by Heather Plett | Jun 23, 2006 | Uncategorized
I ride through a pedestrian/bike tunnel every day on my way to and from work. There is almost always graffiti in the tunnel. It seems to be a favourite place for graffiti-painting teenagers with time on their hands. It’s out of the way and can’t be seen from the street so it’s an ideal place for idleness. About the only time there isn’t graffiti in the tunnel is the day or two after the city crew comes by and removes it with their sandblasters and gallons of grey paint.
Mostly, I don’t mind the graffiti. I actually like some of it – the stuff that’s artistically done. For a long time, the word “Hush” greeted me as I entered the tunnel, and it often made me smile. I wish the city crew could leave the good stuff there and just get rid of the pointless messy stuff.
A few weeks ago, they cleaned the graffiti off, and it was clean for a couple of days. Since then, however, the graffiti painters have returned. But these aren’t the artistic graffiti painters – these are the ones with just a single can of black spray paint and an evening of boredom on their hands.
A few days ago, a swastika appeared in the tunnel. A big, black, ugly swastika. There is nothing even slightly artistic about it – just an unevenly painted ugly symbol of hatred.
I don’t understand hatred. I don’t understand the feelings behind something like a swastika. The idea that one group of people can hate another group of people so deeply that they wish them destroyed boggles my mind.
Most of the time, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. I don’t (usually) yell at bad drivers, because I try to assume that they’re cutting me off because they’re having a really bad day and need to get home to their sick kids. If someone’s rude to me in the grocery store, I try to imagine that they don’t have much love in their life so they can’t entirely be blamed. As much as I can, I try to put myself in another person’s shoes before I cast judgement on them for their actions.
The problem is, I can’t put myself in the shoes of anyone who would paint swastikas in a tunnel. I suppose it was just an ill-advised joke by some bored teenagers, but I can’t fathom the kind of boredom that would reflect itself in hatred.
There are lots of things I CAN understand, if I try hard enough. I can understand prejudice – at least a little bit. I can go back in my memory bank to the day a new girl moved into our homogenous little farming community. When she didn’t fit in well, and everyone thought she was a little odd, it was easiest to chalk it up to the fact that her skin colour was different from ours. And when she moved away again, only a year later, it was convenient to assume that her family’s transience had something to do with the fact that she wasn’t like the rest of us.
The truth is, though, I don’t have to go all the way back to childhood to find the deep roots of prejudice and ethnocentricity. Every day, I see homeless people on the streets of downtown, and almost every day, I have to resist the urge to equate their homelessness with their ethnicity. So, you see, though I work hard to drag out any little vestiges left in my heart, I can understand prejudice.
I can understand anger too. I can go back to that day in the park, some time after I’d become a mother, when I saw a man luridly revealing himself to everyone who walked by, when the anger welled up in me, and I knew instantly, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I could kill or at least seriously injure a man who would sexually threaten my children the way I had been sexually threatened several years earlier. And suddenly I knew why, on the day that I walked into my parents’ kitchen and told them I’d been raped, my dad told me the story of the man he’d known who’d hunted down his daughter’s rapist and castrated him. I remember knowing that, just like my pacifist father, I was capable of the transformation that would cause me to destroy the man who’d hurt my daughter.
I can understand anger, but I’m still not sure I can understand hatred. Perhaps it was hatred I felt on those nights after the rape when I’d lie in my bed, staring at the window, praying that no one would ever crawl through it again. Perhaps it was hatred when I cried myself to sleep, knowing that those filthy hands and tattooed arms had destroyed every last shred of the little bits of innocence I’d still held onto. Perhaps it was hatred, but mostly I think it was anger and fear. I can’t say I feel hatred now, after the years have mellowed and matured me.
The truth is, I can understand a lot of ugly feelings that might be the seeds of something dark inside my heart. And if I think about sinking deep into the shadows of that anger and prejudice, and allowing indoctrination and peer pressure and a little bit of mob mentality to wash over me, perhaps I’d come out on the other side of hatred too.
Maybe, just maybe, there is very little distance between myself and those who paint swastikas and kill for their passion, their prejudice, and their hatred. Maybe there’s enough darkness lurking in the shadows of each of us that, if it were fed the right amount of ugly fodder, we could become Nazis or KKK or Janjaweed.
I don’t know. I pray to God that it’s not true. I hope with all my heart that nothing will ever hold enough power over me to turn my little bits of darkness into hatred.
I’m pretty sure the idle, bored, teenage swastika painters aren’t murderers, but I hope they recognize the seeds of hatred growing in them before it’s too late. I hope they lay awake tonight knowing they’ve done a very bad thing. I hope one day their circles of friendship enlarge enough to include a Jewish person or a person of colour and they find out that love is better than hate.
by Heather Plett | Jun 22, 2006 | Uncategorized
I thought I had something interesting to post, but then I wandered over and read Accidental Poet’s series of posts about something incredible that happened 7 years ago, and I realized anything I might want to post about tonight would be trivial and boring in comparison. As most of you know, AP is my sister-in-law-who-feels-like-a-sister. You really should read her last 4 posts, starting with this one.
But if you don’t have time for all of them, at least read this one – it has something to do with a business trip I once took across two provinces with my mom and oldest two daughters, a bunch of (slightly annoying) phone calls while I was trying my best to get there at a reasonable time, a visit to a nursery room we all assumed had been empty since the-little-niece-I-didn’t-get-to-meet spent one solitary night there, a surprise involving my father and a baby boy (which I thought was an apparition), and, eventually, the dawning of a realization that I’d become an auntie again. That’s my (much abbreviated) side of the story, but AP’s telling of it is much more interesting. Go on, I won’t take it personally if you desert me.
by Heather Plett | Jun 22, 2006 | Uncategorized
After at least a million tries, Blogger is FINALLY letting me post the photo of Nikki nearing the finish line at the marathon. That’s her in the red circle, looking like she’s got some kind of strange protective shield. Maybe she did – it’s called her Momma’s love. 🙂 If you’re wondering what she’s holding, it was raining at the beginning of the race, so she wore her jacket. By the end, she was carrying it.
And because you waited so patiently, I’ll throw in a bonus picture. That’s her, before the race, excited and nervous, and just a little bit silly. She’s not too fond of having her picture taken, so I’ve got lots of pictures of her looking something like this:
by Heather Plett | Jun 20, 2006 | Uncategorized
The alarm woke me at six o’clock. I lay there with my eyes still closed, listening to the morning news. I was still in that semi-conscious zone between sleep and wakefulness when I felt the tap on my arm. It was ten-year-old Nikki – she was up and ready. It was race day and she wanted to make sure we made it there on time.
While I splashed water on my face and tamed my bedtime hair, she dressed in her pink t-shirt and running shorts. I emerged from the bedroom to find her in the living room pulling socks onto her feet. She stood up, and with a look that showed both nervousness and anticipation, she handed me her race number. I pinned it onto her shirt, smiled, and reached up to stroke her tousled hair.
She grabbed her shoes, and together we attached the small sensor chip to her shoe laces. This small chip would register with the computer when she crossed the start line and the finish line, letting us know what her final time was. She pulled her shoes onto her feet, and I felt a small lump form in my throat as I watched her. These were my old shoes – a nice pair of Nikes I’d bought and later realized were a little too tight for me. My tall, long-legged ten-year-old daughter is now old enough to wear shoes that I can fit onto my own feet. How did she get there so quickly?
Together, we hopped on our bikes and rode through the early morning air to the University, across the river from our house. On the way, we met up with her friend and her friend’s mom. We were headed to the start of the annual Manitoba Marathon, and for the first time in her young life, Nikki was set to run the Super Run – a 2.6 mile run that’s just right for kids and novice runners.
There was a high energy buzz in the crowd gathered at the start of the race. Thousands of people had gathered to run various distances and thousands more were there to lend their support. It was a drizzly morning, and some hid under umbrellas or raincoats, but Nikki and her friend barely noticed the rain in their excitement. They scanned the crowd for other friends.
I followed them to the starting line, but soon they got swallowed up in the crowd. The whistle blew, and they were off. I stood alone on the sidelines, watching my daughter’s strong legs propel her into the distance. I’m sure I was smiling. I know I saw smiles on the faces of many of the other parents gathered to watch.
I followed the spectator crowd to the finish line, and climbed up to a seat in the stadium just across from the finish line. It didn’t take long before the first Super-runners started to arrive on the track. Parents cheered as they watched their children approach. Quicker than I’d expected, Nikki’s pink shirt appeared in the stream of runners. She looked strong and agile. Her stride was good. Her long legs carried her across the turf to the finish line, and I stood and cheered.
With my mommy-heart swelling with pride, I headed to the gate where the runners exited the stadium. Before long, I spotted Nikki eating a popsicle while she scanned the crowd for a familiar face. When she spotted me, her face lit up and she walked toward me. I grinned at her and a tiny smile tickled the corners of her mouth. She couldn’t show too much pride in this crowd of thousands, but she couldn’t fully hide it either.
This was a shining moment for her, and she knew it. She’d run the race, she’d finished the course, and she was victorious. She’d been afraid that she wouldn’t be able to run the whole distance without stopping to rest, but the first thing she told me when she reached me was that the only time she’d had to stop was to tie her shoe.
I know, as a mom, there will be many more moments like this, when I’ll watch from the sidelines as my children accomplish something they’ve set their minds to. But there’s something about the first time you see your child cross the finish line that fills you with an emotion that’s hard to describe. I couldn’t have been more proud of my daughter, who’s filling my old shoes, but running faster in them than I ever did.
Her time was 25 minutes and 39 seconds. Quite respectable. If you scan the results at http://www.manitobamarathon.mb.ca/ (click on Super Run) you’ll see that she out-ran A LOT of people. In my rough estimate, she finished in the top 18th percentile for ten year olds. Out of about 510 ten year olds, only about 93 beat her.
(I have a picture of her nearing the finish line, but Blogger doesn’t want me to upload it right now. Phooey for Blogger.)
by Heather Plett | Jun 18, 2006 | Uncategorized
It’s Father’s Day, and my man is busy making pasta salad for his OWN Father’s Day barbecue. Is it any wonder why I love this guy?
Happy Father’s Day to a man who brings honour to the name “Dad”. A man who is fully present for his children. A man who teaches his daughters what it means to be a REAL man (and that includes making pasta salad!). A man who demonstrates what it means to feel the fear and do it anyway. A man who’s helping his daughters understand that they can do or be anything they set their minds to. A man whose proudest moment was the moment he became a dad.
I’m so glad I get to be his wife and share the joy of parenthood with him. Here’s to many more Father’s Days.
by Heather Plett | Jun 17, 2006 | Uncategorized
Trust me, THIS is not something you want to see parked in front of your house when you arrive home in the afternoon. 
I was leaving the local grocery store when a lady pointed to my street and said “about 5 fire trucks just turned down that street and there’s a big billow of smoke over there.” The “over there” she was referring to was in the direction of my home – where my husband and two of my daughters were. My heart leapt into my throat and I started running home. By the time I got to the intersection a block and a half from my home, the police had blocked off the road, and another 2 fire trucks were racing down my street. Two others were parked directly in front of our house.
I raced home, not sure what I’d find. Part way there though, I realized that Marcel was on the sidewalk in front of our house, looking across the street. That’s when I realized that the smoke was coming from the area where he was looking, and our house was okay. I took a deep breath, and my heart slowed to just a little above normal.
As it turned out, one of the units in the co-op housing complex across the street was on fire. We don’t know anyone who lived in that building, but we do know several people in the complex. And we later found out that Marcel’s cousin used to live in that building. From what we’ve heard, the only casualties were a couple of house cats. What’s really disturbing is the fact that someone was hauled into a police car, suggesting that it’s a suspicious fire. I guess we’ll wait for the evening news to find out any other details.
For now, I’m feeling alot of mixed emotions. Relief that my family and home are safe, fear that there may have been an arson at work in our neighbourhood, and great sadness for the people (possibly 4 families since there are 4 units in each building) who have lost their homes. A house fire has always been one of my greatest fears – especially since I’ve been a mom. I hope the people who used to live there have a bed to sleep in tonight, and I hope their sleep is not haunted with nightmares.
This is what it looks like now – after the fire trucks have all left. I can’t imagine losing everything I own in the short time it took the flames to tear that place apart.
