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,
