Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Out of Place at the Parish Hall
There have been times when I have oozed uncomfortableness, times when I felt that my uncomfortableness was so obvious and splotchy, like measles up and down my arms, that I might infect other people.
But it’s not contagious because when someone is extremely uncomfortable, truly out of place, a small invisible globe forms around that person, protecting everyone else from contamination. I know this to be true. I’ve traveled in one of those bubbles more than once.
A few years ago, I went to a memorial service for the son of an old friend. My friend and her family are Native American, and the service was held in a small church on the Oneida reservation. My uncomfortableness began with trying to park our pick-up truck in a small lot next to the church where all the spaces were taken and ended after the service when I was back in the truck headed home.
The time in between was time spent in a bubble, bumping into strangers, starting at the wrong end of the buffet table, searching the room for an empty chair, eating beans and cornbread at the end of a long table where everyone knew each other. Everyone, it seemed, was Native American but me. There was more to this, layers of uncomfortableness, of acute not belonging.
When the drumming started, there was silence in the room and for several minutes, I felt ‘in place,’ if there is such a term.
I wrote about the memorial service in an essay called The Parish Hall. An audio of the essay was broadcast by WUWM, the local public radio station.
When the WUWM producer called to tell me when the piece would be aired, I worried that my friend and her family would be unhappy that I’d written about the service, that somehow it might be seen as using a tragic situation as material for an essay. So, I messaged her to tell her when it would broadcast, and she told me she’d already read the piece on my blog and that it was “Jan good.”
It was only at the moment that I stopped feeling out of place about that time. I belonged there. I just didn’t know it at the time.
2 Comments on “Out of Place at the Parish Hall”
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
many times it is all in our own heads and as you discovered, not in the heads or hearts of the others
Interesting, Jan – the word “belong” and/or “belonging” has been one of the words in my writing this week. So important to feel as if one belongs “somewhere.” And, I remember this story… excellent!