Month: April 2012

Bear-ly Making It

Ellen (not her real name) was a long way from home, wherever home used to be. Since she exhausted her savings after being laid off her job in 2005, home becomes anywhere in Sacramento that she can find to lay her head.

On this wet and stormy night, she would lay her head near the river, where I found her playing a card game she invented herself. Since she was playing it alone, I presumed it to be a derivative of solitaire, seven piles of cards being flipped and arranged in an indecipherable sequence. She had two names for the game, neither of which would appear in an English language dictionary.

I settled in on the neighboring bench to listen to her. The narration that followed was at times difficult to follow. I learned that Ellen had studied computer software and knows five programming languages. After being illegally dismissed from her previous, final employment, she sued them for wrongful termination. A flurry of unsuccessful lawsuits depleted her resources. Ellen bounced from couch to couch until she wore her welcome threadbare. The streets alone welcomed her.

Ellen’s verbal articulation and expressive voice made the veracity of her claims hard to dismiss, yet the warm shimmer within her voice showed she was not tired of life. She possessed a vibrant glow, as if, despite being encrusted with grime and worn with wear, at any moment she would uncover the golden nugget to forever change her fortune.

If she appeared on the Homeless Elocutionist of the Year television game show, she would bring tears and a standing ovation from the crowd, and even the most berating, hardened judge would cave in and give her a compliant thumbs up. This, despite her caked-on street muck and the impressive odors that accompany those with limited accessibility to bathing.

I probed, “So how are you managing to eat, Ellen, with no income?”

Her answer was oblique. Apparently foragers makeshift from a variety of sources which are difficult to easily enumerate.

Suddenly she dug within the plastic bags that apparently housed all of her worldly belongings, extricating a battered teddy bear with two bug-like antennae inexplicably sprouting from its forehead. A faded pink ribbon hung around its neck.

“We’re bear-ly making it!” she confessed, the bright tone in her voice contagious. Her widened eyes were eloquently expressive, with the easy capacity to grab me by the throat.

I squirmed uncomfortably, increasingly cognizant that my own life was stacked unaccountably in my favor. 

One advantage of hearing a stranger’s story is that it leaves the option of our own opinions. Sure, Ellen’s story was gripping and persuasive. It challenged me. It bent my stereotypes of a homeless, down-on-her-luck woman.

If it were true.

With no way to establish the veracity of her story, it could all be fabrication. Aren’t the Homeless born manipulators, just waiting to hit up their audience with “The Ask” for a dollar or two? Sure, Ellen seemed accomplished and talented. But she might just as easily be delusional or conniving.

My mental arguments and counter-arguments were like the quick tides of water sloshing in a bathtub. I wanted to walk away, but I felt stuck.

Slowly and quietly, I pulled my wallet from my back pocket, realizing with a start that my choices were limited–I possessed only one dollar and a twenty dollar bills. I awaited a confirmation of which bill to choose, with no result.

But just in case those gripping eyes were telling the truth, I pulled out the twenty.

I thanked her for the time together. “Maybe this will help with your next few meals,” I nearly apologized.

I stepped into the dark and rain of this stormy night, and all the way back, I wondered whom I had really met–and what she had seen in me.

The Energizer Bunny Lies

We’ve all seen the Energizer Bunny, beating his drum interminably; we are told the batteries never run out. But out of camera range, he doesn’t keep going and going and going as advertised. Nothing does.

The all-young jogger passing me by, all-grinning, all-carefree, all-future-driven doesn’t really keep going and going and going. What I don’t know about is the slow drip her boyfriend is draining from her life.

The schedule-driven train hoists passengers within, clickety-clacking monotonously, horn religiously blasting watch-out-for-me-I’m-coming-through at each crossing gate, but it doesn’t keep going and going and going. A car stalled on the tracks or a broken crossing gate posts all red signals and eight-hundred passengers are late for their jobs, miss conference calls, forgo a college entrance exam.

A cold has the head in a vise, stabs the throat at each swallow and muffles the hearing with a throbbing ache. Chronic pain claws at the lower back, and the arthritic big toe tries to balance a lurching, ailing system that doesn’t feel like going and going and going.

Just then, a street lamp posts an unanticipated sermon at its base—“Hey,” with an arrow pointing upward.

Upward. Oh, yeah. Upward.

A voice from somewhere enters the head, and the voice says, “I still see you!”

And with that, the world falls away.

We can keep going and going and going a bit longer.

Family Tree

When we lose confidence in the direction our lives are navigating, we may look to the example of those in our family tree who achieve success or recognition. Uncle Henry invented a greenhouse tomato humidifier that would hydrate the dirt without the need for a drip sprinkling system. Forebear Grandmother Merva developed a chili recipe which she marketed so successfully that the revenues allowed her to invest her fortune in NASCAR championship racing cars, each one emblazoned with a logo promoting her very own “Mother’s Butt-Kickin’ Beans.”

Some of us who lack such a prominent and impressive family tree struggle through life’s mundane struggles, hoping to come up occasionally for air.

This describes Steven, a student in my classroom housed in the parole office. Having attended my class for over two years, he struggles to maintain his fifth-grade reading level, suffering from dyslexia and other learning disabilities.

Steven has difficulties making appropriate behavior choices. A few months ago, he arrived in class with one eye swollen shut and his face badly bruised. Believing himself to have been disrespected upon leaving a bar, he took up fisticuffs with two fellow revelers, who got the best of him. Fortunately for him, he survived, and the assault charge was eventually demoted to disorderly conduct.

Within weeks he was re-arrested for carrying an illegal switchblade. Again, the judge reduced the charges since the blade only fractionally exceeded the legal length. Saved again. He will do community service.

Last week he earned himself another court date by threatening the clerk in the general relief office for not providing him the benefits he was convinced that he deserved.

As many of us do during times of emotional distress, he fished through his family tree to validate his self-worth despite his recent incorrigible behavior.

“I’m not a great example to my daughter,“ he began. “My brother, though, he really made something of himself,” Steven boasted. “Did you know he earned certifications to do plumbing, carpentry and auto body repair?”

“That’s amazing!” I responded. “What a talented guy!”

“Not only that,” he continued. “He was an ordained minister.”

I was impressed. “Where was his church?”

“Oh, he didn’t have a church,” Steven explained. “He had lots of time to study, though. He earned his vocational certificates and his ordination while he was in prison.”

I sat in shocked silence.

“Yeah. He did 31 years for murder before he passed away from cancer in prison last week.”

He stared silently and blankly at me, like an actor who has forgotten his lines.

“I’m going to miss him,” he muttered. “He was the best brother you could ever want.”

In the Dental Chair

If a street punk informed me that he would be removing my teeth, I would gallop my way to safety, feet pounding and arms flailing.

But a visit to my dentist poses no such threats. His job is to preserve and protect my pearly white crown-encased teeth. He has every inch of my mouth mapped, memorized and x-rayed. He knows my mouth better than I do. If a lunar rover were small enough, he could remotely land it between molars number 19 and 30.

He is a spelunker of sorts, exploring regions that I myself cannot see. I rely on him to do that task. He refers to tooth numbers like familiar addresses that he casually visits every six months, reporting their status to me like a barber shares the local gossip with his clients.

Sitting in a dental chair provides us time to think. Despite being in the presence of a small audience, we are not expected to say a word.

There’s time to think….

There’s a special relationship of trust we share with those who have more intimate knowledge of specific parts of our body than we, ourselves, do. They are witnesses of our inner workings and maintenance requirements. Still, it’s unnerving when medically-licensed spelunkers travel into the hidden reaches of our bodies that we will never be able to see with our own eyes.

I never met my adenoids—and never knew of their existence—until I was ruthlessly assaulted by a barrage of infections that made swallowing a fearful event of searing pain. As a child living in Germany, doctors whose language I could not understand told me my adenoids had grown defective through massive and repeated bacterial attacks. I was hospitalized and put to sleep; the offending organs were harvested by entering my nasal passage with cold stainless steel implements. That was my first experience with medical spelunking, the practice in which a physician explores parts of the body which are invisible to me.

Later, other physicians would pull, poke and examine other parts of me that I had never seen. “How’d you get that scar?” one doctor asked, pointing to the lower region of my back.

“Uh, it’s nothing, I don’t think,” I pondered, his question catching me off-guard.

Finally I recalled what he was referring to. Decades earlier, my back had skidded across the bottom of a too-shallow landing-pool at the end of a steep slide ride at a water park, reddening the water and my swimming suit with pink blood. I had never grown personally acquainted with the wound except by gyrating wildly using a three-mirror setup in my bathroom. Even with that arrangement, I could only view the reflection of the wound. My physician, however, trumped me. He, unlike me, was an eyewitness to the medical history permanently etched upon my spine.

Some explorations are far more intimate. At my annual general physical exam, my doctor reserves the prostate exam ritual for the grand finale. Like a pitcher winding up for the third called strike, he extends his arm high into the air and outstretches his fingers. The end of the windup: he pulls the rubber glove on with his free hand and releases it. The rubber glove snaps loudly as it protectively seals his hand, which he flexes to ensure a secure fit.

He asks me to prepare myself. Then he strikes, quick as a serpent.

“Ugh!” I groan. That’s the worst part of the physical exam! I hate that!”

He masterfully pops off the rubber glove. “I get that a lot,” he responds impassively. “It’s no picnic for me, either!”

There are, apparently, some spelunking destinations nobody really wants to visit. I will trust his report to enlighten me concerning this region of my body that he knows far better than I.

Suddenly I return to reality. I am back in the dental chair. The two faces stare down into my gaping mouth, which by now is developing stretch marks. But all is bliss; compared with my recollections of other medical experiences, today’s dental provocation seems minor: the sting of the needle entering my moist unsuspecting cheek, the drool forming droplets and descending my numbed lower lip, the artillery of the drill destroying my ten-year-old twelve-hundred-dollar-after-insurance dental bridge, long past its useful life.

I stare down the blinding lights that have the illuminating intensity of construction zone flares. A sense of warm satisfaction blankets me like the heavy dental x-ray resistant shield that often lies across my lap; I recognize that, during the past 20 years that I’ve been a faithful client of this dental enterprise, my dental repairs have funded the purchase of the hyper-electronic double-thrust orbital magneto drill that is now chewing up my teeth.

No wonder I feel connected.

Let the spelunking continue.

I deserve it.