Friday Round-Up: The First Week of My New Life

It was a week without make-up. At first because there was no time because I was getting up at 3:45 am to drive across town to work at one of our town’s warming rooms for the homeless. But then it was because I liked it. I wanted to wear my jeans and my beloved black hoodie and not be bothered by the foolery of facial adjustment. This is me. My face is clean and worn.

I put my high horse out to pasture. Oh, not the high horse that can muster deep indignation about the state of the world and write ribbons around defenders of the status quo, not that high horse. That one’s getting extra oats. The high horse I retired is the one that needed to be in charge all the time, the one that thought interactions with homeless people needed to be on my terms, formal interviews, focus groups. I needed to have a role and the role always needed to be the one in charge. I lost that this week going to the warming room every morning to help wake people and clean up the place. I shed that high horse like a heavy mink coat inherited from a rich aunt and it feels great.

It’s Friday and I’m going to be deaf until Monday. Without notice, no beeping or flashing, my cochlear implant processor just quit working this morning. Boom – or rather the absence of boom – and I was living with my head in an invisible block of concrete. There is a new processor coming but not until after we have our annual gathering tomorrow of families who all adopted children from Nicaragua, our beloved Three Kings celebration held at our house for the past 31 years. There is nothing to be done except to grin and bear it. All those heads and all those mouths moving; I’ll feel like Snow White in the forest with all the creatures on mute, a bluebird sitting on my finger warbling in silence.

My son is going to be 33 tomorrow. I remember seeing him for the first time in 1986 in the deserted concourse of the Milwaukee airport, a thin sick rail of a boy, clinging to his new father who had gone to Nicaragua to bring him home. He looked as if he could have been folded into thirds and slipped in someone’s pocket. And I remember seeing him this past July, a grown man in a faded blue hospital gown, joking with nurses while his leg hung suspended by a rod drilled through his knee, weights holding his leg at just the right angle to relieve pressure on the hip shattered in a terrible car accident. That he is going to be 33, well, yes.

I got another rejection email while I was at the grocery store. A piece I have worked and reworked and had work-shopped by very helpful people still hasn’t found a home in print anywhere. Today’s rejection seemed so nice, so complimentary that I wanted to ask if they said the same thing to everyone they turned down but decided I’d rather think they didn’t. I like the fiction that it pained them to turn me down although I know better, sort of. I remain committed to this piece called The Prayer March and will find a place for it. I believe in it; that’s a really new feeling. I believe in that piece as true and important, if homeless at the moment.

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Photo by Gary Bendig on Unsplash