The Hunger Games


I felt wild and dreamy. It was surreal being in that throng of people at midnight. Just normal Emery Bay mall where I buy my pants at Banana Republic by day, taking on a decidedly edgier quality by night. I felt a surge of excitement, mixed with fatigue; an interesting combination of feelings, making for a very different state of existence, wholly receptive to what comes next.


I’ll never forget the moment I got it. I leaned forward and it felt like my whole body was seized and thrust into the story with her. It was if I was in a dream. I was with her on her journey. I was her. The symbols and the analogies and my own memories kept coming at me faster and faster as I plunged deeper and deeper into her world. And I felt the danger and the fear and the relief from each witty idea that saved her. I loved it when she hit that apple, drove that knife in the mahogany table, sawed the swarming branch of tracker jackers on the pack of meanness below.


I was with her during the interview with Caesar when she had to figure out a way to be clever and alluring; to rise up with confidence, take a chance and put herself fully out there. How well I remember that feeling, you’re on the stage and they’re all watching you, wondering what you’ve got. And you know they’d just love to see you blow it. And life can be so fierce and heartless when you’re hung out there, hungry, in a new place and it happened again and again growing up; three junior highs, three high schools, I don’t even know how many grade schools. I pretended I had confidence as I improvised my way through the pack. I needed them to like me. I needed sponsors! Sometimes I was a hit, other times I ate lunch alone hating for them to see me; sometimes they put gum in my hair and violated my locker; one particularly brutal year they all ran away every time they saw me, but then . . . there were the brilliant times I twirled with a red ruffle at the end of my skirt that turned to fire.


It gets better as you get older in some ways, in that confidence sort of way, but some of it gets harder. The competition has much higher stakes and you make decisions along the way and decisions get made for you and your destiny rolls out with the savages and God help you if you don’t have friends who have your back. But even then, there are those with power and money and it’s probably not you and you hope to God you’re not going to get sacrificed at the altar and end up in foreclosure with no health insurance and a pack of wild dogs at your feet. And the 1% in the city are so much slicker and faster and cooler and smarter than you could ever be and those are the times when your confidence is down and you’ve blown your game and you know it. I thought about those vacant, desperate men like my dad who lost his job at 50 and his confidence and identity along with it and finally succumbed to the wild dogs who tore him to shreds. Poor guy – Mom sure wasn’t a Peeta – and he didn’t know how to recognize a Rue. And he went down and he went down hard, taking his son’s hope with him.

And may the odds be ever in your favor. Chilling.

Oh, God, that just can’t be true. What about love and loyalty and the angels along the way? What about the Rues and the Peetas and the Gales and the Cinnas and even the dunken Haymitch angels? What about the hovercrafts and the silver parachutes and all the times you got some ointment for your shattered heart? What about the poets and the books and the rock and roll that saved my butt in high school and to this day. What about Breitenbush Hotsprings and Point Reyes and Paris and the fog in the early morning? What about the softness and tenderness in the jungle? And you recognize each other and you receive each other and you wrap around each other in mutual protection with a spot of humor thrown in for fun. I thought of all of mine. You all started cascading through my memory. You know who you are.

And President Snow was right. Hope is stronger than fear. He used it to manipulate, but it’s bigger than that. It has more power than fear. As Gale said, “If we don’t watch, they won’t have them.” You don’t have to buy into it. You don’t, you don’t, you don’t! Those game makers were so creepy, weren’t they? It brought me back to my AT&T days, working as an economist in a cubicle. I worked with a lot of smart people. A lot of them were even kind. But we were wasted. And for what? And I’ve seen the heartlessness of the system even with the big guys, the CEOs, the Senecas, who loved her pluck, rewarded her for it and took the fall. And didn’t you just hate it when they kept changing the rules? Opt out! Find your own way. Make your own rules. Even if you die, you were still you.


Find something you’re good at it and keep working on it until you know that you can rely on it to survive. She was a huntress. And she was smart. And she was strong. She was so beautiful because she was so real and so utterly unaware of her appeal. She was just being who she was and she was fiercely loyal to those she loved. No matter her faults, it was that loyalty that made me fall in love with her. It made her so pure. And Peeta gave her back that loyalty and more. Oh, that we all might have that special person. If you’re lucky enough to find them, hold on to them tight and be as kind and good to them as you know how to be.


I’m learning how to recognize the angels and how to receive their goodness. And I’m learning that it’s never going to come from money or a system. It’s the people I love and love me back that are bigger than any heartless system or corporal meanness and it’s the giving and receiving of that love and that loyalty that will keep me alive in the end. I’m still alive - throbbingly so.