Tina stood on a chair to reach for the alphabet that was strung across and around the top of the tiny tutoring room at the back of our house last night. I couldn't bear to watch the dismantling. But so much of language has been out of reach for the children who filled this place over the last 15 years, it seemed appropriate that taking it down should be hard for us as well. With our transitions to new positions, the Wise Old Owl reading and homework club is shifting to another location and we are clearing out the space. I poked my head in briefly to check her progress. Tina is nothing if not efficient. She had already boxed the books, stacked the attendance posters with names of kids we have grown to love -- Lupita, Bobby, Keeshawn, Victoria, Eternity and hundreds of others. The ancient, donated iMacs were being unplugged. The globe of the world sat leaning in the corner - A Swiftly Tilting Planet.
Not one to instantly recognize my emotions, I turned away -- had to get out of there. If my initial fear was that the faces of the kids who had picked out books in that room over the years would accuse me of abandoning them, I needn't have feared. They are always too gracious and appreciative of any effort on their behalf, and too accepting of what must seem like arbitrary changes to their options for that. What I am feeling is grief.
I ran the program at first, scouring the neighborhood on my moped for any available kid who wanted to come for an hour, read a book, do homework with a college student, play a game, sing a song, pray a prayer and get a snack. I met parents and siblings, got to know some of their stories. Many times I walked walk down a street in the neighborhood and children ran up to me, hugging my legs and yelling "Pastor Raaaaaaaaandy!" It became my primary way of understanding what was happening in Lowell, and a way to ensure that my white, middle class eyes could not avoid the realities of life there, and my whiter, middle class mind did not give in to the tidy explanations of middle class culture as to why the poor are poor.
After a few years we had staff take over the program, and as my work caused me to travel more I would miss weeks. But if I was in town I would make sure to come and play the song at the end, to lead a devotion for the college students who were there as tutors, to share a meal with some of them afterward. Tina would be cooking that meal as the program ended, and the kids would walk through the kitchen, interested in what she was making, and of course drooling over the smell of it. What I loved most was seeing kids matched with tutors, siting on benches together, engaged. Brilliant students from Japan, struggling with their English, helping bright students from the 'hood struggling with their English, and everybody winning in the process. We held cooking demonstrations by professional bakers, folded orogami, had an artist come to display watercolor technique, a physical therapist to talk about kinetic energy. With every special feature, my whole insides smiled.
Our ancient, grafted orange/grapefruit tree forms a canopy over the back yard, and each December as the program entered its last week of the term, the children jumped for the lowest fruit. They held them like prizes, would take a second one home for a Mom or a little brother. We would collect the rest and put it in gift bags to deliver to their families at Christmas. My whole insides smiled.
But lest we succumb to nostalgia, the program was also a major inconvenience, and contained pieces that could act like hidden coral in the shore of our week. The preparation and cleanup, the snack wrappers in the yard, the kids with attitude, the damage to property or the simple wear and tear; any of these things could leave our toes bleeding and sore, and won't be missed.
Yet I still grieve. I feel proud of these 15 years. Glad to have loved these kids with our modest effort. Sorry that we will miss what is next for them, though some of them still come by to check in with us. Perhaps I grieve the loss of that inside smile that hosting this outreach created.
We are making plans for the tutoring room, this old 10x10 sleeping porch wrapped around with seven windows. It has great light, has a bathroom, and is connected to our kitchen and back office. It will make a nice breakfast nook, or guest room, or a place to set up art projects -- stained glass or mosaic, or perhaps Tina's sewing machine. Like any change, it is filled with a combination of loss and possibility, of a death and a rebirth.
The alphabet cards are now in a jumble in a box, along with the books. Out of sequence, I can imagine them reassembling on their own in the half-light of their storage, but in a new order of their own making. My mind's eye says that they now spell out a sentence: "get us to the next room." A part of my heart has been boxed with them, and won't be free until they are.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Monday, June 2, 2008
Of Mirrors and Tears
We turned to go, to leave the cramped quarters of my parents’ downsizing, their unwanted relocation, for our long drive home. I knew I would steer the car without seeing the road as I reflected on their age, their fragility, the increasing ghostlike quality of their presence. The traumas and restrictions of aging are like a tightening noose to them, and their enjoyments are few. But just then the strains of a violin began on the television, and I said, “Is that something from Brigadoon?”
Without hesitation, my Father, who at 90 is finding it harder to express what he means these days, said with certainty, “No, Phantom of the Opera.” Then he pulled us back into the room and urged, “Let’s just listen to the end of this before you go.”
And so we stood there, we four, two couples in a line, watching a man do what so few of us can these days. With the one musical instrument most like the human voice he communicated fully, clearly with my Dad and Mom, through faulty or forgotten hearing aids, right past the latest medical tests, past the corridors of boredom or helplessness they live in. The message found them, like cups of cool water to their perfectly matched pair of parched and grey souls, an oasis found while crawling through the desert that precedes paradise.
As we listened it slowly dawned on me that we were standing in front of the mirror that had made the trip with them in their move. The added angle put me face to face with them, allowed me to witness the power of that melody as it pulled from their frozen faces something I didn’t recognize at first. It was astonishment and awe.
I felt my own breath leave. Was it the glimpse of them at 87 and 90, standing together in their respective infirmaries, together for more than 65 years? Was it the thought that this could be the last time I see this picture? Was it the absolute pathos of the music? Yes, all these things. But slowly, in that regal reflection, I came to know that it was the immensity of the gift that this image was to me that made we weep. That angle allowed me to see them not as my parents but as a man and wife, propping each other up, stiffly, painfully, for nothing but the reward of beauty. It was a too-late realization of how music, and anything true and beautiful, really, was like food to them, and especially if there was someone to turn to afterward and exclaim, “A perfect end to the day.” It was a too-late realization that it had always been that way for them, I had just not understood it in my childhood. It is that way in me as well, but never until this moment in front of the mirror, have I known why I feel it so deeply in my soul. Time is ruthlessly, lovingly, and as a gift to me, insisting that they reach their end with their truest selves on display.
My tears lasted for the first hour of our drive home, silently rolling from under my dark glasses to soak my collar. After a while, I turned to the radio for rest from the poignancy. But it was not to be. It was now my own turn to be astonished – for my own wet face, stiff with the attempt to conceal my tears – to be caught up in amazement by the program I had randomly selected. The strains of Phantom of the Opera had just begun, the melody instantly flooding the car with the images of my parents’ true selves, and peeling back the layers to reveal something of my own, my own equal need for the true and beautiful, and the similar journey I am now on.
The Giver of this gift, the one who spontaneously gathers an audience around a television concert, the one who arranges the right angle in front of the mirror, the one who beckons a driver to turn on the radio at just the right moment, this Giver wants to give only what matters most -- the gift of knowing who we are, the gift of knowing why we are the way we are, the gift of his beauty and truth, the gift of a journey.
The mirror makes their small place seem larger; I am glad we decided to hang it there. But today it expanded my soul as well as the room, and helped me glimpse a reflection of the Giver – the One who planted the soul’s taste for the truth, the One that grants regular feasts of it, the One who causes one traveler to say to another, “a perfect end to the day.”
Without hesitation, my Father, who at 90 is finding it harder to express what he means these days, said with certainty, “No, Phantom of the Opera.” Then he pulled us back into the room and urged, “Let’s just listen to the end of this before you go.”
And so we stood there, we four, two couples in a line, watching a man do what so few of us can these days. With the one musical instrument most like the human voice he communicated fully, clearly with my Dad and Mom, through faulty or forgotten hearing aids, right past the latest medical tests, past the corridors of boredom or helplessness they live in. The message found them, like cups of cool water to their perfectly matched pair of parched and grey souls, an oasis found while crawling through the desert that precedes paradise.
As we listened it slowly dawned on me that we were standing in front of the mirror that had made the trip with them in their move. The added angle put me face to face with them, allowed me to witness the power of that melody as it pulled from their frozen faces something I didn’t recognize at first. It was astonishment and awe.
I felt my own breath leave. Was it the glimpse of them at 87 and 90, standing together in their respective infirmaries, together for more than 65 years? Was it the thought that this could be the last time I see this picture? Was it the absolute pathos of the music? Yes, all these things. But slowly, in that regal reflection, I came to know that it was the immensity of the gift that this image was to me that made we weep. That angle allowed me to see them not as my parents but as a man and wife, propping each other up, stiffly, painfully, for nothing but the reward of beauty. It was a too-late realization of how music, and anything true and beautiful, really, was like food to them, and especially if there was someone to turn to afterward and exclaim, “A perfect end to the day.” It was a too-late realization that it had always been that way for them, I had just not understood it in my childhood. It is that way in me as well, but never until this moment in front of the mirror, have I known why I feel it so deeply in my soul. Time is ruthlessly, lovingly, and as a gift to me, insisting that they reach their end with their truest selves on display.
My tears lasted for the first hour of our drive home, silently rolling from under my dark glasses to soak my collar. After a while, I turned to the radio for rest from the poignancy. But it was not to be. It was now my own turn to be astonished – for my own wet face, stiff with the attempt to conceal my tears – to be caught up in amazement by the program I had randomly selected. The strains of Phantom of the Opera had just begun, the melody instantly flooding the car with the images of my parents’ true selves, and peeling back the layers to reveal something of my own, my own equal need for the true and beautiful, and the similar journey I am now on.
The Giver of this gift, the one who spontaneously gathers an audience around a television concert, the one who arranges the right angle in front of the mirror, the one who beckons a driver to turn on the radio at just the right moment, this Giver wants to give only what matters most -- the gift of knowing who we are, the gift of knowing why we are the way we are, the gift of his beauty and truth, the gift of a journey.
The mirror makes their small place seem larger; I am glad we decided to hang it there. But today it expanded my soul as well as the room, and helped me glimpse a reflection of the Giver – the One who planted the soul’s taste for the truth, the One that grants regular feasts of it, the One who causes one traveler to say to another, “a perfect end to the day.”
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