it is so very different. and yet also eerily similar.

especially the way the story presses against your brain.

all of the voices within it, like a choir with an orchestra, but you don’t quite have the music.

so it’s just voices and that weirdly lovely chaos of noise when the orchestra is warming up.

i gave a talk at the newburyport literary festival last month. a talk i’d not realized i was going to be giving because i thought we were “in conversation with.” so, in other words, a talk pulled directly from my ass– a task that terrified me enough then, but would have murdered me mere years ago.

but it was a talk about jackie. i know jackie.

it’s a weird liminal moment. or maybe it isn’t. maybe jackie will always be there so there is no official crossover. maybe it will always be “jackie and…….” insert name of whoever i’m writing about now. maybe the others will come and go and jackie will always be there.

publicly, at least.

i find i can no longer read other people’s books about her. i find i know about her, know of her, even know her a little. but our relationship has changed. she is in everything and everywhere and fiercely present in who she was and is to me and also she is squarely in the past within my life.

and yet…

i’m talking to a friend about the christa mcauliffe book and i always wind up comparing it to jackie, in trying to understand why it is such a sad story.

and it’s because jackie survived.

in writing about christa mcauliffe, i write about someone who did not.

and yet…

this is the thing about teaching. so many of our teachers are always with us. we carry them with us. because they taught us how to read and write and be who we are.

teaching is a way of touching the future, christa mcauliffe said in a speech, a quote that probably did not originate with her though it is always attributed.

but it’s true.

i’m writing about loss and death and uncertainty and the future. i used jackie to write about that before and i’m using christa to write about it now. but, within both of their stories, there was also, always, hope. whether in survival, hope for the future, a sense of adventure, an eagerness to smash borders and see the world.

there is so much hope and yet, so much darkness.

drive in the dark part, mr. kirby told us in driver’s ed when we asked him where we should locate the car within the road.

i write in the dark part.

which means, by extension, living in the dark part, lingering in it, drawing close words and images and feelings and other voices and melodies in order to communicate something.

the something usually being that time is an accordion, life is frightfully short, and we none of us know what will happen next. none of us, ever.

and that is the magic of it.

i am struggling to communicate christa’s hope.

because i feel so little, as students and professors and protestors are being beaten in the streets, and our government in the US continues on its barbarous path.

my father’s handwriting grows tighter and tighter.

my mother and i sit next to one another on a swing where the metal scrapes against itself, screaming every time we move forward. i struggle to hear her.

we sit in sunshine. flowers bloom around us.

the swing screeches as she says: you just have to find joy around you, every day, and take it.

because we do not know what will happen next.

i was 12, nearly 13, when jackie died. she was 64. i couldn’t understand why everyone went on about how she was so beautiful and so young to die.

now, thirty years later, i understand.

burvil and jackie were both born in 1929.

i cannot imagine the last 30 years without burvil in them.

the adventure always has an ending. that is the thing about life. that is the beauty of life.

maybe i always understood this.

in may 1994, aged 12– nearly 13– i wrote in my diary, for the first time, about jacqueline kennedy onassis.

i wrote:

and it’s all there. people. history. life. death. words.

clumsily conveyed, but it is nonetheless all there. everything i’ve spent the last thirty years writing and thinking about– writing being a way of thinking, writing being a way of living, writing being a way of being present and also of touching the future.

the swing screams. the flowers bloom. my father’s handwriting tightens. i open another document. my mother kicks her feet around trying to position the blanket over them just right. the icing burns and lays atop the cake like lego hair. she lights the birthday candle in my yogurt with a long-handed lighter. i eat chicken for lunch three days in a row. the dog wears a one sleeved garment to protect the elbow he cannot stop licking until it bleeds. the cat sits on various laps, acts loving only to bite various hands. i wake up in the morning lying diagonally, in the sleigh bed my grandfather built a few years after jackie died– when we all imagined a future in which i would live in a home with multiple rooms and space for an enormous wooden bed.

hard to say where this is going.

if you’ve been around a while, you know i never know where we’re going when we start out. but that’s the thing.

i write to think, to feel, to get out of one little room and live broadly, capaciously, across time, through words.

(i do not know if the commas are correct here. but they accurately communicate the way i want you to read that sentence.

commas are about control, i tell my students. same with paragraph breaks.

they’re the rhythm of the piece, the way i can speed you up or slow you down and make sure the information is arriving to you at precisely. the. speed. i. want. it. to.)

i found a bunch of pictures of burvil when i was in memphis. pictures of young burvil. and whilst i loathe our cultural emphasis on youth, i nonetheless realize there is something beguiling about beholding the people you have known and loved before you knew and loved them.

i touch the future, i teach. i touch the past, i write.

for so much of my adult life i have had dreams about unknown rooms. me, existing in spaces where, throughout the dream, i come to realize that there was so much space beyond what i knew, space i did not imagine, to which i could have had access had i known.

for decades really, i’ve had these dreams.

do i miss jackie?

is our life together over?

given that i spoke about her last month, the answer to the latter would seem to be no.

the former, i’m not so sure.

a friend and i were walking around central park early last month, and we found ourselves going around the reservoir, serendipitously, in front of a couple where the man was mansplaining the “jackie kennedy oasis reservoir” to the woman with him. without comment, this friend and i slowed our step and paused our conversation. to the degree that the pair eventually went around us.

and the friend turned to me and said it was a privilege to be walking alongside the person who had literally written the book that those people needed to read.

jackie, she’s everywhere. her name electric on the air, always, still. even if autocorrected poorly.

my name autocorrects poorly.

my big connection to christa mcauliffe currently is that she was also called by her middle name and didn’t know that wasn’t her full name until she was older.

sharon.

some of the news reports call her that. NASA, briefly, called her that. a particularly ignorant press release tells us her name was sharon, but she prefers to be called “chris.”

my initials are FCE. until the age of seven, i thought my first name was “favorite.”

my mother did everything in her power to prevent balmoral elementary school from calling me by my first name, but alas.

in first grade, over the loud speaker, they called out for FAITH EATON, and my teacher– the one i hated, the one who made me go to the principal’s office, where i stared at the photograph of christa mcauliffe behind the secretary’s desk until i could call burvil and, as ms. walls had instructed, tell her to tell me to stop talking in class– told me that was me.

it was quite a demotion. from favorite to faith.

still, in advance of a 20th anniversary graduate school reunion, seeing official lists, people ask, is caroline’s name also faith?

it’s a name i always see written in my father’s handwriting.

i touch the future, i teach. i touch the past, i write. when i write, i do not know where i’m going and that is ok.

it is all ok.

because we never truly know where we’re going. we do not ever know what will happen next.

we just throw ourselves into the future, into the next day with wild abandon, flowers blooming around us, the hugs growing tighter every time, the sun rising and setting and rising and setting and rising and setting, history breaking around us, over us, history breaking within us.

there is an image of christa that i love. she is in a jet, weightless, half-smiling. the thing i love most is that her nails are polished a deep bronze.

there is an image of christa that i saw in the archives recently. same day, it seems, still weightless. what i noticed first was her jewelry, sparkling– closer to the camera in this image– the bronze still on her nails, then the look of pure joy on her face.

an image taken maybe a split second after, but radically different.

joy.

life, death, uncertainty, words, stories, hope, and joy.

we do not always survive it, whatever it may be. but oh to be doing what you love. even as the world burns around us.

still, there are words, stories, hope, and joy. and love.

that’s not an ending, but it is where i’ll leave you.