An Interlude
Monday, May 24, 2010 at 2:17PM | by Otter 
The community college extension campus was baking in the sun this morning. The Mississippi River lies brooding out of sight behind the levee that runs behind the campus, full of the low clanging of barges, the chugging of engines, a smell of diesel.
I had just dropped off an application to teach there and was standing in the shade collecting my thoughts, and watching the small sample of depressed humanity that loiters around a community college extension campus on a hot day between terms.
A tall pierced kid with blazing blue eyes and gold jewelry all over him, looking tough as hell but incongruously eating a chocolate bar. A small knot of teenaged girls with their studied air of indifference. A sweaty Pakistani woman in an unruly sari. A man in his fifties dressed neatly in chinos.
A woman and her child came out of the building, where maybe she had registered, or failed to change a grade, or had discovered that the cost of becoming something is a little more per semester than she can afford.
She's of a type that all teachers know: the kind who is destined to fail. Such students awaken the hero in us, unless we've lost our hope.
She was crying.
Overweight, in dirty flip-flops and an overtaxed halter top she stood, a defeated-looking woman clutching a small obedient boy by the hand. He might have been a little past two, wide-eyed, brown-skinned, in shorts and clutching a plastic toy that probably came from a Happy Meal. He looked at me, at the Pakistani woman, who smiled at him.
It occurred to me that we each had our problems out there: me perhaps least. Unemployed, but certainly employable, I might teach these people to write or to read more intelligently than they currently do.
The small boy looked up at his mother. I saw a little flash of temper cross her face, as though she were about to be angry with him for looking at her, but she quickly mastered it, thought better of it, understood that it was not his fault that she stood there without hope or direction.
This, I wanted to tell her, was the sum of the philosophers and prophets, at least insofar as they speak to such things. This is what it means to be a good person, really: not to strike another for what they did not do to you. Not to let the animal within you take your neighbor or kin as prey, or a sacrifice to your god.
We stood there in the heat.
She looked up the long street one way, then another.
"Do you need bus fare?"
It was one of the girls.
The woman stared at her.
"You need bus fare?"
Suddenly, everybody standing there was drawing closer together. I didn't see any feet moving, but we were all standing together where before we had each been turned away into our private thoughts.
The woman just nodded, and wiped her tears with the back of her hand.
Someone produced a Kleenex and handed it to her.
Somehow the boy was now holding a bit of chocolate.
His mother kept weeping. Harder now, if anything.
The older man was nodding, and coaxing her story out of her. An administrator's name, the name of a class, the financial improbabilities all came out in a rush. Everybody listened. Everybody nodded.
The boy did as boys will do and had managed to spread his bit of chocolate over an acre or so of his own body. One of the girls had a towelette out and was wiping him down.
There is in such moments a kind of tingle in the air, something that I have known very few people to miss, as though for an instant reality had changed a little. There is something akin to magic in such a moment, a lifting of the veil that covers the normal. It reminds me of the rainbow: the instant where the unified incoherent fabric of light is stretched thin for us to see its properties, distinct but indivisible.
I thought of my mother, dying of Stage 4 adenocarcinoma. I thought of this woman struggling to make a better life against impossible odds, without beauty or wealth, perhaps without much intelligence or wit or even a good sense of humor.
And here, the center of our little knot of... what? Love? Barely literate, struggling, indigent love.
In a dying city in an eroding state by a Gulf filled with poisonous crude oil, we stood together with Kleenex and a Hershey bar became our communion.
This is our body. Do this in remembrance of us.
"Will be alright," said the Pakistani woman calmly.
Perhaps it really will.
Reader Comments (10)
I've never been able to choose a favorite color. I like all the colors. One color standing by itself is not as beautiful without the other colors. Your story here explains why. Thank you.
Wow, thanks for this. It made me smile and cry all at once.
Beautiful.
:tears: good tears
This made me think of George Strait's song, "I saw God Today".... You saw God today: in a tired little boy and his even more tired and likely feeling hopeless mom, in those who offered help and chocolate,-which any woman knows will cure all ills- and most especially in all of those people being their best when life was at it's worst.
Thank you all.
Shame! Shame for having lived a George Strait song!
(Teasing, Jennifer.)
So Jennifer: is that experience what you call "god"? Seems more worth worshiping than politics, but of course I have good friends who say you can better make a new world by getting a law degree and making new policy than by giving a boy a bit of chocolate and a girl a little bus fare.
What say you?
One problem with changing the world (or planning to) in BIG ways is that it becomes too easy to just "imagine" what kinds of problems the BIG solution will focus on. In my own life, when I've obsessed about BIG fixes, I've been inclined to just stop engaging in the minutia of the lives around me.
I believe the coverage of the oil spill illustrates my point. Flying over in an airplane allows us to decide all is well below the surface. But the divers found something more troubling that wasn't visible from the air.
Chocolate won't solve all the BIG problems. But I'd hate to live in a world without it and people who freely share.
I spent 7 hours in various stages of Emergency Room waiting/treatment last evening. It was amazing to see the camaraderie that developed among those of us who waited, each with our own unique "emergency".
Moms shared Tylenol to soothe baby's fevers, cared for each other's babies when a bathroom break was needed. Joked and commiserated and laughed and shed silent tears for one another. Shared snacks. We were a little family for a few hours.
Such was the closeness that when a name was called from the desk, a young black man asked one of our waiting neighbors, "Did she just call my name?". She joked, "You're asking me? I don't even know your name?". I said "I don't either, but I'm pretty sure it's not Cynthia." And we all laughed together. I still don't know his name. But when the rest of us see him in Walmart, he'll be Cynthia to us.
Tears here, too. What a privilege, to see a little bit of Heaven touching earth. Thank you for sharing it with us all.
And more tears. Thanks for sharing it.