Three Oranges

Lorca, Literature, and the Walmart El Paso Shootings

Today is about oranges, the kind you eat.

As a professor of creative writing, I often tell my students that if an image arises twice in a single poem or story, it becomes a motif, with or without the will of the writer. By the third time it appears, the image might be trying to tell you something. It signals to the reader that meaning is embedded into the image, and if it appears four times, it may even be a fundamental thematic element of the work.

Same is true in life, probably even more so, because stories are intended to represent “real” life. If there are connections in the work of art, it must be a representation of how details we notice in our day can connect us to meaning.

So what is the meaning that on one day, today, I encountered three references to oranges?

The first was rereading the Garcia Lorca poem Despedido.

El niño come naranjas.

Desde mi balcón lo veo.

It’s a short amazing poem that finds the portal between life and death, between the imaginary world and the physical world. I think it’s one of the most elegant poems ever written about death. And I love that line when he sees the child eating an orange, because you can imagine when he pulls off the rind it sprays acid and juice in his face and he can smell it before the first juicy bite.

The child is living. The child is alive.

The second reference to an orange that came to me today was a detail I found in a Substack I was reading –sorry I don’t remember who it was!!! They wrote that when they were young, they were lucky to get an orange for Christmas. The reference sparked my Richard Wright neuron, and I remembered that scene from Native Son during Christmas, and the mother gives them oranges for Christmas, and they devour those things.

It's a sad image when we think of how poor they were and how materialistic Christmas has become for many of us. To think that kids could get such immense pleasure from an orange is heartbreakingly beautiful.

The third other reference to oranges was especially heartbreaking.

I found this morning on my newsfeed, a story in El Paso Matters about the Walmart shooter, written by Robert Moore.

Read it. It’s a stunning work of journalism.

The shooter didn't enter Walmart with a gun.

He entered and walked around, and in Moore’s piece, there is a poignant moment when a lady comes up to the shooter and asks him in Spanish if he could get something off a top shelf for her, because he’s tall and she’s short and can’t reach it. He helps her.

Later he goes into the grocery area of the store and buys a bag of oranges.

He takes that bag, walks back to his car, gets in, and he sits there for an hour.

He ate one of those oranges during that period. I can imagine him sitting in the car, thinking or trying not to, maybe trying to get the courage to go inside. He takes an orange out of the bag, and he opens –it sprays in his face, and he’s a kid again.

I wonder what neurons it fired. Were they good memories? Maybe he remembered getting Christmas gifts or family moments, or maybe he had hurtful memories, like when he was in elementary school and he was getting picked on by a couple of Mexicans kids, which Moore explains was the reason he gave the cops for why he mercilessly murdered so many people.

I wonder if that hour in the car (before he went back in with guns) was supposed to only be five minutes. Maybe he was just going to drop the bag of oranges in the car, get the guns and go do it, but because he ate one first, maybe it made him stop. Maybe for a moment it even caused him to connect to something human about himself and the lady he helped. Maybe that’s why he stayed in the car in El Paso in the summer when it reaches the hundreds. Maybe he was hoping that the lady he helped inside the store was gone by the time he went back in to kill as many as he could.