An old 1960s TV program called Checkmate featured a striking title sequence: as the credits displayed on-screen, the background showed what appeared as a pool of swirling paint of multiple contrasting colors. (I say “appeared” because in those pre-color television days, the paint actually displayed as shades of gray. You can see it here, in the midst of a bunch of other old shows’ openers.)
It used to fascinate me to watch how each color remained itself, especially at the core of its own smear, but also subtly changed at every point where another color butted up against it. And, of course, that other color also changed…
Regular readers here probably know by now that good friend a/b, which is to say Ashleigh Burrows, is — when not wearing that bloggerly persona — known in real life as Susan “Suzi” Hileman. And that name (at least for readers in the US) will probably set off another wave of associations: Suzi Hileman was one of the most seriously wounded survivors of the Tucson shooting a couple weeks ago. Indeed, she’s the one most in the news lately, as the neighbor who accompanied nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’s meet-and-greet.
Here’s Suzi on last night’s NBC Dateline:
In today’s post at her blog, The Burrow, a/b’s officially “comes out”: Look world. It’s me, Suzi. Yes, Su— SUZI, as in Hileman? You used to know me as Ashleigh?
Some of us had put two and two together already. She mentions Nance’s detective work, in particular.
Nance… heard the news of a shooting at a Congress on Your Corner event in Tucson and just knew that I was there. She just knew. She and her friend Susan U used their computers to triangulate the Safeway and the hospital and the address from the brownies I had sent her at Xmas and it became apparent to them that it was my neighborhood. She left a message on my home phone, begging for information.
As for myself, I now confess that I’d gleaned her real name a couple weeks before That Day. I ascribe it to the curse of life as a Noticer, as I think of them (i.e., us). a/b and I had emailed back and forth a couple of times, and once — just once — her mask had slipped, I’m sure completely accidentally: she had two separate Gmail accounts, one as a/b and one as Suzi Hileman; but, just this once, she had checked a/b’s mail while logged into Gmail as Suzi. The way Gmail handles a case like this is that a reply will display in the recipient’s email as from (in this case) Ashleigh Burrows… by way of Suzi Hileman.
(Normal people almost never look at all these little bits of email message headers. Noticers do it all the time.)
I remember thinking: “Suzi Hileman? Who the hell is Suzi Hileman?” Then the coin dropped.
Roll the calendar forward a few days. When news of the shooting first came out, I connected Tucson to a/b, because at The Burrow she’s always spoken plainly about living there. But I didn’t imagine any firsthand involvement. Rather, I thought, y’know, “I hope a/b doesn’t know any of those poor people.” Because stuff like that never happens to ourselves, right? so it never happens to our friends — extensions of ourselves — either, right?
Only after Nance had done her gumshoe thing and let me know about it did that coin drop. So then I knew Suzi Hileman/Ashleigh Burrows had been shot. But I still didn’t know which victims were which (except for the headlines, of course — the Congresswoman, and the little girl) — not until late on Monday and then, for sure, on Tuesday.
Then, finally, the personal heartsickness set in…
The Matrix movies weren’t the first to suggest — if only in their titles — the importance of connections, of intersections, in the online world. We all cross paths, weave in and out of the fabric one another’s daily lives, sometimes converging at a single point (like a blog we read in common). Sometimes, indeed, there’s a little jolt when we share that single point at the exact same instant: a chat window opens unexpectedly, startling you until you realize who it is, or you’ll notice when posting a comment or email that its timestamp lagged someone else’s by just a second or two.
But it’s more complicated than that, way more complicated, because each of us online has at least one other line, the one representing our real life. Depending on the sort of online life we lead, the two lines generally track each other, perhaps converging (if we blog honestly about real life), crossing, diverging, returning to parallel, and so on over time. If we’ve got a fictive online alias, all sorts of crazy intersections veer into possibility. (In today’s post, Suzi Hileman describes Ashleigh Burrows as “my tall, willowy, blonde alter-ego who’s been in my pocket since high school.” Which makes me smile, because I’m pretty sure that Ashleigh Burrows fantasizes her alter ego, Suzi Hileman, to be someone whose loving courage and strength she could never live up to.)
In such cases we can control the distance between our two lines… right up until the moment (if/when) they collide.
Suzi Hileman and her husband Bill are clearly people who enrich the world just by opening their mouths and making sound emerge. As for Ashleigh Burrows, and The Big Guy (TBG)? Well, their lines started much later than Suzi’s and Bill’s; their lengths will never catch up to their real-world counterparts. Maybe Suzi will continue to “be” a/b, here and elsewhere, or maybe she’ll just progress to blogging as her own self, or maybe — who knows? — she’ll adopt some other online persona. (Or drop out online altogether. I hope not, ye gods, I hope not. But it’s a possibility.)
In the meantime, the rest of us will just have to be thankful for the thin, thin tracings of color (different but complementary colors, and different rates of flow than our own) with which Bill and Suzi, TBG and certainly a/b, have however briefly but irreversibly tinted the swirls of our own lives.
DarcKnyt says
Poignant, well-written and thought-provoking post, John. I’m glad to have you in my matrix of parallel lines, sir. Very glad indeed.
cynth says
I’m so glad to have met the mixture of lines in your posts John. The swirling of their comments in and out of my day always enhance it. I’m so very glad that a/b is okay and Suzi is as well. I hope she continues to drop in and waft her thoughts across the sticky web of RAMH. And I’m so glad you share your voices with all of us.
marta says
When I heard those first reports from Arizona, I did think that the last person on this earth I would want to be was the woman who had taken Christina Taylor Green to the Congress on the Corner event. And I heard on NPR her husband talk about her recovery and was sad for this woman I did not know.
She is a great lady. Someone I would be glad to know.
I’ve often had the thought that our lives are threads unrolling, crossing, twining, knowing, leaving, and we can’t know where exactly those threads will take us. Or end.
Seems like a very tangled world right now.
Lovely post of course.
Thank you.
John says
Darc: Same here, friend.
The Querulous Squirrel says
When I first started blogging, I thought of bloggers as less real than the people I interact with on a daily basis. But overtime, bloggers have gotten more and more real, and I tell other bloggers things I would never tell those in my daily life where I wear my other various non-squirrel masks. True, they are all a part of who I am, but I see now that is true for other bloggers. Yet it has been quite a shock to have a blogger I only vaguely know from your blog turn out to be a really real person, traumatized and on the news, another form of reality.
Nance says
The swirling colors and intersecting curves are a lovely metaphor for this most unusual relationship formed in blogs. With all of her excellent writing, her colorful descriptions and set pieces about her life with TBG and her cast of characters, A/B was never able to prepare me for the extraordinarily capable, eloquent, poised, and endearing people that Suzi and Bill have turned out to be. She did, however, make me love her in advance of ever seeing her.
I was fascinated by her description of Ashleigh Burroughs, that cool Pattie Boyd/Carol Lynley type, as her alter. The best I was ever able to come up with for myself was more along the lines of Jung’s concept of the Shadow–the dark and dangerous image of the self. Someone asked me a few years ago to describe my Shadow self; I coughed up, “Amy Winehouse.” Well, you know, BEFORE these last, career destroying bits.
I wonder, John, if all those years of sitting with other people’s trauma stories, other people’s experiences with the way life can turn brutal on a dime…I wonder if it forever spoiled my ability to imagine that something terrible typically happens to “others,” and not to people I know and love. My, I do miss that innocence.
fg says
This is selfish but I feel how strange it is not be in regular touch with people I do not know as I read this. Sorrow and pain are something so private and yet… and now this is a leap into… well, national. The news is so close and yet so very far from a person. The film here presses my reserved and sorrow buttons at once. I feel I should not look as sorrow is a private place.
But enough about ‘I’.
What I mean to say is I can’t say more to you, Suzi except formal condolences sent with all my wishes. It was a safer place (for us all it turns out) to know you as a/b where time, place and location were seemingly a flexible fiction. I can understand why you’d reveal your concrete self now and it weighs with sorrow. I hope (selfishly) that you will float back into a/b’s light shoes when you can, soon again.
JES, I’m with you, I’m a noticer and though good for life I also agree its can be a terrible burden.
John says
Swirls of paint, sticky lines, matrices… Thanks, everybody.
In a comment back in December, a/b herself provided the “lovely word” interstices to label what’s going on in the subtext of a conversation. That’s also the word for all the stuff which happens to a line in between the points where it intersects with other lines. The Missus and I met online twenty years ago this year, and we used to debate this point quite a bit: whether it’s important, or even useful, to separate “real” life from “virtual” life. Can we trust interactions in the latter as much as we trust those in the former? How do we know — if we know — that online friend X is the person s/he claims to be?
(Not just in fact, but in effect: not just raw data like “Do they really live where they say they do?” but interpretive judgments — “Are they really as friendly or wholesome or smart or well-read or […] as they seem to be?”)
Blogging lets you designate the points at which you’re willing to intersect with other peoples’ lines. We almost never know for sure, though, what’s going on in all those interstices in between blog posts… almost never, unless something really public and out of the blogger’s control intervenes. That a/b and Suzi Hileman seem to be pretty much the same person is lucky for us, but maybe not so lucky for her. The good news is that eventually the specifics of these stories tend to fade. At that point, Suzi and/or a/b can choose how much more (or even whether) to overlay the public and private personas. But on balance, I think getting to know a/b has prepared us pretty well for knowing Suzi — it was just one hell of a shock how suddenly and openly, how noisily the two personas got forced together.
John says
Nance: years back, for a few months, The Missus and I were seeing a therapist who had us name our Shadows. Well, actually, she had us name each other’s Shadows — name them in some way which made it hard to ignore how the other person thought of us.
I called The Missus’s Shadow “Cassandra,” after the constantly-predicting-doom figure in Greek mythology. (Of course, that Cassandra was also often right in her prophecies — just disbelieved — added a little extra spice to the nickname.)
She named mine “Coop,” the cleverness and subtlety of which I immediately envied. First, “Coop” was the nickname of Kyle Maclachlan’s character, Agent Dale Cooper, in our favorite TV series, Twin Peaks. It also suggested Gary Cooper — the interpretation I favored at first, because I liked the implication of having a strong, silent, manly Shadow. But the real nub of the nickname was: keeps everything cooped up. Hmm.
John says
fg: Once the news media seize on a story line for a newsworthy event or person, that becomes THE story line — they will come back to it, over and over, from one TV network or newspaper to the next, asking the same questions, always (maybe) hoping-but-not-hoping for a slightly different answer… I’ve never been in a position to worry about this myself, but I do wonder how — once the immediacy wears off — how the people who had to actually live the story line cope with the tedium of being asked the same things, the same things, the same things…
Ashleigh Burroughs says
This is the kindest discussion about me on the web. This is also the most intelligent compilation of thoughts about my situation on the web. And believe me when I tell you that I have read all of them. Because that is what you do when you live the story line.
Thanks for being in all of my lives :)
a/b and Suzi
Ashleigh Burroughs says
@Ashleigh Burroughs – And will somebody tell me how to make it stop italicizing itself. You’re right, JES, I shouldn’t use it if I “don’t know what they do. :)
John says
a/b and Suzi: much belated reply… I’m happy whenever someone reports that a blog post of mine is the “-est” of anything. But this one especially means a lot!
Glad you’re still with us. As, I’m sure, are you. :)