Early summer rain, the kind that falls soft and slow and drowns out the noises of the world.
The good friends.
Campfire smoke.
A full twenty bag.
Cheap sweet wine with the windows rolled down and the air feeling just right.
Waking up beside blue eyes the color of sea glass.
River water pushing against skin just before the surface breaks.
The panoply of night voices that call us to the mystery.
Knowing that when I wake up tomorrow, life will be even better.
…i could drown in it. I woke up with an old hymn stuck in my head. One of those days that it feels like every step digs us deeper into the sand. But thats the point. Life is hard and we have to keep moving. And the sunlight is still so damn beautiful.
On a rainy March night, on the corner of 72nd and Amsterdam in Manhattan’s upper west side, I sat against a public phone next to a man named Charles. He was older, perhaps in his mid-fifties, or early sixties. Underneath his milk crate, wrapped in plastic bags, stuffed in an old backpack, was everything he owned; a change of pants, a bible, a phone book, and a little bit of hope. We talked for an hour or so. He used to work labor. Construction for a company up in the Bronx, but a reoccurring knee problem got him fired. His age and his lack of qualifications never found him another job. When I talked to him he couldn’t even remember how long he had been out of work. Years he said. Too many years.
How does a college kid respond to that? I had a job. I had professors, friends, even my parents back in Connecticut who could help me out if I was having trouble. For a few weeks during the September prior, when I was without a place to live, I had couches to sleep on. Beds to share. I slept on a bench one night for the novelty. It rained, and it was miserable. But this was his life. He didn’t sleep on benches for the novelty, he had no other choice. How could I, with all I had, and still have, respond to him?
In the Gospel of St. Luke, in chapter 12 it says, “For those who have been given much, much will be expected.” What does that mean? What is expected of us? Of me?
That night we hoped and prayed together. The next time he saw me he cried, telling me that when I prayed with him it gave him strength. He believed his homelessness was part of God’s plan. Over and over he said that he was being taught something. Deep in his chest he held the hope that one day it would be better.
I have sat with many homeless men, and so few have had his hope.
Homelessness is a growing problem in the United States. With few large organizations in place to help these men, women, and children, many remain on the street, or seek other avenues out of their helplessness. Drugs, alcohol, violence, crime, even suicide, seem like viable alternatives to days and nights on the street. And many of the smaller, locally run groups just don’t have the resources available to them to help all those that need helping.
Probably the biggest obstacle in serving these people is this; we distance ourselves from them. We call them the homeless, the poor, the itinerant, the hobos, even the phrase “these people” keeps us at degrees away from them. But they are human. They embody the same hopes and fears, struggles and passions that every other person has. They are flesh and blood, saint and sinner, just like you and me. We get scared because sitting with men and women like this make us question what we have. They make us wonder if there is something more than how we live our lives. I have been spit on, cursed at, and mocked just for sitting with my friends who don’t have places to live. Is that all that humanity is capable of, or is there more?
Charles sat in the rain and asked for a little help. A few coins for a meal. Two dollars for bus fare. Some souls attended to him, but most just passed him by. Is that what our world is? When those who suffer sit in the street, or lay in our doorways, has it become the norm to ignore them? Or mock them? In his book The Stranger, Albert Camus writes, “I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.” It is hard work, acting with compassion toward each other, but there is not a more pressing task, nor one as important.
Rains have swept these city streets of any memory. Rushing water has carried the residue and chaos of our desecration toward the sea. First to our rivers. Then to the source of life. For once we pulled ourselves out of the deep and let God shape our bones from dust and mud. He was the breath that gave us shape. The song that started our dancing. But our children have grown violent. We have turned from the light and become nocturnal. No longer do we dance and sing. We have become slaves to our own depravity. And I can feel the darkness in my chest growing and spreading. The pestilence of a complacent soul filling my blood with poison so that no grace may find me.
Is not ignorance the greatest of all sins? Are not our closed eyes the worst of our transgressions? Though many have looked, few have truly seen. In this, the moment of our greatest weakness, is not our humanity worth fighting for?
I’ve been having trouble sleeping. It’s the dreams again. The ones where I’m falling through the earth and the world gets small behind me. And then I stop. Deep underground I can hear the creaking of the great machine as the world stumbles on. There’s a shaking, and a rumbling, and suddenly I’m covered by rocks, and they’re laughing at me as they press down. I try to scream but the air dies in my lungs.
And then I wake up. Amber light sifts in through the blinds and I know it’s the middle of the night. I know you’re not next to me, and all I want to feel is your breathing. All I want to hear is the tremble of your heartbeat. All I want to feel is the tug of the sheets. I want to breathe your air and taste your skin.
But you’re gone because I pushed you away. And all I want is for you to come home.
April, sunshine, I let my coffee cool.
It wasn’t intentional, but thoughts the color of early spring began to crawl up the brickwork of my mind, and bloom just outside the glass.
I have only now just begun to put into words this past year.
Grandpa died in late September, on a Wednesday morning, and I missed a week of school to be home and sit with him on his last night, and to be with my grandmother as I saw her cry for the first time, and to be with my mother as she, like Atlas, carried the great burden of her family’s world. And, most importantly, I was there with my father as he and I struggled with the reality that all fathers pass away. We are made of dust, and our ashes are caught on the easterly, and are borne back to the waters we were raised from.
Life never seemed so temporary, or so fragile.
I wish my sister could have been there the night he died. But her Love and Spirit were with that old man to the end, and he knew, and I knew the smile on his face was for more than just the relief of a well lived life ending. It was a smile shaped by the pride he had for us.
We need to remember the spirits of our ancestors, for we gained the great gift of life from them, and we owe them lives that are beautiful, lives that are full of meaning.
So I will try to make my life worthy of memory.
I drank a lot that week. Somewhat to drown the struggle in my bones, and somewhat to give me courage for the path ahead. My best friend picked me up at the train station, the night before grandpa passed, and the static between us was heavy. I had wronged him. The wrong ran deep, and it was something built up for years that neither of us wanted to face. It may have been jealousy on my part, or fear on his part, or a poisonous mixture of the two.
And we knew the river was rising.
And we knew we were too close to her cold fingers to escape it again.
So I drank whiskey and cheap beer and prepared for the task at hand. We surrounded ourselves with smoke and I vomited the dark memory out onto the floor of his attic. We pulled the bits out of the bile and wiped them off on our shirts and scrutinized the wrong I had dealt to him.
And he loved me, and I will be forever in his debt.
True friendship is born through forgiveness, and strengthened with gratitude. I learned that from him.
We buried grandpa’s ashes on a cold, blustery, autumn day. We buried him in Newtown, in the cemetery that my mother played in as a little girl. He wasn’t in the box. I could feel him around us, coaxing us to something, whispering greatness in our ears, expecting our very best. There are days I think we invented God to give a voice to the dead that could be distant from our own waking realities. If we listen, those we loved continue to whisper to us our history, so we always remember where we came from, so we never lose track of where we are going. They have the gift of eternity in their hands, and they want to share it with us in the stories and tasks they conquered.
Stop. Listen. That is all we need to do.
It was hard to come back to Brooklyn after that. It was hard to go to school, to know that I had witnessed death, and would be expected to ignore the physical and focus on the theoretical. It was hard to sit in a classroom, and watch the concrete expand and extend itself into every natural space, to watch it cover up and muffle our dead so that their whispers would be silent, and we would be free to live our own, little, temporary, selfish lives, away from the connectedness that makes us so terribly human.
My grandpa wrote something to my sister. He feared we were losing our ability to communicate and relate to one another. Surrounded by the distractions that have come from our advances in biology, and technology, and increased social awareness, he feared we were losing our identities as a community of human beings, losing our ability to build strong relationships and to truly know one another.
Returning to the city, I knew he was right.
Friendship supplants blood, keep it, and burn some incense.
Big sky - Pennsylvania night - he sits, eyes on Whitman’s words - smoke in broken lungs - Amish corn forests in old red clay stretch for miles in hand plowed earth.
Stars spin like pinwheels in the deep - there is a long pause.
He has just begun to look within - this happens, sometimes, when we are forced to live without.
For the loss of blood, friendship
North. Madman bodhisattva shaman - stretching lazy by the Indian river - sitting at home, smoking a pipe, contemplating lovers lips - with dextrous dirt sniffer’s hands.
South. Hot March sun rises with molten heat of early summer - crazy monk catches a glimpse of bluejays eye and sees the future:
Nothing looks good.
Nothing looks good.
It all looks like freedom. The car starts.
Irving Hawthorne loved Delilah Thorne.
The first time he kissed her they lay in the back of his pick-up alongside the river. Night had come, and the summer stars yielded a great harvest of whispers from the deep-dreams-place. Peepers and night birds hummed from the tall grasses, their songs without meter, without a key.
Her gold hair was silver in the grey light.
“I am going to kiss you now.”
He looked at her, waiting for her to tell him no, but she didn’t, so he leaned in and gave up reason for the taste of her lips. A heron barked from the shallows and took wing. In the east, the moon was following the charred path of the sun, beginning its slow ascent across the midnight sky. The waters swirled on, toward the south, toward the sea, black beneath the passage of time. It was August.
For Delilah it was just another night. Another kiss she would carry with her to her grave. For Irving, though, this was a culmination of patience and honesty, never straying once from his confessed love for her. Sometimes, we are able to wait years for what we want, then only to find out our desires were fleeting, as insubstantial as the mist, which dissipates as the sun warms the earth, and sets things right again. In the air, the stars shivered as the earth turned. The moon rose. Irving held her, and her heat seeped into him, and his into her, and it was like they were one pulse. What need does man have for god when he has love? On this rapidly spinning earth, Irving held onto the only thing that made sense to him.
They did nothing more than kiss that night. It was his way of showing her that he desired her, not what she could give him. Looking back, remembering the taste of cinnamon on her tongue, and how her hands carelessly explored his body, he knew. He could have had it all that night for nothing more than the cost of gas and a cup of coffee. She began to shiver.
“Hold on,” he said.
The dry grass and gravel crunched beneath his boots as he slid off the tailgate, and made his way around the side toward the cab. While he was rummaging behind the seat, she texted a friend, and slipped her phone back into her pocket before Irving was aware. He produced a blanket, and made his way back to the truck bed.
“Here, it’s thin, but it will do the trick.”
He sat next to her as she wrapped herself in the blanket, pulling his knees up to his chin and looking up. A meteor flashed across the northern horizon, its light burning beautiful before fizzling out, its life nothing more than one perfect, incandescent moment.
“Did you see that?”
She nodded, “I made a wish.”
“I did too.”
She looked over at him, her eyes ranging over his body, sizing him up.
“I learned a long time ago to only wish for things I know will come true.”
She smiled faintly. Behind them, along the gravel access road, headlights burned through the dark and lit up the truck. Irving jumped and his heart punched the inside of his chest.
“If it’s the cops, let me talk to them.”
Delilah held in a laugh as the driver door opened.
“Hey Dee, you comin?”
“Hold on a sec Mike.”
She looked over at Irving, who still hadn’t figured out what was going on.
“I had a wonderful time tonight, but, I have other places I need to be, you understand.”
He nodded, he didn’t understand. She leaped from the back of the truck and jogged over to the other car, hugging the driver and slipping into the passenger seat. Irving watched until the taillights were swallowed by the darkness of the access road. Soon, the sound of the engine died, and Irving was left with the hum of the night. He neither got a goodbye kiss, nor his wish. He lay out there until it was dawn, and then, as the sun rose, he waded into the river.
Irving Hawthorne loved Delilah Thorne, but that night he learned to love the river more.
It’s hard for me, you know, livin’ in this world and shit. It’s like, everywhere I go there’s somebody without a job, or without a home, and what’s a kid to do? I just got a sit here, and let the rest of the world go to hell around me? We got all this violence and hate at home, and all our news cares about is what’s goin’ on in somebody else’s country, or what some entertainer got in trouble with. They don’t care about what’s goin’ on in the ‘hood, or in the trailer park. They just want to show us some shocking or entertaining television and keep us in the dark where we think we’re fat and happy, but really, we’re all starving for some kind of compassion or somethin’. I go to sleep at night and I hear the homeless groaning, and I hear the gun shots in the dark and I ain’t scared of it, I’m just worried. Cause nobody seems to care anymore. They want to change this system and that system, and they want more jobs, but they ain’t never met any of these guys without jobs, ya know? They got their numbers, but I got names and faces and it’s hard for me to wake up some mornings. Cause I know subway Ronnie’s got a kid to feed. And I know Jonathan is damn good cook, but nobody will let him make them their food. And I know Mikey over on 16th and 5th has got to be one of the hardest workin’ men I ever met, but he’s stuck beggin’ for a couple of bucks a day just so he can eat some fast food shit and maybe survive another week. And they got us so entrenched in this hate and mediocrity, that we forget we’re all brothers and sisters. They make us forget that sometimes things are gonna get a little rough, a little dirty, but that’s alright cause there’ll be a brother, or a sister right there to pick us back up, no matter our gender, or our race, or our religion, or our politics. Cause none of that matters. None of it. But everyone keeps acting like this and that policy will change something, or this and that religion will save somebody, and the truth is, until we all start changing our hearts and stop fighting, nothin’ is gonna change. Nothin’. And that’s a natural fact.
