On April 20th, 1999, the day I first heard about the Colorado school shooting, I walked out the front door of my house and paused for a moment. It was spring. In Colorado they had snow but in Champaign, Illinois the sun was shining. I wasn't at all sure that the hibiscus flower I'd planted the year before had survived the winter, but that morning I saw that several green stalks had poked up through the layer of protective mulch.

I couldn't help connecting these two things--I remembered an interview that I had seen on Good Morning America with one of the EMT workers who had been first on the scene at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing (April 19, 1995). This man said that he had spent the next year in his garden, trying to think about things that were alive and growing, trying to come to terms with what he had seen and experienced. Clearly the connection I made that morning was one which has been made before -- between life and renewal and death. But for me, at this moment, the connection seemed quite unique and important.

The relevance of this moment to this particular text is the idea that such connections, taking place in a moment and meaning in a particular way for only an instant, are not found in the confined space of academic writing. As a graduate student, my life is full of reading and thinking. But the spaces that interest me most are those tiny gaps which I fill on a daily basis with concrete, physical experiences: the way the shock of a school shooting combines with a moment of scratching in the mud to reveal green shoots.

These experiences became intricately connected to the texts I was reading at the time for a course called Rhetoric and Race in Writing Studies. The course met every Tuesday, from 3-5 PM. The four walls of our meeting room created a particular setting for our discussions about race -- discussions which were sometimes hampered, I thought, by efforts to connect our lives and experiences to the theories presented to us through the texts we read.

On this particular morning in April, 1999, after leaving the scenes of death on the morning news and wiping my muddy hands on a kitchen towel I walked towards the bus stop. Suddenly, the shooting, the hibiscus, and a conversation I'd heard the day before combined with the course readings to create an instant of understanding which flashed by too quickly and was gone. I can think about it now, much later, and remember the elements of the formula, but the moment of clarity eludes me. My effort in this text is to use elements of textual recombination and rearrangement to create similar moments - instances where clarity emerges suddenly and is just as suddenly lost.