Somewhere in those hours, Nonna slipped away. My dad picked me up and we drove to Massachusetts. I tried to write a daily theme from the passenger’s seat. I tried to keep going because otherwise everything would stop; but the car was too quiet and the road was too blank.

***

I’m still not sure how much Nonna and I were intrinsically similar, and how much I actively modeled myself on her. If we’re talking genes, I do have blue eyes and a gap between my front teeth. I do not know how to flirt. Every time that I try to ride a bicycle with no hands, I think of how once, with the same hope of free air, she rode a scooter with her eyes closed straight into a Venetian canal.

But there’s also everything that she shaped in me, everything about her that I have tried to emulate. She gave me For Whom the Bell Tolls when I was thirteen and here I am, ten years later, turning in a senior project on Hemingway in Spain. When World War II ended, she danced in Piazza San Marco until dawn, and there I was in January, two days after she died, thinking I should go to Wednesday Toad’s as a fitting celebration of her life.

But I couldn’t go to Toad’s. I just wanted to sleep. Every day for three weeks, I woke up feeling disoriented, like I had been cut loose from the narrative that I had been writing myself for twenty-two years.

Words had always been my favorite toys, and Nonna had always been my favorite subject. In high school, I spun myths from her dinner-table stories about dancing on the Lido and swimming at dawn. Turned around caught, laughing in surprise joy. The summer her scrape got infected, I flattered myself that I captured old age nicely. The fragile skin of her veiny shin peeled off like an apple sticker. There were, too, the words I knew because of her, the Italian that we spoke over the phone or when we were together in the four summers that I lived with her. Her long voicemails looped from start to finish. Ciao bella, è la Nonna, they started. Baci baci, è la Nonna. In her stories, in her being, she gave me words for where I come from and words for where I’m going.

There are no words, my professor said, in a lecture about precision in writing. And there weren’t, in the few weeks after Nonna died—not mine, at least. Writing a daily theme took me hours. I didn’t try to speak Italian because I was scared my tongue couldn’t do it. My English didn’t fare so well either. If I talked, I babbled, but mostly I just wanted to be quiet.

This wanting to be quiet felt like the antithesis of being a Yale student. I had spent almost four years learning how to express myself in ways that would both connect me and set me apart. That was almost four years of introducing myself, speaking in section, writing essays, editing articles, interviewing for jobs, tutoring middle schoolers, and telling stories over beers about last night and last lines and what I did last summer. I think we deal in stories, here. We build ourselves through conscious narratives, tales we know we’re writing.

***

I had heard the story. A woman bought the unfinished framework of a one-story house in a field and started to build it higher and wider. The wind-bleached wood looked like bones against the blue February sky. As she scrambled between the ribs of the top floor she whistled, the neighbors say—continuous whistles, as if she only ever breathed one breath. When the season spread into spring, and then summer, she became quiet. She ran out of songs, one neighbor said, but I bet she just wanted to listen to the heavy hum of cicadas. She bought a harness and belayed herself up and down each of the six outer walls to shingle them with cedar. By the end of the summer she was brown, and her hair had turned blonde. She painted the cedar shingles white. In the autumn, when the frost stiffened the fields, the neighbors didn’t see her anymore. They could hear hammering from inside, and sometimes a drill.

No one else touched the house’s bones, they tell me, though when I climb up the stairs years after they say she began, that seems incredible. The rooms are complete and smooth. The second floor is made out of windows. There is no furniture. To the right of the staircase, on the third floor, there’s a small hexagonal room. The woman has a low, square table set on top of a Turkish carpet, and stacks of paper, and a jar of yellow pencils. It’s February, and the water in a clear drinking glass is frozen. I tilt my chin up and notice there’s no ceiling. The woman looks up from a sheaf of lined paper. Such a pleasure, she says, to wake up to that blue sky.

***

In lecture on a Tuesday in February, I heard someone reading those paragraphs out loud. I looked up from my notebook and remembered that I had written them and felt like I was in one of those dreams where you go to class in your underwear. Hello World.

We had been assigned write a theme about a dream and I had pulled my laptop into bed half-asleep. I hadn’t re-read the words that I had typed. When we read the piece out loud in class, what I had written made me nervous because it was so true. What I had written was about what it felt like to grieve in the middle of senior year at a place of productivity and self-definition: existing quietly, letting out what wells up in whistles; trying to build something you have no idea how to build; wanting space and looking to fill space at the same time. After lecture, I read the story over and over. Words I hadn’t chosen had said everything I wanted to say.

***

Maybe, I thought, I could explain everything without trying. Maybe I could build myself from subconscious stories. After that dream, I kept a notepad by my bed and wrote every morning as soon as I woke up. And I could tell you more stories from that notepad; stories from the week before spring break and the week after spring break and the week we spent at Nonna’s house during spring break, packing up boxes of books and going through a closet of clothes that still smelled like her Shalimar perfume. There was the one where I walked by a building as its scaffolding fell down; the one with an empty train in the woods; the one where my neighbor walked into my room and told me not to resist love. The one about skiing and falling; the one where Nonna spoke and pulled a sweater from her closet; the one where I lost a heart-shaped rock in a game of hide-and-seek.

The truth is, I’m not sure if they’re relevant anymore. I want my stories to be conscious again; I want to do something with my words instead of exist within them. Fables don’t last long around here, anyway. I go back to that story about the house, but now it ends differently. I wake up and build a roof and stand on top of it and the view is so much richer than plain blue sky.

The United Methodist Church does not allow its clergy to perform same-sex weddings, and so, the 79 year old reverend is now facing a possible canonical trial for his action, accused by several New York United Methodist ministers of violating church rules.

Ogletree, who performed the wedding service for his son, Thomas Rimbey Ogletree, JE ’03, and Nicholas Haddad on Sat., Oct. 20, 2012 at a ceremony at the Yale Club in New York City, is being charged with violating the Methodist Church’s governing book, the Book of Discipline, which rules that  “the practice of homosexuality” is “incompatible with Christian teaching.”

Based on past rulings, it is possible that Ogletree could be stripped of his credentials, if brought to trial.

The New Haven Register has reported that the Yale Divinity School is standing behind its retired  dean, and that current Divinity School dean, Gregory E. Sterling, expressed his support for his predecessor in a statement.

In a recent op-ed in The Washington Post (that you should all read) entitled: “Why I disobeyed the United Methodist Church’s unjust teaching on same-sex marriage,” Ogeltree outlined his reasons for administering the ceremony. A veteran of the civil rights movement, Ogeltree was once an active participant in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. He states that this experience has illuminated his response to what he considers to be “unjust disciplinary rules in the United Methodist Church, especially rules that denied my right to officiate at my own son’s wedding.”

Considering the prominence of and obsession over undergraduate “resume porn”,  who even knew non-participation was even an option? As an anonymous Facebook user put it: “Wish this had been the case for Yale College too. Kudos to Yale Law!”

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There was only one RL that showed up to perform at Yale Spring Fling 2013: twenty year-old wunderkind Henry Steinway, a producer and DJ from Los Angeles that goes by the stage name of RL Grime.  A protogé of Baauer and Diplo, Grime delivered one of the livest EDM sets Yale has ever seen.  He closed with a previously unreleased rework of Chief Keef’s “Love Sosa.” Let it bang.

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