The things we carry . . .

One of the journal exercises I do with my composition students involves taking prompts from Tim O'Brien's powerful short story "The Things They Carried" and having the class fill in the prompts according to what their lives have required them to carry.

Sometimes I will do the exercise with them, sometimes not. I did write along with them this past week. I am posting my entry which I read to the class when we shared.

Truthful, honest writing, I believe, is accomplished most readily by opening the words our souls have given us and sharing them with a community of fellow writers. This exercise always generates some amazing words from the students.

With a thanks to Tim O'Brien for the use of a few lines from his work.


The things we carry are largely determined by necessities. Among the necessities are a house that carries the spirit of the previous owners, Gary and Ronna Jordan, who hid the permanently foggy windows in the bedroom when they were trying to sell the place by pulling their green brocade curtains taut, who failed to tell us the house was falling apart because of the hate they carried for each other.

So now we carry a roof that leaks that the they said was new. We carry brown water spots creating a random design on our family room ceiling, the girls’ bathroom, and bedrooms. We carry the Jordans’ mold that continues to grow in our house because of their lies. We carry our own mold inside us because the weight of their dishonesty is too much to carry.

We had carried a hope people were honest when we first moved into this house. Now, even though Gary Jordan was a construction project supervisor, we carry the discovery of duct tape on anything that has ever been broken in this house that he tried to fix. They even duct taped their marriage together, but it didn’t last.

We carry the fear that the house remembers their duct-taped marriage. We carry the fear the duct tape of our own marriage won’t hold either. We have a fear what the Jordans carried at 2117 Breconridge Drive is catching. We carry no illusion about honesty anymore.

At night I carry peculiar little odds and ends. I carry ghosts. I carry sleeping in any other bed than with you because the beagle snores louder than a human. She gets to sleep next to you. I don't.

I carry the sounds of the day in my head, a pre-programmed litany that occurs whenever I close my eyes. The question“Is Christmas day still on the 25?” I asked my manager at the bookstore. The open dialogue my brain waves have with each other about how stupid I’ve been. During the dark, I carry the wide awakeness of a premenopausal woman—something I thought I’d never carry, not the premenopausal stuff, but the wide awakeness part. I slept for twelve hours a night as soon as I came home from the hospital after I was born. Now, being a hormonal ghost, walking my own halls is a haunting thing to carry.

Some things we carry are determined by superstition: For instance we believe if we carry the honor of treating others right, then they will treat us right in return.

Some things we carry in common—among those we carry a hope that will sustain us. We carry the fact that we were both preachers’ kids. We carry the junk that being preacher’s kids carries with it.

While we were dating, we carried Captain D’s as our favorite restaurant. We carried the knowledge that we were good people, that neither of us had much money growing up. You wore those corduroy tan pants for twenty years. I had to be told the clodhoppers I wore to the office weren’t appropriate. We bought our first Christmas tree for $9, and most of the needles fell off by the time we got it in the apartment. We carried no furniture into our first apartment. We sat on the orange shag carpet and ate meals in front of a black and white TV. We carried love then so we didn’t think it mattered all the things we didn’t carry.

We carry the land, the mold, the rotten roof, the brown spots on the ceiling, the duct-taped everything since we bought the Jordans’ house. Now, six years later, if we get along we carry the hope that we still love each other, the hope that if we hold onto the rope long enough, we can carry the possibility of someone seeing what a good job we’ve done of holding on and everything. We carry the hope that the other person will make sure we never completely fall.

We carry all we can bear, and then some, including the silent awe for the terrible power of the things we carry.
---------------------------

Shelnutt 2005 Copyright