Near Love Stories |
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The evening was much as you might expect. A lot of righteous indignation, a number of predictable platitudes, some genuine sorrow. For me, as it usually was in those days, it was anger that rose to the fore. A species of inside out self-pity borne of the sense that under different circumstances I, or anyone else traveling or working down there, could have easily been where Linder was. On my first trip we had journeyed into contra territory and our bus and a later gathering of foreign visitors at a remote ranch area had been guarded by AK-47 wielding Sandinista soldiers. Towards the end of the presentation, at a time when my internal musings had run their course and I became aware again of the exterior world, I looked over at Anna Lee. I had tried not to look at her too often, hoping that by concentrating on the film and speakers I would seem appropriately serious, someone who deserved to be sitting with someone as decent as she was. What I saw when I looked over drove the remainder of my pathetic self-absorption from me. Anna Lee, possibly the only person in the room who understood Linder, where he had been and what he had done, was silently crying. I was profoundly affected by the sight. Tears ran down her ruddy cheeks and her tall body shook ever so slightly. I looked at the tears welling still in her reddened eyes and a powerful feeling swept over me. Through Anna Lee's real, quiet sorrow I realized, understood the profound loss of a fellow human being. While most of us understood the loss on an intellectual level, even to some degree emotionally, its true depth could only be understood by someone for whom the loss was truly personal. Finally, after several moments more, I forced myself to look away, to let Anna Lee grieve without intrusion. I turned back to the presentation, tried to concentrate on it, but I could only think of Anna Lee and of Ben Linder himself, the once living, breathing human being. I thought of Anna Lee's loss, her grief, of Ben's life, his death, of his other friends' grief and that of his family. After the presentation, I spoke with Anna Lee and a few other friends briefly, but now felt as if I were an interloper in some drama I had no right to be part of. Shortly I excused myself, left the auditorium and went on home alone.
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About three or four months after I sat with Anna Lee at the Ben Linder memorial, I reached my saturation point for working in the spirit-numbing world of computers. I gave a month's notice, worked up until a Thursday night, left Tucson Friday morning and later that night was sitting on the patio of the Papagayo Hotel in Cuernavaca, state of Morelos, Mexico sipping on a cold Corona beer. I stayed down south for about five months and in a letter from a friend heard that Anna Lee had gone back to Nicaragua to continue her tireless work in the farm co-op. When I came back to the states, I learned she had married some local Nica guy, a farm worker like herself. A couple of years later, while I was living in Colorado, my same friend sent me a newspaper story from a Tucson paper, a nice piece with an interview and photos of Anna Lee showing her life in Nicaragua. About that same time there was a celebrated novel by a well known Tucson novelist that used the outline and some details of Anna Lee's life for one of its protagonists - without, interestingly enough, listing her name in the front matter credits where other local progressives of note found theirs. When I left Colorado a year or two later to come back again to Tucson, I ran into my old letter writing friend, a long time local progressive and activist and he told me that Anna Lee was still living in Nicaragua and was still married. I was glad to hear about her and hoped she was doing well. But I only had the Ben Linder experience to really remember her by, because after that I never saw her again.
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