My Brooke

Today, I challenged my students to write a vignette about someone who influenced them at some point in their childhood.  This is what Willa Cather did in My Antonia, and I wanted them to appreciate the difficulty of writing in this way and keeping it vivid and specific without diluting the story into "he was important" or "she was really great".  It had to be called "My ______" in reference to the person described.


I slapped together a vignette of my own to show them an example, and I thought I'd share it with you.

My Brooke

My memories of my early childhood are often more strong impressions than images.  One of these impressions was of Brooke.  She was beautiful and kind with long hair exactly the color of newly-dried straw in the sun.  Brooke was the oldest of four children in the Smith home where I spent my week days as a young girl while mom was at work.  Mrs. Smith broke horses; I think each of her children had some of her tenacity in them as well.  Annie, who was closer to my age, had the largest dose of her mother’s spirit.

I remember nothing specific that Brooke did or said.  I do remember that she was calm when Annie was wild, and she treated me like a little sister when I had no one else to look up to.

I heard the news when I was about 10 and Brooke was a young teen; it had been a couple years since I had seen them last.  Brooke had been the passenger in a car of teenage friends.  The car had screeched to a sudden stop.  She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt and was tossed through the car window and crushed by passing traffic.  Her death was slow and painful.  Brooke's family was distraught, and Annie was rumored to have fallen in with a bad crowd apart from her sister’s influence.

I was not able to attend Brooke’s funeral, but I felt a more personal contact with her death than any other I had experienced, including the death of a kind aunt not long before.  For me, she was not just a teen driving statistic or even a fond memory with a sad ending.  Brooke was the harbinger of unexpected fate in a fragile world.

Though I was the type of child who thought deeply about faith, I never questioned God’s Providence or determined that individual goodness was futile if it could be rewarded so harshly.  However, I now understood that I and anyone I knew was vulnerable.  I no longer entertained an unfounded confidence in life’s invincibility.  Years later, fellow college students would become surprised by the unexpected vehemence with which I insisted on them securing their seat-belts.  I still pray for Brooke--I pray that her soul is at peace and I attempt to live so that I too will be at peace whenever fate or death or God holds out his hand toward me.