DEATH BECOMES US

The class shifted. Their weight moved from the backs of their seats. They weren't yet to the front, but they definitely had slipped forward, aware . . .

Ralph looked out across the room. Each student looked at him waiting for the words. He held on to them just a little longer . . . counting in his head one, two, three . . .

They had been working all morning on defining voice, and style, and tone, both in their work and in the work of others, and how these things helped them, as readers, to articulate the things they were thinking themselves through the words of another. Each student had worked on the same thing. They each read and analyzed a piece of fiction, Snow, by Julia Alverez. They only had to compose a one page response as to what the snow analogy meant and what they thought to be Alverez's larger theme, all the while figuring out how to show this by using the text from the story to support their ideas. Each one of them, as he suspected, drew entirely different references and made remarks that were close, but not quite right. IT happened this way every time with this assignment. It was why he did it. To illustrate this very point.
They were in the midst of doing research for the final research papers for the quarter. He wanted them to spend time thinking about how they were choosing their sources. What better way than to have them read each student piece and then have them decide which ones, anonymously of course, were the ones they felt were best, or most accurate. After each round, after they narrowed the papers down the to the final two, he could see in their faces the depth of critical analysis they had begun to engage in. Was the piece they had chosen the best? How did they know? What made their decision similar or different than their peers? What made their decisions the right decisions? How would they know?


"Are you ready . . .?" he asked, smile settling over his face, his lips curving, against his will, into the very corners of his mouth. He was amused, always at this point, by what he figured to be obvious, though it never was to them . . .

The assignment asked them to think about what the snow meant in the piece, and most students could formulate an opinion. Most of the students thought about the traditional images of snow, that snow was unique, that no two flakes were the same, that snow was innocence and beautiful, therefore we too must be these things. Surely this is what Alverez meant. Usually, as was the case today, at least one, sometimes two students looked beyond the obvious imagery and looked to the other details in the story to draw a more significant conclusion. They looked at the war, the images of isolation the girl, Yolanda, was subject to both by her teacher in the classroom, and by her ethnicity and her being an immigrant in the U.S. They looked at these things and put them all together with the idea that snow was also winter, and death, and cold, and the earth was buried beneath it for a long time. Snow was death. We were not unique, but indeed made equal in death. This was beauty. This lack of arbitrary boundaries was beautiful.

. . ."one, two . . ." Ralph counted off, eyeing each student and the ease and new found excitement with this part of the assignment growing in them.

And when these ideas were exposed, he watched the faces turn with wonder, first on their own ideas of snow, then on themselves, and then, without them realizing, to the sky, as if to wait for it to fall. All around the room we slipped outside ourselves, forgetting self for just an instant. We were beautiful this way. Together.

" . . . three!!!!" The students, most of them laughing now, tossed the scraps of their shredded essays into the air. The paper filled the space above them and fluttered down slowly over their heads, the desks, and on to the floor. Some students ducked, some students stared up into the fluttering scraps and held out their hands, each of them trapped in their fondest memory of winter, in the memory that felt like home.

Later, when the class had slipped away, chatting about the paper, about everything they had been asked to do, Ralph began to clean up the room, sweeping paper off the desks and chairs into the trash. He reached down and picked two pieces from the ground. On them were single words: yolanda and death. He smiled and tucked the pieces in his pocket, aware that it would never happend just this way again, no matter how many more times, and the days slipped off him like clouds across a summer sky until he was home, hands reached out above him, his tongue catching the very first flake of that very first time.