Computer, Bring Me an Umbrella
Content Warning: This piece discusses school gun violence at length.
I want an umbrella to keep in my office. I want to copy the offices of my favorite professors – a coffee maker, a tea kettle, a little coffee and tea bar, a meditation pillow, French language posters, prayer flags, a running fountain – English professors, what can I say, we know how to make a space – but I don’t have the eye for it, never have. My spouse hangs things on walls. I live like I’m on the run, like at any moment we’ll need to pack up and get back the whole rental deposit, like I can still fit everything I own in my car, like asking my spouse if they love me, like applying to jobs every year in case I get fired, like never wanting to rely on anything too much in case it breaks. My office doesn’t have any windows. My spouse came to campus one weekend and hung things up, at least. I need to just start taping things, really. I need to start embracing my lack of certainty. Anyway, I don’t have the money for a mini spa in my office, but I do have twenty dollars for an umbrella.
Is that too much for an umbrella? I don’t think I’ve ever bought myself one. I’ve never lost anything, either, I don’t lose things. I just shed them. I love getting rid of things. Some people find pleasure in purchase, but I find pleasure in purge. I’d rather have nothing at all. How much is too much for an umbrella? I want the big long kind, pointy, weapon-y, I want to take up too much space on the sidewalks, like a dry little Popemobile. I want everyone to stay away from me.
Whenever students get too close to me, I flinch. We leave the doors open for airflow because of COVID and I think of my training for active shooters, but you notice there’s no such thing as an inactive shooter? In case of emergency, I teach with my windows open on the second floor now, for airflow, because of COVID, and if you jump from that height you might break your ankle or your wrist but you won’t have a bullet wound. If there were an active shooter, we would run, hide, fight because I remember my training.
This is something they do actually teach you in poet school, believe it or not, how to fight for your life, but should we jump out the window first, or try to hide? We can’t socially distance huddling in the dark together, but that’s okay – my students are young adults, and so am I, so we will likely survive the COVID we would spread to one another huddling in the dark. Every active shooter training has you imagine how you would fight a self-made soldier rippling with body armor and a semi-automatic weapon, and I think a big pointy umbrella certainly can’t hurt.
I’m writing this piece in my office on campus. Recently, someone came into my office without knocking with a key. Last year, someone walked right into our house, didn’t knock or anything, walked in the front door, thinking it was an AirBnB. I was nice to them. My spouse asked them to leave, which hadn’t even occurred to me. I never know what to do when something bad is happening so I act pleasant. This is the “fawn” trauma response, the doormat, the please don’t hurt me. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn. Would it work with an active shooter? I doubt it, but it might work about as well as throwing a stapler. We tell children how to conceal a gun they wrestle away from a gunman under a trash can so that nobody is shot by police automatically when they burst in the room. That’s how good America is.
Computer, bring me an umbrella. I get thousands of thumbnails of umbrellas instantly, so many umbrellas I could fill an entire academic building with them, open, rolling around in a false wind of bullets. I think that would disorient. They don’t teach you how to confront your own mortality in teacher school. They don’t teach you how to MacGyver a way to save your students’ lives. I fear my students most, though. Every friend I have who teaches college and I have had students we feared. My first semester teaching, a student towered over me screaming, finger in my face, over a grade, alone in an office, and I realized that he could smack me in the face with just the slightest movement, that nobody would believe me, either, that it would be a he said she said, and why would he do that, but then again, why wouldn’t he? Another semester, the student who cheated on every assignment sat in the back row and drew guns on an iPad. They were very good at drawing guns, and they liked to write about how women withheld sex from men on purpose, and I counted down the days until I could give them a C and never see them again.
“Gun to your head, would YOU say you believed in Jesus?” The boys who asked me this in elementary school after Columbine, their fingers cocked against my temple on the playground, are all preachers now. I wonder if they ask their congregation the same thing, waiting for a thunderous Yes! to boom back. That’s a rumor, by the way. The girl who was killed in that room wasn’t the one who confirmed she was Christian. Somebody in the room got two girls mixed up, one who died and one who didn’t. It’s not their fault. I wondered sometimes if those boys in third grade were going to come to school with a gun to test us, one by one, but in the rumor-story, the girl who confirmed she was Christian was the one who died.
Computer, bring me a bulletproof backpack. Bring me a bulletproof desk for elementary schoolers. Bring me a bulletproof lunch box. Computer, bring me a sheet of plexiglass for the front of my classroom, because students sit 6 feet from the chalkboard and I can’t teach pressed flat against the wall. Bring me ill fitting KN95s, hand sanitizer, a face shield, books on calming my mind at night, bring meditation bells and a tiny zen garden for my desk so I can push sand around and think about which of my students I think will murder me one day.
Computer, bring me an umbrella, to walk to class in the rain.