Today, I was thinking, I'm so naive that I keep coming back. Every morning I make cereal for Mary whose boyfriend threw her down to the pavement with her(their) baby Mariah still in her arms. Mary kicks it with TJ. Tj who came from the farmlands of Georgia, who checks my tires (of my yiayia's chevy lumina, the one she used to drive before the operation and before the dementia) and told me once over dishes about his mother who adopted him and other disabled children. After rinsing he said that she locked them up in an empty room for a check each month from our government. At 11 pm last night, I walked TJ into Pacific Garden with 500 men, a pack of evangelicals, a 5 am wake up call, and a big neon cross twinkling JESUS SAVES in the city twilight.
TJ would help us fold boxes after our food pantry which serves 120 families each week in the neighborhood with strollers and mesh bags of old bananas and frozen peas. Last week a mother told me that I should stay away from her 6 year old son because he was bad, wouldn't listen to anyone, and that his ADHD meds had been stolen by some good for nothing. She went to have a cigarette and stand outside only to be ushered back in by Johnny, who cleans the tables for our seniors club and helps set up the food pantry every Friday morning. Johnny, who according to (un)reliable sources (but who's to say?) married is sister and is up to shady shit, but who knows what. I painted furiously the night I heard rumors from a girl who wears burberry but wraps her hips in tattoos and drinks in bed with the director's son. The son of a man who drives a truck delivering snail mail for the graveyard shift, the father who is on disability for high blood pressure, for sticking around too long in an organization with ghosts and leaking ceilings. The ceilings could fall down any second, but something seems to hold them up. Maybe its Ma Benton herself.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Love is Labor, Not Leisure
The Occupy movement is raging from city to city, and I am here occupying Ma Benton's House of Happiness day to day. It is a settlement house, inspired by Jane Addam's dream to live democracy in our homes, from when we rise until we sleep. Nine of us live in century-old rooms. In my mind, the rooms are named after their previous owner, the growing list of ancestors. Nick's has a leaking roof, Nate's (mine) has the library ghost, Jessica's has the yellow and brick walls, the room that Jessica took an axe hammer too and tore down the walls, only to find that the walls were leaking with horse hair insulation, and little did she know she was allergic and went straight to the hospital. We live here, we work here, and we try to make it by everyday in whatever way is meaningful or comfortable.
Yesterday I came home after the shelter (the youth had a Sexual Discovery Group, Cathy says, "I think they've already discovered it. . .," through the door they were yelling about size matters, using douches, and keeping it clean), and Matt was building towers from food pantry boxes and hanging action figures from their windows. We decided we need a theme for Halloween (though isn't Halloween theme enough?), so its Zombies in Toyland. I didn't think much of this until I spent one night setting up a scene with a hundred dollars worth of action figures, and one morning sifting through hundreds of stuffed animals at Unique Thrift's 50% sale. Kristina, laughed when I came back wide-eyed, falling over from the plastic shopping bags, "you've fallen into one of Matt's traps."
There are other traps to fall into. A few nights ago around 11:30 p.m. I was sitting in my room thinking about social work school futures. Craig comes banging on my door, BAM BAM BAM, "It's an emergency!!," he says hastily flushed and sweating, curls in each direction, red flush on cheeks, "we need everyone to the food pantry! There are rotting bananas! Rotting bananas! We need to throw them out before the rats come in." I put on Benna's 5 year old converses that I've grown attached to wearing, even with the hole on the bottom. As I leave House of Happiness (Benton House's original name, until it was found to be cross-listed with a brothel), Megan walks out, still in work clothes, hands on hip, "are they mad at me? I have to wake up at 5 am. . .and I'm dressed like this. . . and I can't be carrying out bananas!." I rush out with barely a word. Bags and bags and boxes of rotting bananas fill the food pantry. Flys are everywhere and it smells like I imagine a banana farm would on a stuffy day. For some reason we are rushed, but it makes it funnier, rushing to carry boxes too big for my arms to carry, stealthily pattering into the alleyway, to bypass rats and angry neighbors (Bob-- our neighbor-- a short man with long hair and old teeth and tattoo sleeves and a black t-shirt with a cigarette- hates the compost pile- says it's brought rats to his house). We imagine all the things we could make out of bananas as we salvage one box of about one hundred bananas and start peeling (our freezer now filled with a garbage bag of peeled bananas). I imagine our lives as a sitcom or reality show (my generation's favorite thought train). "Fuck you for not carrying out rotting bananas!" "I'll put them in your goddamn personal fridge!" Uninspired by the garbage bag of peeled bananas (still sitting in freezer), we take a bag of rotting avocados, occupy the kitchen for the rest of the night eating guacamole and smiling at a hard day's work.
Yesterday I came home after the shelter (the youth had a Sexual Discovery Group, Cathy says, "I think they've already discovered it. . .," through the door they were yelling about size matters, using douches, and keeping it clean), and Matt was building towers from food pantry boxes and hanging action figures from their windows. We decided we need a theme for Halloween (though isn't Halloween theme enough?), so its Zombies in Toyland. I didn't think much of this until I spent one night setting up a scene with a hundred dollars worth of action figures, and one morning sifting through hundreds of stuffed animals at Unique Thrift's 50% sale. Kristina, laughed when I came back wide-eyed, falling over from the plastic shopping bags, "you've fallen into one of Matt's traps."
There are other traps to fall into. A few nights ago around 11:30 p.m. I was sitting in my room thinking about social work school futures. Craig comes banging on my door, BAM BAM BAM, "It's an emergency!!," he says hastily flushed and sweating, curls in each direction, red flush on cheeks, "we need everyone to the food pantry! There are rotting bananas! Rotting bananas! We need to throw them out before the rats come in." I put on Benna's 5 year old converses that I've grown attached to wearing, even with the hole on the bottom. As I leave House of Happiness (Benton House's original name, until it was found to be cross-listed with a brothel), Megan walks out, still in work clothes, hands on hip, "are they mad at me? I have to wake up at 5 am. . .and I'm dressed like this. . . and I can't be carrying out bananas!." I rush out with barely a word. Bags and bags and boxes of rotting bananas fill the food pantry. Flys are everywhere and it smells like I imagine a banana farm would on a stuffy day. For some reason we are rushed, but it makes it funnier, rushing to carry boxes too big for my arms to carry, stealthily pattering into the alleyway, to bypass rats and angry neighbors (Bob-- our neighbor-- a short man with long hair and old teeth and tattoo sleeves and a black t-shirt with a cigarette- hates the compost pile- says it's brought rats to his house). We imagine all the things we could make out of bananas as we salvage one box of about one hundred bananas and start peeling (our freezer now filled with a garbage bag of peeled bananas). I imagine our lives as a sitcom or reality show (my generation's favorite thought train). "Fuck you for not carrying out rotting bananas!" "I'll put them in your goddamn personal fridge!" Uninspired by the garbage bag of peeled bananas (still sitting in freezer), we take a bag of rotting avocados, occupy the kitchen for the rest of the night eating guacamole and smiling at a hard day's work.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Swim In Your Sleep. Go On Swimming Until You Find An Island.
On Mondays, I head to West Town to edit resumes and cook meals for youth at a small shelter with bright fluorescent lights and a daffodil lined courtyard. Each week, I hear another story that makes my knees weak-- a second stint in prison, a new restraining order, a son traded in for a new car. Three weeks ago, one of my residents ran screaming into the street, hoping to get hit by a speed demon on Division. One week ago, I bumped into another resident screaming at her son on the pink line. Typing these words makes me wonder how I still make it to the front door.
Yet somehow, stepping on to the 9 bus to the shelter and going home, I have a burst of spiritual energy, a subterranean spring gushing forth. What it is that makes this happen? I'd like to say my inspiration comes from continental youth uprisings in the Middle East, but I think it may be more of the small revolutions. Catching the Pilsen ladies dancing on table tops; watching Rosa's evening routine of setting up clothes, cereal, spoon, coffee mug; listening to a young man at the shelter talk about the trials and tribulations of applying for a job at Foot Locker; spying on Benna braiding a challah with a telemarketer head piece on with musicals blaring; a mother explaining her cooking rituals. These are the crumbs of information that I clamor to hear from my students at Pilsen, the residents at the shelter, the boys I did research on in Northern Ireland, my catering co-workers during a slow night shift at the Met. My sustenance is in the stories and absurdities of our every day. "We tell each other stories to live," Joan Didion wrote, and this thought keeps strutting through my mind. The stories I crave to hear are sometimes poetic and profound, but are always a lesson in how we keep going. Thinking of these moments, as I ride the bus to a home filled with beans and art combustion lined walls, I am at peace with the mixture of suffering and questions and hopefulness.
On this Monday, as I get on this bus, I'll think of my house's floors lined with blankets and new friends, of education and social movements in a 100 degree room filled with miniature chairs, of cruising in a '97 Chevy on Lake Shore drive with too many passengers, no air conditioning, and a trunk filled with orange coolers, dried out corn, architecture magazines and leaf-stained soccer balls, of my roommates eating cherry-pie leftovers and musing on future paths. Hopefully, on the bus home I will have a new story from a resident: a hilarious encounter with a GED instructor or an adventurous run through a toy store for a newborn. I don't know, but I hope so.
For Inspiration Day # 12 and counting, maybe each of us can take time to think of what stories we've heard and told today and every day this year. What stories ride with you on the bus? What destinations are they taking you to?
Here's to the absurd poetry of this day sustaining us,
Yet somehow, stepping on to the 9 bus to the shelter and going home, I have a burst of spiritual energy, a subterranean spring gushing forth. What it is that makes this happen? I'd like to say my inspiration comes from continental youth uprisings in the Middle East, but I think it may be more of the small revolutions. Catching the Pilsen ladies dancing on table tops; watching Rosa's evening routine of setting up clothes, cereal, spoon, coffee mug; listening to a young man at the shelter talk about the trials and tribulations of applying for a job at Foot Locker; spying on Benna braiding a challah with a telemarketer head piece on with musicals blaring; a mother explaining her cooking rituals. These are the crumbs of information that I clamor to hear from my students at Pilsen, the residents at the shelter, the boys I did research on in Northern Ireland, my catering co-workers during a slow night shift at the Met. My sustenance is in the stories and absurdities of our every day. "We tell each other stories to live," Joan Didion wrote, and this thought keeps strutting through my mind. The stories I crave to hear are sometimes poetic and profound, but are always a lesson in how we keep going. Thinking of these moments, as I ride the bus to a home filled with beans and art combustion lined walls, I am at peace with the mixture of suffering and questions and hopefulness.
On this Monday, as I get on this bus, I'll think of my house's floors lined with blankets and new friends, of education and social movements in a 100 degree room filled with miniature chairs, of cruising in a '97 Chevy on Lake Shore drive with too many passengers, no air conditioning, and a trunk filled with orange coolers, dried out corn, architecture magazines and leaf-stained soccer balls, of my roommates eating cherry-pie leftovers and musing on future paths. Hopefully, on the bus home I will have a new story from a resident: a hilarious encounter with a GED instructor or an adventurous run through a toy store for a newborn. I don't know, but I hope so.
For Inspiration Day # 12 and counting, maybe each of us can take time to think of what stories we've heard and told today and every day this year. What stories ride with you on the bus? What destinations are they taking you to?
Here's to the absurd poetry of this day sustaining us,
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