Are you capturing this?
People sometimes use this phrase in meetings when they want to know if someone is taking notes. Staff used to be assigned to such duties; usually an already overworked administrative assistant would do the capturing. Now, the job is more often tossed around like a Nerf ball. Your turn, now yours, now yours.
What of our lives right now? This moment. This day? Is someone capturing this?
A man stands in line waiting for coffee. He leans against the refrigerated display case and stares through the glass at tomato salad, and beside it, an almond tart. In a mirror, behind the food, he sees a lemon pie with a slice cut out, then himself reflected back in all his scars and light — lately he’s older than his mind’s picture of himself, so that he must stare at a stranger before he sees himself staring back. Oh, yes, he thinks.
He sighs, fidgets with his wallet, wonders what is holding up the line. Today, in this spot, in this moment of his life he is safe, those he loves are safe. He’s tired. He doesn’t want to think about flip side of safe. He needs new shoes for work, so he wonders instead when he’ll have time to go to the store, try them on, buy the brown ones.
He’s late but really wants coffee; they don’t have it at his meetings anymore, and certainly not muffins or bagels. Everyone is cutting back, cutting into, cutting out.
The day’s paper is folded in one hand; he hasn’t read it. He flips the edge of the front page with his thumb. He knows about Myanmar, knows about China, knows about death and destruction raining down. But he’s tired, overloaded and far shy of evening and real exhaustion.
How do we process crisis half a world away when we are already saturated with crisis?
He gets back in his car with his coffee, in his old shoes and starts the engine, but he isn’t quick enough. The radio is on and before he even begins to scan traffic to back up, he’s hooked by the words of Melissa Block, one of the hosts of National Public Radio’s longest-running program, “All Things Considered.” She lives in the United States, but was traveling in China when the temblor hit. She picked up her microphone, her notebook and set to hard work.
He doesn’t particularly want to listen, but is too late, he’s already gone and far away, captured by her words. The lid stays on his coffee.
Melissa Block is standing in concrete dust at the edge of a pile of rubble three stories high. Days earlier it had been a six-story apartment building. She’s waiting with a young couple — for nine hours she waited — as heavy equipment digs to try to find their 2-year-old son, alive. Melissa becomes speechless, chokes up, cries, and tries to process the unimaginable while painting the story for the rest of us. He listens on and on.
She captures it. She brings him in. She opens, in him, the space that he thought did not want to hold any more stories.
He breathes, turns back to traffic, steers toward work and on the way, calls his friends to tell them of the radio show. He called me.
I listened on the website . The story is called “Couple Frantic to Find Loved Ones in Rubble.” It will continue to be available (I checked), right on the first page of the site with a button that says “Listen Now.”
It is weeks. later, but the story is just beginning. Tens of thousands have died or are missing or injured in Myanmar and in China. We need people to witness, to testify, to capture. As much as we might try to turn and duck from yet more devastation, what makes us human is our sameness, one to another.
What do we say about those willing to bring the rest of us in, to connect us? Kudos? Bravo? Good work? None of these seems appropriate.
Some journalists bring us to where we belong — feeling some small part of a loss we can suddenly imagine, so long as we are reminded that we can, indeed, imagine. They capture it for us. To each of them: Thank you.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza- Chavez at grace-notes @comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
