I was newly into my twenties when I was visiting a city friend who had relocated to a small borderline redneck town in the (usually liberal but not so much in this story) Pacific Northwest. When I say “city friend” I mean it in every sense. A friend who grew up not just streetwise but street-walking. Who lived daily with drugs, gangs, and State-subsidized housing that was just a pretty word for the Projects. Like in many of these (all too common) life stories, she found God (meaning she saw His face despite what the world wanted her to see instead) and she proverbially and literally Got Out.
But the cliché exists for a reason: You can take the grrl off the streets but you can't take the streets out of the grrl. My quietly buttoned-down, easy-smiling, sharp-strategizing, sometimes-domineering friend is *tough* and she's got a wicked straight/hook combo that has taken this gamer grrl out cold more than once (three times) in the ring.
So we were out together. Me, my friend, Anna, and her new little son. We were shopping for eggplant. And while I was waxing poetic about eggplant dishes I'd had in various parts of the world (probably trying to impress her) I kinda half notice that she's nodding and uh-huhing and looking at her son... but her ears are obviously following some other conversation. I pause and tune in.
A father is arguing with his lanky preteen son. The boy wants to do some activity at school but his father explains it's too expensive. The tone of a spoiled kid is absent but there's an obvious disconnect. The boy just doesn't get it... and boy's deadly little bon mot is too much for dad: “Maybe we'd have more money if you kept a job.”
The sound of a grown man's fist (not hand) meeting a child's face is always the same.
The boy tumbles, sprawling in surprise, into the display beside him and bell peppers roll onto the floor around his off-brand sneakers. But I'm not so much watching that as I am watching Anna *wail* on daddy dearest.
I vaguely remember (okay... I brilliantly remember) my 5'2” buddy showing me a perfect demo of how a kidney punch, followed by a gut punch, can double a large stranger over enough that a small fighter can deliver a volley of straights and a hook without having to jump up or stand on a stool. I also remember thinking: Oh, Anna... not a good choice.
Because, in America (and many other places in the world), we're allowed to hit our children... and we are not allowed to hit a stranger in the middle of the produce section. Especially if you're a itty bitty woman roughly the size of a twelve year old boy.
But that day, other strangers intervened even before store staff did. Almost as soon as the first grunt was heard, two other male shoppers pushed between them. I thought maybe that they assumed they were saving Anna from being pummeled into the brussell sprouts as soon as daddy got over his shock, but as daddy called out, “You're lucky, girl! You're so lucky!” One of the other men snorted, “*You're* lucky, man. She's a ****ing pitbull.”
Anna stood for a silent moment, fuming. I watched her beautiful body, in a basic white tee and black vest, blue jeans, black sneakers, like I might have watched a young gladiator. She trembled and, because she's a woman, her face was wet with tears. Finally her little guy ran from my side to hers and she raised her chin, took his hand, and said to the stranger, “You should be *grateful*...”
Years later I think I understood what she meant. Her son had recently been diagnosed as autistic. The preteen boy was a healthy, handsome boy with easy social skills and public demeanor. But in that moment, her comment as she walked away touched me in so many ways and on so many levels.
A new friend was talking to Anna the other day about me. She commented, “That EJ, she makes lemonaid out of the sourest of lemons. There are no sour grapes with that grrl.”
:) That made me smile and it may be true. But if it is, it's only because lemon trees are very plentiful and I'm very thirsty. I know and love mathematics like a security blanket but in my heart I don't really accept chaos theory no matter how hard I try. I believe that Christ puts everything on our path – from the store being out of milk to our pet goldfish being eaten by a velociraptor – for a reason. As a matter of fact, the more the experience hurts, the more it shakes us and even pushes us to our knees, the more grateful I am for it. I even once had to explain carefully that I'm not a masochist, I'm just a person who wants to *grow.*
Caterpillars don't spin a cocoon and then slim down and sprout wings. They freaking *dissolve* into a writhing mass of pulp and are reshaped into butterflies. Oh yeah. Not so logo-worthy an image any more, huh? But that's how the real world is. Messy.
If it's easy it isn't really very important. If it makes me break out in a sweat, feel light headed, cry, scream, hit something (not someone), drop to my knees and pray.... then it obviously has some depth and meaning and *reason.*
Another friend, Cris, woke up with pain in her ear last week. This is the ear that had to have the drum rebuilt. A surgery that involved removing the ear on three sides, laying it over and grafting a new little sound receptor. Cris was just hired by me and my working partner to compose original music for a trailer. She's feeling some pressure about that (her first major gig as a musician) but not nearly as much pressure as what she felt in her head that morning.
Into the Urgent Care went Cris. She waited in the long line for thirty-five minutes. All around her were silent or surly people grousing about pains to no one. Complaining about paperwork. Glaring at one another. The waiting room was thick patterned carpet and marble floors. The walls were cream with oak trim. Descendant and new. Cris finally got to the counter. Offered up her (State-subsidized) insurance card and, without any eye contact, was told: “We don't take that. We can't help you.”
That's it. Because apparently MultiCare (yes, look, I name names) doesn't care one bit.
Cris made it home before she started to cry. She grew up upper middle class. She had never experienced this before. This world of disregard assigned along economic status. Lucky for Cris, she knows Anna. “Welcome to good company,” Anna whispered to her. Then, “Stop now. We'll take care of this.”
A few calls later, and off Cris went to a different Urgent Care that accepted her insurance. She walked into the dun-colored, building with its industrial finishes and was greeted with smiles by the staff. When a waiting patient became short-tempered with an in-take staff member, another worker stepped in immediately, “I'm sorry, ma'am. I don't think that's appropriate. We're all doing our very best here to help everyone. We have to triage and make difficult decisions quickly. You may not have meant it but what you said just now was cruel and you can seek help elsewhere if you can't be civil.”
And Cris smiled while she waited for her ten minutes with a doctor.
The less you have, the more grateful you are. Not just the more grateful you are for what you have, but the more grateful you are, period. It's very hard to be arrogant and self-centered when you stand naked and empty-handed before the Lord. When we, as human beings, as the most stripped down, are desolate and without any chance of survival except by the sheer will of God, this is when we find the breath-taking beauty in the formation of clouds across the sky.
I was raised that if I am to be only one thing, to do only one thing in my life, that thing should be to be a catalyst in the world around me. To spark a flashpoint in the lives that I touch. Christ is the changer, we are the changed, but the opportunity for change, the open door that allows change to walk, bold and beautiful into our lives, is always a door opened by one another.
And no door opens without the presence of gratefulness. Revelation doesn't come when you're sitting in a two thousand dollar suit sipping cognac from an Austrian crystal sniffer.
This is far more than an issue of the “haves” and “have nots.” This pervading sense of ungratefulness that occasionally grips people. This is about a society, a culture, that sadly stands on a foundation of Darwinian capitalism where only the strongest survive (by consuming all others).
There is a small household of friends (ever growing how many of them live there, strangely LOL) in Washington State who pool their merger resources to send me canvases that they pick up secondhand, prime and restretch themselves. I simply don't have the money to buy new canvas right now and their deliveries have been like manna (I mean that literally). They are my catalysts like they may never understand. I love them so deeply for these gifts of blank space that I can't put it in words.
Sometimes, to pad between the canvases are sheets of their local newspaper. I followed a story and the responses in Letters to the Editor with increasing interest. A small farm was featured and praised by the reporter. The farmer's quote closed the article, “We finally broke even last year and we were so proud.”
For the next three weeks of papers, individuals wrote into the editor to lambaste the farmer and the farm. The letters were vapid, mean-spirited and just ugly. Almost as ugly as the paper's decision to run so many of them. Why, argued the detractors (perhaps in the grips of the green monster himself), was the farm being praised?! If no profit was had, then this business should not be receiving kudos and media attention. “Self-sustaining”? Who cares! Where is the all-mighty dollar? Where is the hard, sharp line drawn between red and black?
The farmers of that mini-farm are grateful for being able to make enough to simply pay their bills. They live hand-to-mouth. There is so safety net. They are pursuing their dream. They are growing beyond the trappings of the world and stepping onto their path. They are embracing the “green issues” that mean something to them. They are giving back to their community. They are quoting truths about the American Dream. The simple, captivating reason why most of our ancestors came to this country in the first place. Yes, it most certainly involves that bottomline, but even more it revolves around the ability to provide for one’s family – perhaps not easily, certainly never effortlessly, but at least something. To put food on the table and a solid roof over our heads, even if the children aren’t in the other room plugged into a thousand dollars in entertainment equipment.
When the American Dream is remembered as something other than winning a reality show contract with a recording agency or network. When it means reaching out when we have nothing, to be a catalyst in a life both our own and not our own. To be changed by the changer. To let Him in.
“Break even” is never failure. Success in business, in life... in love... is not measured by benefits to oneself. That is not true success. And when cut-throat capitalists are filing bankruptcy and throwing their dollars away in attorney fees, all the Dream makers and catalysts will continue on, breaking even and making due for themselves, their families, and their communities. These will be the people smiling in the sunlight, in the Urgent Care lobbies, in the super markets, and in each other's arms.
And no matter what we have or don't have, we will be grateful.
EJ
“Lucky you are that far away so
we could both make fun of distance.
Lucky that I love to travel for
the lucky fact of your existence.
“Baby, I would climb the Andes solely
to count the freckles on your body.
Never could imagine there were only
ten million ways to love somebody.”
“Whenever, wherever,
we're meant to be together.
I'll be here and you'll be near
and that's the deal, my dear.”
“Thereover, hereunder,
you've got me head over heels.
There's nothing left to fear
because you feel the way I feel.”
So grateful... of everything, in every way.
