Twenty-Eight Minutes 5/19/14 Blog

     I walk into the empty living room and sit down at the kitchen table across from my mother. Boxes line the blank walls filled with the belongings acquired in the first seven months of the Gambee family's residence in Colorado. My mom looks around and taps her foot nervously, trying to find more things to pack away before the big move in the coming week. Once my waving hand finally grabs her attention, she focuses in on the computer screen in front of her where I have just pulled up the poem. Soon her eyes dart to my phone laying on the table, the phone that is anxiousness waiting to remember every note that comes out of her mouth. "Do you really have to record me?" She says with self-conscious grin. After a smart-mouthed comment from her eldest, she begins to read the poem. I study her as the lines across her face morph from confusion to contemplation and back over and over again. After a minute or so, she continues to look at the screen, but I know she is finished reading; only thinking. "Well, it's about racism," she explains. I ask for a little more detail; "how did it make you feel? What thoughts popped into your head?" Were just a few of my thought provokers. She explains how she immeaditly felt lucky to be an American. Patriotic.
      "I couldn't imagine being part of this horror," she said. "The poem never directly explains any obvious suffering, what made you think there was?" I respond. She reads me a line from the poem and explains to me why she thinks it is so awful."Wow," I say. "I never thought about it like that," She goes on to put a new perspective of the poem that I am studying into my mind. My mom found it to be very violent and brutal; something I had not seen yet in "Durban, South Africa - Some Notations of Value," by Chris Abani. After she clarified with me what Abattoirs are, she tells me that she thinks that the stanza about the slather-houses are really related to the way that the minorities were treated during apartheid. As well as how the "death skipping between the children," (Abani 26), is about the fear that all people felt during this awful time. After a remark that almost sounded defensive over the line "here, women are older than God," (Abani 12), she moved on from the dark parts of the poem.
       One thing I've always admired about my mom is how she finds the positives in everything. Even in a poem as apparently dark as this one she looked for the rays of light in it. "Yet love hums like tuning forks," (Abani 15), is the line she studies next. "See! They still have hope," She says with a certain type of joyful melancholy I doubt I'll ever understand. I ask her another question, "What images came to your mind when reading this? What do you think about?" "When I first started reading it, I thought of South African beaches and the shiny city, but towards the end it shifted to a darker place. Like a mystery movie." Mystery movie. I found that an interesting choice of words. Maybe a horror or crime movie, but a mystery? This is why conversations like this are good; it truly helps to have another look at something this symbolic and metaphorical. We sit quietly for a moment while we wait for the next subject to begin out of our mouths. I scratch my hand while my mother's eyes flicker over the electronic paper on the screen for the hundredth time. My mind starts to wander to other homework that I must do before the night ends when my brother walks into the room.
    "Sam, what do you think about this poem?" My mom asks, desperate for some new inspiration. My brother steps over a moving box to look at the screen. "I don't know, I'm not gonna read that. I just came to grab a snack. I have more homework," He says, annoyed. "Forget it," his mother replies. "Figures," his brother replies. I look over my copy of the poem and ask about a word I'm still unsure about. "The dance workout?" She questions when I ask her about the use of the word "Zumba" in the poem. I explained how I couldn't find the historical significance of the word and maybe she would know. She didn't. "I don't really know what else to add. How much more do you need for your assignment?" She asks. My brother walked by crunching on some form of a carb he grabbed from the pantry. "I think this is good. Thanks mom," I conclude. "No problem, honey," She adds with a kiss on the top of my head. She walks off with a hint of pride in her step. Not because of her intelligence, but because of the intelligence she thinks I have. She is a proud mom, something that no one can ever take away from her. I know I don't deserve her help, but I accept it willingly. I realize as I begin to write that her input helped explain the poem to me from a whole new level. I write a few notes then hear the door open and see my dad walk in from work. "I think I'll call that a day," I think to myself as I close the ears of the little piece of technology on the table who just listened to every sound made during this 28 minute and 51 second period of fulfillment.