by one of the watchful crows that caw their way through Sacramento skies, and I went to my car, the last one in the parking lot, and I went home.

love wins

he and him
she and her
they and them
ze and hir

hand in hand
lip to lip
arm wrapped
in arm
they rejoice
they celebrate
all over a union
the president says
grown a bit
more perfect

on the same day
in a small
southern town
nine black birds
fly over a
white-steepled
church where
inside
its occupants
mourn
as they forgive
the one who
trespassed
against them

amazing grace

love wins

I’m working on a series of short (you might say even micro) fiction pieces, 1,000 words or less, which is a challenge for me. This is one of the little pieces with fictional narrators, each in a different voice. This story arrived during a writing group after considering a postcard of the Rangerettes doing their famous super-high kicks. 

Now that you ask, I couldn’t kick that high when I started. Like everything else about being a Rangerette, it takes practice—lots of practice. When I first came to college, I never imagined I’d come all the way to Kilgore, Texas, from my little podunk town in Oklahoma, I’d watch the girls perform at the games. I admired their white cowboy hat and boots, their cute short skirts. I couldn’t fathom how a girl could kick like that and keep her hat on—even with a chinstrap.

But I started practicing in my dorm room, doing splits up against the wall—only when I was alone. I was a cheerleader at my high school (go, Broncos!), but the Rangerettes are another class of cat, as my daddy likes to say.

I couldn’t believe it when, at the third tryout in two weeks, they picked me to be one of three rookie Rangerettes. Within five days I had my own uniform—cute blue skirt, short cowgirl boots (“not cowboy,” I was told), tight red undies and yes, the famous hat. “That’s what makes a Rangerette a Rangerette,” says Carol Ann Greenway, our team leader.

She gives all us girls HE-double-toothpicks if our hats slide back on our heads. They have to stay on straight and flat (bobby pins!)—or as Carol Ann says, “Stee-ray-aht and flay-aht.” She has the funniest south Texas drawl, that girl.

But honestly, she runs us around like a drill sergeant—especially us RITs (Rangerettes in Training). “Stee-ray-aht-en that back, Shelley Marie,” she hollers at me, “or I’ll put a yardstick down your speye-in. I don’t want to see slouching when you’re on the fee-yuld at halftahm under those big ol’ lie-ahts with thousands of cheering fay-ans.”

And when we link arms, standing next to each other in line for our perfectly synchronized high kicks, there’s Carol Ann barking, “Higher, girls! I want the sky to see the soles of your boots!”

My roommate, Jolie Lee Cutter from Lubbock, a studious girl with a face—my father would say—like a board fence behind her round glasses, snorts when I tell her about Carol Ann and the high kicks.

“That girl just wants people to get a good look at your coochies,” she says. “It’s demeaning to women.”

Well, that set me up on my high horse, let me tell you. I straightened my spine without the aid of a yardstick and told Jolie Lee, “For your information, our coochies are not on display. We wear red swimsuit bottoms, and we make sure we are always,” I have to pause and take a deep breath, “spic and span down there. All people see is a leg—well, 12 of them—up in the air for a flash of a second and then another flash of leg.”

“Upper thigh, actually,” Jolie Lee puts in. “Leading to your coochie.”

I plow on. “Would you call what the Rockettes do at Car-nee-gie Hall demeaning?”

Jolie Lee pushes her glasses up higher on the bridge of her nose and looks goggly-eyed at me. “Yes, I would,” she says. “There’s more to you and the Rangerettes and the Rockettes, for that matter, than your nice legs and fancy dance moves, Shelley Marie. I don’t expect you to see that, but I do hope you’re not like so many of the girls who come here to college to earn their MRS degrees.”

She narrows her eyes as mine widen. “You have a perfectly good brain, and I think you should put some important information in it.” She taps the book she’s reading and holds it up. “Tudor/Stuart England,” it says on the cover the color of ripe cherries. “Something you can use someday when you can no longer kick your lovely legs with your white boots over your head.”

I want to throw words back at her like, “And Tudor/Stuart England—whatever that is—is important information? How’re you gonna use that someday, Jolie Lee?”

But as I sit on my bed, legs crossed in front of me, elbows on my knees, stretching, I feel my lower lip hanging open. No one has ever told me that I have a perfectly good brain. Not that I can remember anyway. I’m more used to comments about my pretty little head from my daddy, like, “Don’t worry your pretty little head over that, darlin’. Let us men deal with that.” “Us men” being him and my three brothers, who are always thought of as the smart ones in my family.

Jolie Lee shakes her head at me—the frizzy one containing her perfectly good brain—and goes back to Tudor/Stuart England, and I am left… I don’t know, but I bet there’s a good big word for it… with my own perfectly good brain wondering what I should do with it.

One thing I’m gonna do—I’m going to the library tomorrow and find out about Tudor/Stuart England. Is that a place or a person, do you suppose?

(a love poem to precipitation)

For two days the sky has slowly clouded,
scrunched its face like a toddler winding up
for a tantrum, finally spitting petulant drops
at us, and the miracle of puddles and wipers
beating a steady cadence on the windshield
and the gratitude we had promised
to the heavens if only…
has given way to irritation.

We are a parched people who have
forgotten what it is to be wet.

We slip, we swear, we shake ourselves
and our umbrellas like dogs when we come
inside. We are surprised by the viscosity
of soil that yesterday gasped with dust
under foot, now turned scary slick.
We have forgotten how to drive
under anything but bright blue skies,
and already, we long for sun.

Oh, disciples of drought,
denizens of the dry:
Step outside without coats or umbrellas.
Feel yourselves pelted, even pummeled
by the seemingly endless rain,
summon to your lips a wet prayer
shaped to your most urgent need,
and let it radiate through ever form
of thanks you can muster—

because this is a gift like so many others,
coming at just the right time,
seeping into your skin,
moistening your hard shell,
washing away the stains and sorrows
all the way down to your bones.

Because that’s what a new year does—
offer the clean slate, present the fresh calendar,
the new four-digit number that causes you
to shake your head and say, how can it be…?
The sense of time not so much passing
as racing, even more than the annual
notation of your birth—

and you, here on the brink, feel compelled
to make good, start over, resolve
(whether you say it or not):

This year will be different.

Of course, it will—with no help from you.
The months and days wear the same
names and numerals; the seasons
dress themselves in familiar clothes,
repeat in their reliable order.

Yet no two are the same.

Look closely. If you must resolve,
promise to find one new piece
of awareness every day—
within or without, one just out
of your line of sight, on the periphery,
that sound or color or thing
that makes you turn your head,
widen your eyes, attune your ears.

Yes, that. Only that.

Begin.

I meet my maternal grandmother in antiques shops. Nearly every one that sucks me in—though I try to avoid them—holds pieces of her china (Desert Rose) or her silverware (Washingtonia) or cut glass bowls with sugar cubes and delicate silvery tongs, or crystal teardrops that once hung from glittering chandeliers. Or tall secretaries with their open writing desks wearing faded green felt, perfect for penning a quick missive. Or a large divan, a Louis XIV replica, with plump, ivory damask cushions that Grandma covered with a pale green sheet so Grandpa’s pipe ashes wouldn’t soil the material.

And I look around, half expecting to see a small-boned woman with piercing brown eyes and the whitest hair, perfectly coiffed, a large topaz ring on a hand gnarled by arthritis, her white pocketbook that matches her low pumps, permanently attached to the crook of an elbow. The one who gave me EGBOK: Everything’s gonna be OK. The one who lived by the credo, “Old age is not for sissies.”

But no.

I walk around a corner and I meet my paternal grandmother in milk glass chickens with painted red beaks and black beady eyes. Their top halves come off to reveal empty bowls that my sister and I used to fill with marbles. That was the grandma whose mother was born in Sweden, the grandma of tiny meatballs painstakingly rolled by hand and counted, browned in an iron skillet, then baked in a casserole dish, for some reason. The grandma of brownies and apple pie and almond windmill cookies (the latter bought at the store). The grandma, who with Grandpa, loved to watch Lawrence Welk every Saturday night, sitting behind TV trays in the den, getting up during commercial breaks to make brown cows for my sister and me—a funny name, we thought for root beer floats.

I meet them both in needlepoint wall hangings and pillows. In glass slippers and ceramic ladies head vases. In doilies and tea towels. In plates with tiny flowers seemingly watercolored on tender china.

I am not the only one who meets her ancestors here. I hear other browsers say, “My grandmother had one of those,” or “Those were my mother’s dishes.” Women trace their histories through the belongings of the women before them. Perhaps men do, too, but they are more unusual specimens in antiques shops. We are mostly female, moving slowly, casting our gazes over tables loaded with treasures, pricking at our memories, shelves filled with someone else’s stemware, someone else’s dolls, someone else’s somethings that have ended up here, now called antiques.

One of my grandmas, the one who had her own antiques shop for a time and who worked in others, said items had to be a hundred years old, at least, to be considered antique. Other stuff was just old stuff.

I meet my grandmothers—born 115 and 120 years ago, respectively—as antiques and, now past my own half-century mark, I recognize them as treasures I failed to see with much younger eyes.

Yosemite Falls

If I’m in Yosemite, it means it’s the end of May, and school’s out for summer (sing it with me!).

This year it also means I’ve completed my 21st year as a full-time writing professor… and before Sacramento City College hired me to teach journalism and English, I’d never spent more than four years in the same gig. That’s what journalists do—move from job to job, city to city, war-torn country to war-torn country. Only I didn’t cover wars or big time stories. I was pretty much a small-potatoes reporter on a few newspapers, one now-defunct wire service and a magazine. I love journalism; my heart rate picks up when I’m around presses churning out copies of fresh newsprint. But it is, as an old newspaperman told me when I was in my 20s, a young person’s job. At some point you don’t want to cover another city council meeting or legislative hearing or try to find a new kind of feature story at the State Fair. You’re done.

I was fortunate to find my way into teaching when I was in high school—at Roseville High School pool, to be specific, up to my chest in chlorine’d water, coaxing scared little kids off the side and encouraging them to float on their backs (a very scary prospect) or (even scarier) blow bubbles, face down, and kick and stroke like mad in something that resembled swimming. I also got to coach synchronized swimmers, having been one myself. A decade later, a former college professor of mine handed me a journalism class to teach—filling in for a professor who had to leave five weeks into the semester because of a death in his family—and I found a second profession I loved.

That was 1985, and I’ve been hooked on teaching writing to college students ever since. I knew that my primary job was—as with the little kids learning to swim—convince people that all they had to do was let go and trust that they could do this. (And maybe know where to place a thesis statement or a lead and oh, I don’t know, some commas maybe.) Lucky me, I got the full-time job in 1993; I have colleagues who have been part-timers forever, flying from classroom to classroom trying to cobble together a living. They work harder than I do for far less money.

Still, as people are wont to do, I moan and groan my way through the school years, generally loving my job but finding some weeks downright demoralizing (don’t we all?). Sixty-hour weeks’ll do that to ya. But unlike a lot of people I know, I get these amazing breaks in the form of a couple of months off here, a month off there, and that makes all the difference.

For some years now my dear fella has taken me—practically moments after I walk with my fellow faculty members into the stadium for another graduation—to Yosemite, which this year celebrates its 150th anniversary. On June 30, 1864, while occupied with the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant Act, “establishing Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove as the first protected wild land for all time,” according to the National Park Service website. In 1890 land surrounding these two tracts was declared a national park, and in 1906, thanks to the efforts of John Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt, it all became Yosemite National Park.

You cannot be here on a late spring evening, in the middle of a great meadow, as we were tonight, looking up at the cathedral of rock walls surrounding you, and not be grateful to those people—or the ones who carry on the work of protecting this place today. We feel so lucky to spend time in Yosemite Valley, looking up at Yosemite Falls in one direction, to Half Dome in another, feeling the peace of it all. Even in a national park where thousands congregate, at the end of each day it gets very quiet here. You can roll out your yoga mat in Leidig Meadow, as I did this evening, not far from a young buck munching tufts of grass, and put your body into mountain pose and tree pose, do a little sun salutation as it sets behind the towering wall of granite. And be grateful, so grateful, for this lucky, lucky life of mine.

(for RDS)

In my family December 7 was celebrated as my grandparents’
wedding anniversary, 1921, long before most Americans
had heard of Pearl Harbor, before bombs whistled
from the sky, unleashing unholy destruction upon
far too many across the planet, ending with unspeakable
acts that decimated cities full of people going about
their business, loving, living their lives.

As a child I saw photos of the aftermath—sunken ships
in Hawaii, London rubble, Germany destroyed,
skeletal survivors, the ghostly image on concrete
of one person incinerated in Hiroshima.
Who was foe? Who was friend? In the words
of my father, who killed and was nearly killed
in Korea in a conflict that was not his:
“You can’t imagine.”

But I did and I do, on this day heavy with memory.
I conjure an image of that young and slender
couple, Ed and Ann, marrying that winter in a tiny
church outside Chicago. I put snow on the ground,
her in a wool coat with fur collar, wishing her
dead mother was there, hoping her father would
arrive sober to give her away. And I see her groom,
tall and strong, neither of them having a glimmer
of what would bless them—two children,
four granddaughters, a half-century marriage—
and what would pursue them, scar them—
the Depression, the second world war,
the son sent to Korea and returned
forever wounded.

Now I, the third granddaughter, see you,
someone else’s hoped-for son, born under the shadow
of that world war, decades later, on this same day
near the end of the same century. We sit in a car
parked by a levee on a frosty winter night.
You tell me you love me, a different kind of bomb.
I feel the heat of that explosion, one that will upend
my world, change the course of our lives, bring
us together, tear us apart and put us back together.
You can’t imagine, I think now, what comes
of a love like that, of old wounds, of misdirections.
You can’t say thank you enough.

Once upon a time, many years ago, a dashing mountain man named Matt Rivers came riding into town, swung his lean, bearded form off his horse, and, walking past a young woman named Delta Breeze, tipped his hat and said, “Ma’am.”

Matt Rivers, then and now

It was love at first sight for both of them.

Matt Rivers on the trail.

They’ve since had many adventures together, Matt showing Delta the high country he admires just a tad less than he admires her (or so he says). He has walked her through high mountain meadows and watched deer eating sweet grass across rivers thick with grass just under the surface. He has shown her long ribbons of waterfalls and bubbling geysers and volcanoes oozing lava in national parks. He has settled her into Jeeps and driven her to long stretches of island beaches with shipwrecks just offshore.

She has returned the favor by taking him to exotic lands like Ocean Falls, British Columbia, and Winters, Calif.

Though he has other lady friends he admires a great deal and has squired them on various travel adventures, all these years later Matt Rivers still invites Delta Breeze to share his bedroll now and again. He has just turned 70, and his mountain-man, horse-riding years are behind him now. Still happy to get out on the trail, Matt and Delta recently took themselves to the North coast of California to celebrate his completion of seven decades on the planet.

There they had a fine old time, walking a bluff top trail in Sonoma County overlooking the great Pacific Ocean, looking for bits of shells in fine gray sand, talking story and generally enjoying each other’s company.  They made their way to one of their favorite spots where old redwoods lean their heads in to each other and a trickle of a creek turns into a small waterfall in the deep forest. They found sunsets to watch and got out the old Kodak to take snapshots for their photo albums. And at night they sat outside and watched the distant light of stars set against an inky palette as a bitty fingernail of a moon marched its way down to the horizon and disappeared.

If you’re very lucky, like Delta Breeze, when you’ve loved someone for a very long time who is also your best friend, you find yourself on the edge of the earth now and then saying thank you out loud to the ocean and the sky and the stars. You realize that every moment you have together is precious, and you remind yourself that you must appreciate those moments in the here and now.

Matt Rivers takes in a Sonoma Coast sunset.

You know how fortunate you are to have had Matt Rivers ride into your life and tip his hat to you. And you do not hesitate to say, “I love you,” and “Thank you, good sir.” No, you don’t.

The man and his Jeep, ready for adventure