MINE. MINE. MINE!
Mine! Possibly the third word every American child learns to say. Mine! My momma. My daddy. My toy. “Mine, Mine, Mine” the seagulls squawk in Finding Nemo, jumping up for food.
“He took my snow ball!” The playground is covered in thirty inches of new snow. I look around for the trouble spot. “I made a snow ball and he took it.” “He shouldn’t have done that. Tell him how that made you feel.” “It was mine!”
“Stop pushing up there!” I yell in another direction looking up at six-year-olds on the top of the snow bank. “We’re playing King of the Mountain!” they yell back. “You can’t play it that way. We need to find new rules. Come on down, let’s talk.” “Can’t. It’s mine”
One might think that humans would outgrow this behavior as they learned that you couldn’t own people and pieces of ground, but no. The new mom looking down at her child secretly and gently says it. The newly married couples think it as they slip rings on each other’s fingers. I said it as I signed the papers on my new house. From a family of nine, I had never had my own bed now a whole house was mine. I feel it in my soul as I turn the corner at the top of my walk and look down at my town and my river. Or as I come across the bridge at my lake.
As old as time, across all cultures. People fighting for what they perceive as theirs. “Mine,” they said as they landed on the shore of the new world. “Mine,” they said to the Native Americans, the French and the Spaniards as they headed West and South for new land to claim as theirs. And then invented new guns to make sure they understood.
“Mine,” they said as they tried to draw lines in the ocean. My place to fish, my place to keep my shore safe from people like you, my place for my boats. And then invented better boats, airplanes and submarines to make sure they could keep it.
“Mine,” we said as we shot ourselves into space to the moon and planted a flag that proved it was ours.
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Hey The Eyrie is out at last--take a look around campus or outside of Lesley Gillis' door, and you can take a copy Maybe this for Issue 2?
ReplyDeleteCindylou, what strikes me about this is tone and your control of it. It's far too easy to set up villains in a piece or to stake out some moral high ground, but both approaches deeply undermine the writing. What the reader needs and what the point of this week is (as opposed to the week on distancing) is to be invited in, to be gently introduced to the topic--and you do that beautifully, arranging your examples without shoving our faces in them, introducing yourself without setting yourself apart, and coming up with a very strong close, one that leaves nothing more to say.
My one and only suggestion. Drop the very last word--makes the sentence crackle if that word is "was."