Idling

Dear Mr. Driver of the Snap-On Tools Truck that Idles in front of my House every week for Hours on End,

You are ruining the environment.

Specifically, you are ruining MY environment.

Your truck is noisy and stinky and I have been wondering for months now why in the world YOU CAN”T TURN YOUR ENGINE OFF WHEN YOU ARE NOT IN THE TRUCK.

Please. Stop. Idling.

Thank you,

Me plus all the little creatures (even the snakes) that live around here

UPDATE: I finally met the owner of the auto-body business next door. Turns out the Snap-On guy has an on-truck computer that he’s running on a generator the whole time he’s visiting. I don’t feel totally comforted but at least it’s not just pure laziness. And I think my complaint may result in the guy idling somewhere else.

Still.

Honesty vs. Kindness

A woman told her husband of 13 years, I don’t love you anymore.

She was going through intense therapy. A few months later, she realized, No, she did love him. But it was too late. He’d been hurt. There marriage ended soon afterward.

The woman – my mother – was being honest with her husband – my father. And isn’t honesty the best policy?

This causes me to have one of those internal debates that then drives me to write before I start talking to myself in public. I can argue some opposing points:

1) In a relationship, you don’t always need to be 100% divulging all the time of everything in your heart. Keep your mouth shut. The truth might take some time to surface. If my mother had waited a few months, she could have avoided hurting my father and losing him forever.

2) It’s a good thing my mother told dad how she felt, even though it was hard, and possibly a passing feeling. The fact that he couldn’t hear it and handle it is proof that they needed to split up.

3) My mother told the truth, and maybe regretted it, but it was the truth, and she should have stood by it, instead of backtracking when the consequences hurt.

4) Mom should have valued his feelings and the relationship over her need to spill her guts out. The edit button is helpful to preserve relationships.

What do you think?

There are definitely times when speaking everything on your mind is just not the kindest way to be honest. Telling your boss her breath stinks, for instance. Telling your neighbor you hate the way she does her hair. Confessing to your spouse that you wish he would lose some weight. These may all be truthful, honest statements – but do they reflect the truth of your care and concern for that person?

The other thought here goes back to good old Jesus – love thy neighbor as thyself. Be honest and truthful to yourself. So this means, in my mother’s case, that she needed to honor her truth. Maybe that didn’t mean telling Dad she didn’t love him anymore – but maybe she could tell him she was in a really hard place. Maybe she needed some things from him to honor the process she was going through – or maybe telling him her feelings was indeed honoring her truth, conducting herself with integrity, and despite his reaction, she should be proud of herself.

I’m sure there isn’t – is there ever! – a black and white answer to this conundrum. For myself, I grew up very much pleasing other people whatever it took in terms of playing down or shaving off any rough edges poking through that might cause displeasure or provoke alarm. Speaking my truth with kindness for myself and others is a challenge I am just now learning to tackle.  Letting others be responsible for their reactions is a crucial part of it.

The truth can definitely be a sword.

Is it possible to wield it gently?

the bus

The bus stop is adjacent to the park.

Going on the bus is a social excursion. The nurse next to us smiles at my baby and says to him, “You see this black face? You have a white face!” My son gurgles. I hear her accent – African? She tells me, as if she heard my silent question, pointing at my sling, “In Africa, 1 -2 – 3 months, they go to the back.”

“That would be easier,” I say, “For cooking.” I tell her how dangerous it gets when I’m heating oil. We laugh. I ask her where she is from, and she tells me she is a refugee from Togo.

“Do you miss it?” I ask. “Yes,” she says. “Very much.”

I recall my geography, ask her about the ocean. I feel like I’ve read about ecotourism there; rich people (browning themselves?) on the beaches.

“Yes,” she says. “My father owned a fishing boat.”
She tells me they ate fresh fish and bam, a kind of coconut. (We call our son “Bam,” coincidentally.)
She tells me her five children are all over the world, only her youngest is here with her in the US. One is in Paris. but she says this is a good place for children.
Her mother had nine.
They are planning to return for a trip next year.

“You should go,” she tells me, warmly, extending an invitation for me to come see the place she loves. For a moment, all I want in the world is to do just that; go to Togo, look her up in the phone book. I want to see the blue ocean she’s talking about and feel a different part of the world. I want to see what home looks like to her.

I am also thinking that I’ll never go to Africa. And this feels terrible. I will die having never gone.

I am also thinking of how much I miss my ocean, the Pacific, where I grew up – maybe I am not imagining Togo at all; I’m just remembering a place that used to make my chest cave in when I thought of it, a place I’ll never really return to.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a refugee. But I know what it’s like to be far away from home and to always feel that you are not where you rightly belong. Our oceans mingle in my imagination, become the same missed body.

And then she gets off the bus.

When we return back on the bus three hours later, the woman from Togo is there again. Headache she says, holding her forehead where a bright kerchief is slipping back to reveal gray hair on her brow. And my knees. I go home to rest.

She looks miserable. I don’t know her name. I don’t know really her story, how she ended up here. I felt, on the way, that I’d had this amazing infusion of information; but now I see, as we rattle down the road, that I’ve learned only that there’s so much I don’t know. My imagination made me feel like I was having some kind of poetic experience; reality is, it’s just a bus. We’re not traveling very far together, she and I.

In contrast to the other ebullient woman I meet on this bus ride – I’ll write about her next – the woman from Togo does not say hello to the people on the bus and street corners. She seems lonely. This makes me wonder if refuggees from other countries, though the same “color” as “people of color” born here in America integrate with them, and if so, how.

This question still when I get off the bus, walk along the park towards home, and there’s two boys with backpacks going home from school, speaking to each other in a foreign language. Again, I am wondering where they are from, and suddenly also, how many refugees are in this town, and of those, how many are feeling homesickness? And what do I, what can I do about – think about – that?