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Fragile Connections
I am confined to an electric wheelchair and live in an Institution where all of the other residents are confined to electric wheelchairs as well. This gives us a somewhat stunted view of reality: after all, there are a limited number of 'normal' tasks that we can do; mostly everything must be done for us by attendants. That's the downside of being here.
What about the upside? Well, being in a wheelchair means that I, like all the other residents, get to sit around a lot; in fact -- and this must be considered one of the big perks for being in this sort of situation -- no one, not even an impatient father, will ever accuse you of being "lazy" or "laying around too much." On the contrary: all you have to do is get up every day and wink at people, and they will tell you "how well you're doing" and that sort of thing. Not bad -- one big indefinite-stay vacation! Do you like to write, as I do? This is the ideal writer's colony where you can scribble away all day if you want to, and meals are served, even fed to you three times per day for the rest of your life. What do you think of that? I'll tell you what to think: this is one hell of a place!
Was I indulging in some maudlin satire in the above? Not at all: I am telling the absolute truth about my stay here! (Of course, I did not mention the disease that I have. As for the cost, I have found it best to ignore such crass topics. "But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln...")
So do I write all day? Of course not -- that would be an impossible regimen to sustain, not only physically (I would run out of voice with which to dictate my pieces after a few hours) but meta-physically as well (I would run out of ideas on which to write.) Of course on one day I might have several possible topics, but be too weak to write; while on another day, I might be eager to write, but have no topic on which to write.
It was on one such dearth-of-topics day recently that I found myself sitting in a desultory fashion (to match my mood) at various points in my room or out in the hall. I felt myself in such desperate need of a topic that I actually yelled, "My kingdom for an idea!" (Unfortunately [or is it fortunately?], over the past year my voice has been reduced to a veritable whisper.) I was in such desperate straits; in fact, that I was on the verge of doing something unspeakable (but why not speak of it? I was sorely tempted to go down to the Activities Room and play a game of Bingo.)
Then I remembered something that is probably as old as so-called Everyday Experience and Writing (but more likely as new as the ink [if I used ink] drying on this page):
"There is a story in even the most mundane parts of everyday life."
As I sat out there in the hall and ruminated ("ruminated"? Are parts of everyday life so common, so banal, that people can chew them up like a cow chewing its cud and then re-digest them?), someone came walking by me -- someone who, I had no doubt, had done such a thing to me, as well as to everyone else so sitting out there in the hall, hundreds of times before. Indeed, I had seen and greeted him many of those times. But this time it was different: now I was on the prowl for (as I am wont to crassly put it) "new writing material". And, being on the proverbial prowl, I observed.
What did I observe? This mundane act: a maintenance man walking by me as I sat out in the hall. Now if this were in Samoa and my name were Margaret Mead, such an observation might have the potential to become "a major anthropological discovery". Alas, in our culture it would be considered a very minor discovery -- that is, if it can even be dignified by that qualifier at all.
But, minor or not, I feel that there is potentially a great deal to be discovered in something so seemingly prosaic. Let us examine what I have found out so far, and then go on from there.
Joseph
There is a worker here at the Institution whose jobs, as far as I can tell by observation, run the gamut from middle level maintenance man to lower-level waste disposer. The former includes the use of a ladder (if he wants to appear important; most of his work can be done using a chair) to reset a semi-complicated electronic switch over a door; while the latter involves the transportation of bags: plastic ones containing poopy diapers (to be sent down a chute to the garbage truck) and plastic ones having residents' clothes within (down a chute to the laundry.) I gathered that part of the requirement for this particular multifaceted position was not only a narrow technical savvy, but as well the ability to differentiate between the words 'garbage' and 'laundry', so that the employee not mix up those two chutes!
Joseph (for such is the name of this worker) has a demeanor that is utterly placid. I have never seen his brow get the least bit furrowed, nevertheless the man get excited about anything. His walk is smooth and easy, unhurried. Indeed, his very outfits fit this profile: they all seem to be navy blue with a few off-white stripes -- a color coding which extends from his cap right down to the very sneakers themselves.
So why am I writing about someone so seemingly prosaic and uninteresting? Remember: "There is a story in even the most mundane blah blah." And apparently there was something about this man Joseph which I found to be interesting to me on some level. ('Interesting': literally, "to be between". Something which links two people or things together because of a common interest or trait.") (Author's seat-of-the-pants definition.)
My own situation was as follows: typically I'd be sitting in the hall in my wheelchair, ruminating about something or other. Suddenly Joseph appears walking in my direction on his way to pick up a trashcan on wheels or a bag of dirty laundry. From now on, from the time he appears, I am watching his face (which is under a shadow beneath a baseball-style hat.) Coming toward me, he does nothing to acknowledge my presence -- until he reaches a critical distance from me. (How does he know when that critical distance has been reached? He knows because he is constantly estimating that diminishing distance and he chooses the moment when to choose any later would not allow enough time for the following actions to occur.) Then he will suddenly engage my eyes with his. To do that, he shifts the direction of his face just a tiny bit so that it is directly facing mine. He locks his eyes on mine, while his face (which emerges from the shadow and is illuminated by the overhead lights at just that crucial moment) breaks into a broad grin. He raises his left hand with the palm side toward me and he nods his head. And that whole greeting consumes at most two seconds -- after which he is back in the shadow, beyond my sight and then past me.
That is Joseph's first greeting to me of the day, and you cannot say that I am not well greeted. But I will be seated out in the hall for another hour or so: evening has already fallen, bedtime is beginning to encroach, and during that time I will be hungry no doubt for the address of an attentive person. And I knew that I would not be disappointed, for Joseph had to walk right by me again in order to return his empty trash barrel.
I hear the clumpy sound of the barrel coming from around the corner. Joseph himself will appear and then, in the next few seconds, I would be bathed once again by his beautiful smile and greeting. There he is, he has turned the corner and is approaching me -- I watch his face closely to see the effects of another epiphany...
His face did not change at all. He did not turn it to face me or lock his eyes on mine. Rather, he continued gazing straight ahead with the austere look of one whose face seemed chiseled in stone. It was as if I wasn't there.
Of course I was crushed the first time this happened. Here I had thought that Joseph and I had this special relationship! Apparently we did -- for the duration of exactly one greeting, after which he dropped away like a stone plunging into a pool of water.
I thought of all the creative ways Joseph could have dealt with this problem without going cold turkey right away. He could have gradually tapered his greetings back while adding layers of irony. The second time he saw me he could have left out the hand greeting while putting a broader grin on his face as if to say, "So -- we meet again!" The third time he could have grinned and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, "My goodness, we have to stop meeting like this!" And so on. Even after the seventh meeting, when essentially all gestures have been pealed away, he could've still moved his eyes slyly toward mine and then winked -- as if to say, "Don't worry, I haven't completely forgotten you!"
Yes, all of those would have been creative responses on Joseph's part. I suspect, however, that the poor fellow quite simply did not want to be bothered with having to concoct all those subtle layers of greetings for a number of residents. The simplest thing for him was a binary system: on or off.
Still, I have three experiments which would test the Joseph "system". The first would be to see whether his ignoring of me only happened in the short term. If, for example, he greeted me in the early afternoon, would he greet me once again in the evening, perhaps forgetting that he greeted me before?
The second experiment: the first time he encounters me and smiles and raises his hand in greeting, I would deliberately look away in indifference. No doubt this would confuse him: did he really greet me or not? Does the person you're greeting have to acknowledge it in order for it to be a bona fide greeting? What would he do the next time he passed me? Would he attempt to greet me again?
The third experiment would involve the following: after he had greeted me once (henceforth to cast me off like an old shoe), I would find another resident who had not yet been greeted by Joseph that day. I would have that resident come and sit next to me in the hall. What would happen when Joseph walked by? Would he greet the other person but not me? Or would he be thrown into confusion and not know what to do? What would happen if I added two or three other people, some greeted and some not, to the mix? Would it drive Joseph crazy? And would I be cruel enough to try and find out?
Stay tuned!
Jean
Jean is another Haitian man here at the Institution. His job is in basic building maintenance rather than anything relating directly to the residents.
You've heard of the man who asks where in the company he will start his new job? The blunt answer is inevitably: "You have to start at the bottom and work your way up!" Just so Jean -- except for him the reply was: "You have to start on the floor -- literally -- and work your way up."
Jean's job is the maintenance of the floors here. He first sweeps and then mops all the floors in all the resident's rooms every single day. (If you spend any time in your room, as I do in mine, then you are bound to run into him sooner rather than later.) He probably mops all the halls at least once per week. And, at some crucial time of the month, he will buff all the floors (and drive us all mad with the din as his machine goes roaring past.)
The people that hired Jean probably told him, "If you do well with floors, you might work your way up to walls and even eventually to ceilings!" This may sound like a Woody Allen one-liner (it's actually my own one-liner), but in truth there is a pecking order in the vertical direction. And so there is a maintenance man here whose job, amongst other things, is to spackle and repaint the walls damaged by residents' wheelchairs. As for the ceilings, they only receive attention from the highest maintenance poobah-- and only then when a catastrophic event happens behind them, such as a water leak.)
Jean is a big gentle giant of a man. I have taken glances when I knew I would not be detected: unlike the smooth worry-free face of Joseph, Jean's face -- particularly his nose -- appears to have been damaged, by what means I have nothing but a sneaking suspicion: he seems to be in possession of the frequently broken nose of a boxer.
Whatever his past, Jean now wields his mop with seriousness and dedication, his brow in deep concentration. I greet him by declaiming his name in the French style (as in "John" with a soft 'J' and the un-pronounced 'n') rather than in the way that it is spoken by most others here (the prosaic 'Gene'.)
Instantly he recognizes my voice. He turns to face me and his battered visage is wreathed in a smile of such depth that his merry eyes are all but obliterated within the wealth of delirious flesh. And then it comes gurgling forth like a half-suppressed giggle over something delicious and delectable:
"My Friend!"
The word is pronounced with such radiant relish, that it sounds as though I must be his long-lost comrade from an Expedition of Adventure and Truth. Indeed, he steps back and gives a slight bow -- a sign of profound respect.
"How is My Friend today?" The juice of an over-ripe melon comes gushing out.
"I'm fine Jean -- and how are you?"
"That is good that My Friend is fine!"
If truth be told, Jean does not have much of an English vocabulary; so our 'conversations' do not amount to much. But, unlike Joseph, he will greet me whenever I run into him; in fact, he will greet me even if I don't see him first.
For example, I may be tilted back in my chair resting in my room, when I will suddenly hear the vibrant murmur of a broom near me, and a voice which is a lush caress:
"My Friend is sleeping -- sleep well, My Friend!"
At another time, I will be writing by dictating to my computer when Jean comes in with his mop:
"My Friend is working!"
How utterly wonderful does this make me feel! That this man regards me as his special and unique Friend I have no doubts, given all the attention he lavishes on his delivery of the word to me in such a sumptuous packaging!
And I was wont to continue this assumption of a Unique and Beautiful Friendship indefinitely (after all, I crave love just like the next person) -- when one day I received a rude awakening. As I rode by the room of some nondescript other resident, out of the corner of my eye I saw Jean mopping her floor. I know he was not addressing me, for his back was to me as I passed by. And what I heard was:
"My Friend!"
It was spoken with all of the same delicious ripeness which I hitherto had assumed was mine and mine alone.
Did I develop a resentment against Jean because of his falseness to me? Of course not. I was not going to get angry with a man for using his extremely limited vocabulary to communicate with others.
I just wish that he wasn't such a seductive elocutionist!
Gabe
I must admit: in the beginning I did not entertain much hope for establishing any sort of connection with this person at all, nevertheless for hitting it off as splendidly as we did. After all, he was distinctly a member of the Working Class -- a group of people with whom I have never felt particularly comfortable.
Gabe was one of the ones who did mid-level maintenance at the institution. He was the one who would spackle and repaint the walls damaged by residents' wheelchairs. He was the one who could often be seen wheeling around a maintenance cart with a cute little red ladder on one end. And in the summer, he was the one who cut the extensive lawns with the big mower.
He was a big blustery young Irishman with a ruddy face and the brogue to go with it. I have no idea why he chose to connect with me -- perhaps my radical political reputation as being "somewhere to the left of Trotsky" intrigued him. Then again, maybe our whole "relationship" was an elaborate game on his part designed to hoodwink a member of the "educated" class. Whatever the reason, one day early in the primary season he stopped me in the hall and, in a conspiratorial undertone, asked me what I thought about Barack Obama. I told him that at the time I was a Hillary supporter, but I found Barack to be intriguing as well.
And then this big ruddy faced Irishman did something which I found truly shocking: he raised a pretend rifle, squinted along the sights, emphatically stated the name "Obama!" With a chilling finality, and squeezed the trigger. The stock recoiled against his shoulder.
Of course I admonished him for not only harboring such thoughts but for acting them out in such a shameless public way. Privately, though, I was frightened; for Gabe had simply made manifest what many of us (especially those of us old enough to remember the assassination-riddled 60s) feared might happen. Gabe was simply an indication that the crazies included those who walked among us.
(I wondered whether he had been a member of the Irish Republican Army and, with its demise, was redirecting his aggressive tendencies.)
For the next few times I ran into Gabe, I was treated to the "Obama -- BANG!" (or at times "Obama -- Osama -- BANG! BANG!") performance. But the shock value wore off after a while; and my stock response became:
"Oh Gabe -- why don't you go crawl back into your cave where you belong?"
I have to give him credit: he was able to rise above his initial crudeness. I think that he was genuinely intrigued by the Obama-phenomenon, and initially did not know how else to express himself. But now, post-caveman, the questions began to pour out. For example:
"Would people ever elect that kind of person president?"
I pretended ignorance: "What kind of person would that be, Gabriel?" In this way I gently forced him to be explicit. (His question, of course, was really one which implied a negative answer; but it also operated under the assumption that everyone knew what the code words meant.)
"You know -- a black man."
"Well you know, Gabe, no 'kind' of person is ever elected -- until they are. In the beginning of the Republic, all the men elected president were land owners, aristocrats essentially -- until a member of the working class named Andrew Jackson was elected. No one who used a wheelchair was elected president -- until Franklin Roosevelt got in. And so on. Just so today: this may be the year that we all elect a black man as our president. A few years ago such a thing seemed unthinkable; now it appears to be eminently possible."
Gabe mulled this over. I knew that it had given him genuine food for thought because he was no longer using his shoot-down-Obama pantomime. After this, whenever he saw me he would greet me with a shouted "Obama!" -- as if I were that distinguished personage himself. (Sometimes he would hail me as "Hillary!", but that ended after the primaries were over.) He would then approach me and, in his conspiratorial undertone, pour out his doubts about Obama's ability or readiness to do the job. Once I replied:
"I think he's wicked smart, the sharpest knife in the drawer. He has the right instincts and he's eloquent -- my goodness, he even writes his own speeches!" I paused, and then I added: "Do you know something? More often than not I forget that Obama is black. What I see is an ultra-competent man who might have a chance to get us out of this huge mess we're in."
And so it went in the final weeks before the election.
I must admit -- I did not have very high expectations for Gabriel despite all his questions and doubts. So imagine my shock and surprise when, on the day after Election Day, I asked him for whom he had voted, and he replied (with an uncharacteristic shyness which seemed to say that he had done something almost against his better judgment): "Obama."
Well! If I had had use of my arms, I would have given him a big hug -- or at least a high five!
I'd say that there's still some hope for the lad!
(21 May 2009)
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