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| Michael Noel |
A Cold Day in December, 1958
That first day of December, my friends and I headed to South Park after school to ice skate, most of us eighth-grade classmates at St. Paul of the Cross in Park Ridge, just outside of Chicago. It was the Monday after Thanksgiving, and the football field at the park was now an ice rink. Skating season was back, when boys and girls might pair up and glide around the rink hand in hand. I was just 13 and, like other teens, newly interested in romance, though for me the need for attention and affection now seems to have been more urgent. Just skating on a freezing winter day, bundled against the cold, holding mittened hands, created a warm hyper-reality for me.
I skated with a girl briefly that day, but I can’t recall with certainty who it was. I do remember the exhilaration of circling around and around with the sounds of steel blades scraping on ice and the joyful cries of youth in my ears—calling out to one another, racing, playing tag or crack the whip-- but I can’t bring back the face of my partner. I’m guessing it was probably Diane Wellbank. Diane often captured my attention with her long black hair and unusually large, dark eyes. I do have a clearer memory of a spring day with her on Riverview Amusement Park’s parachute ride. As we sat locked together in our car, the parachute hanging above us, gradually rising some 200 feet into the air, I watched the pond near the ride grow smaller and smaller below. At any moment, we knew the chute would deploy, and we would hurtle back to earth, in accord with the ride’s design to thrill with speed. Throughout, Diane was happy and unafraid while I was so scared I could barely speak, and completely embarrassed. That was in the warmth of June, right before we graduated.
In cold December, while I was breathing in the chill air and feeling the warmth of closeness with another, a devastating tragedy was unfolding miles away in Chicago. Thick black smoke was billowing from another Catholic grade school. Within, kids my age and younger were suffocating on the gaseous, acrid smoke, gasping for their last, dying breaths. My father, picking me up to take me home for dinner, was the one who told me about the Our Lady of Angels school fire. Ninety-two young lives ended in terror that afternoon, along with three nuns. Watching film footage years later, the sight of firemen coming down ladders out of the inferno, with so many limp, lifeless children in their arms, is deeply upsetting. Those unfortunate kids wore the uniforms typical of parochial schools all over America. The disaster went worldwide and spurred significant regulations in the materials used in building schools and triggered other safety measures in the U.S. I wonder how many parents, or haunted surviving children and their teachers, found solace in that.
The day was also distinctly memorable because, as my father told me what he had seen on newscasts, tears welled in his eyes. That he could cry was a revelation. Though I loved him, I also had watched him slapping my mother on two occasions. The first time, I was only six or seven, but I grabbed him around the waist, begging him to stop. As a child, I was overwhelmed, terrified by his angry abuse, without conscious choice, thrown into a role as my mother’s protector. I also constantly depended on her to soothe my resulting chronic anxiousness. The anxiety has been lifelong, complicating many of my relationships.
Unlike those children who died that December day in 1958, I am fortunate to still breathe. Given so many more days, what have I learned? That trauma can be mended. Compassion for others who suffer can help heal personal pain. So does the choice to forgive. Our lives play out within the infinite multiverse, most of it dark, except where lit by astral phenomena, which, though more enduring, like us, have a finite existence. When we see their images, they may already be changed in form or extinguished. Yet across a vast expanse, their light still shines.
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| Stephen Granzyk |
