PS: More “Pink Means What?”

Pink Means What? More Thoughts…

Yesterday’s post addressed the pink for breast cancer awareness connection.

Coincidentally, I’d noticed pink ribbons tied all over the neighborhood for the last few days.  I automatically  assumed the ribbons were tied in observance of a special breast cancer awareness event or calendar week…

This morning I accompanied my youngest on a field trip. I noticed that there were pink ribbons tied to the buses too. Hmm. More breast cancer awareness? Now I wasn’t sure. The field trip was great; we tramped through snow at the local Nature Center, regarded some Wild Things and Their Tracks.  We all shivered in the cold, and delighted in the glory of childhood innocence.

Warm and cosy on the bus again, a natural hush fell on the kids (making the let’s be quiet contest invented by the teacher a little redundant).  Some kids leaned on each other and dozed. I watched their teacher, whom I have grown to love this year.  A month or so ago when I was helping in Nora’s class, I noticed her quietly praising a student who’d been struggling with his reading.  She told him that she knew he’d been trying hard, and congratulated him for reading with more expression.  He wriggled in his seat with pleasure at her confidence in him.  As I thought about her and looked at snowy fields through the foggy bus windows, something triggered a recent memory, a story I’d heard: a teacher hurrying children into a cupboard, barricading it, and planting herself before it as she faced a crazed gunman. My throat caught. I realized that she probably hadn’t felt afraid so much as she would have felt terribly, terribly sad. I couldn’t help wondering both about my own daughter’s teacher, and the teachers and children in Connecticut, and whether…or how… they all managed to come back to school after.

And then I knew why there were pink ribbons tied to the bus, and tied around telephone poles next to the school.  And I realized that now, pink means one more thing to us.

This was bittersweet for me.  In the face of incomprehensible tragedy, I hope that pink ribbons fluttering in the winter wind help us all feel more connected to each other. There are so many of us, we can’t all tell each other in words, “I’m so sorry for your loss, and mine. I’m so sorry that malice and terror keep creeping across our thresholds”.  But we can show each other. Pink ribbons tied down the streets of my community are wonderfully symbolic of connection, of awareness and empathy, of love, and of hope.