"RAINBOWS IN TRAVAIL"
Published in the Johnson County (Ind.) Daily Journal, March 24, 1997 ©
Your first natural instinct is to reach out and touch it.
At least it is mine, and there are no signs that say, "Please Don't Touch
the AIDS Quilt." I just feel compelled to reach out and touch it, the same way my mother reached out intuitively and touched
my father's hand in the last minutes his casket was open, even though they hadn't been man and wife for more than 20 years.
But I hold back my hand. If everyone touches this pastiche of memorial swatches,
it will wear thin if not wear out. Rectangles of cloth are less permanent than the interwoven circles of death they represent.
Though it is only a small part of the 17-acre, 46-ton AIDS quilt, three panels
to be exact, it is still an impressive sight, standing tall and multi-colored in the softly sunlit room. Each rectangle grows
in size, comes into focus, as you approach the panels and begin to read the names, see the faces, count mentally backward from
nine million AIDS deaths worldwide.
The names are ones we have all heard, all spoken, nothing uncommon about them.
Ken. Ricky. Don. Alan. One, on an open book of white cloth against a black background, bears the same name as my first son and
the name of the same city where he has always lived.
My son is almost as old as this young man used to be and only by the accident
of good fortune, I have to admit to myself.
Another panel has black musical notes on a white background, a piano keyboard,
player-less, stretched out beside them. Another has a green cloth Christmas tree and another a yellow racing car. One has Polaroid
snapshots of a smiling man with a thin mustache, sometimes surrounded by smiling parents, siblings and/or friends.
The most common word I see on this trilogy of common mourning is "love." Diffusing
light filters through the patches of the panels, coming from the round window near the top of the north wall. The instinct again is to
reach out and touch it, as if I ever could.
I touch instead the wooden lectern beside the third panel and leaf through the book
of names that have periodically been read aloud in this room of diffused light and quilted tribute. I find a second instance of my son's
name, find another the same as mine, another I recognize as the racing driver I so enjoyed interviewing over the years he was at the
race tracks.
On the list on a table nearby -- names people have written there to be read with the
others -- is the name of someone I may have once worked with and, farther down, maybe a former student. I can't be sure because only
their first names are written there.
The natural feeling is to be overwhelmed even by just these three of thousands of pieces
of the AIDS Quilt scattered across the known world by The Names Project to remind us, from a room at Franklin College to similar rooms
halfway around the globe.
The self-appointed cynics of the last half-decade of the millennium would find it easy,
I suppose, to dismiss it as just another impossible example of symbolism over substance. But I can only remember, somehow, part of what
William Laurence wrote more than 50 years ago in the last paragraph of his Pulitzer Prize-winning story about the dropping of the second
atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan.
Looking back from inside the "Bock's Car" bomber that dropped that bomb, then some 200
miles away from ground zero and speeding even farther away every second, Laurence described the awesome and terrible beauty of the mushroom
cloud rising behind the fleeing B-29.
"The boiling pillar of many colors could also be seen at that distance, a giant mountain
of jumbled rainbows, in travail," Laurence wrote in the fall of 1945. "Much living substance had gone into those rainbows."
There is more substance in this room than the self-appointed cynics can ever feel or understand.
This, too, like that bomb, is a patchwork of jumbled rainbows, the awesome cloud produced by the anatomical atom bomb that has already claimed
more people in this country than were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
This quilted spectacle is a tribute to hundreds of thousands of families, in travail. Families
that used to have members called Ken and Ricky and Don and Jeff and Jerry.
As much living substance as symbolism has gone into its colorful and sorrowful panels. So much
so that even its 17 acres will not long contain it or bring any kind of lasting peace you or I can leave behind in our wake. Or in the comfort
of our unnatural, untouched sleep.
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Copyright 1997 by Jerry Miller ©
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