The Talking Day

Some lunatic with a gun killed some people at an

immigration center in Binghamton, New York. Liz

Rosenberg and her family live up there and David, her

husband, teaches in the middle school which is close to

all the action (the way, in any smallish town, everything is

close to all the action). I called Liz to see if everyone was

all right and she was in her car driving to the elementary

school to pick up Lily, her young daughter she brought

back from China a few years ago. Lily was fine, but

Liz wanted to move her outside the question of how to

make sense of the broken pieces of “someone” with a

gun walking into a public space and then firing. There’s

something called (I learned from a news report the day of

the shootings at Virginia Tech) The Talking Day which

refers to the day immediately following the day when

something wildly violent happens. No one quite grasps

the reality of the situation and everyone spends that first day

talking about what happened and reliving it as language—

not so much to understand the violence but to make a

kind of recording of it: talking about it, letting go of it,

putting it down. And so I imagine it must be with Liz and

Lily and David in Binghamton, New York today: letting

“something” go. Liz is in her car after having just picked up

Lily at school and driving back home through a town that

suddenly makes no sense and she is telling the story about

what happened when a young man walked into a building

with a gun. And for Lily, who’s had a pretty serene, un-

violent United States time so far and whose endless joy

has made her an adorable chatterbox, tomorrow could be

her first talking day. Or, if not tomorrow, some other day.

We live in a talking day world.