Pigs

Me with pigs on a farm.

Spring has come

My youngest sister, Claire, used to love to "roughhouse" with me. Sometimes, she'd try and biff me in the face, so I'd sit on her. Then she would laugh and laugh, her little stomach quivering with delight. "L-l-laura," she would say.

"Yes, Claire," I'd say, examining my fingernails.

"There's a dinosaur over THERE --" trying to distract me. "I think he's going to eat us."

"Aah -- I don't think so," I would say, not turning my head. "The dinosaurs died out some time ago."


After a time, she'd try again. "Laura," she'd say. "Do you want to go eat ice cream? Girls only outing!"

"Aah -- not in the mood," I'd reply. Then she'd howl with frustration, and struggle to get up. I wouldn't let her.

I remember one time watching her flailing limbs with particular amusement. Suddenly, her eyes lit up, fixated on something hovering over my head. Slowly, she extended her arm. Then her hand. Last her forefinger, which trembled with emotion and conviction. "Laura, oh, Laura -- spring has come!"

Had it really? I turned to face the window. It had been such a long, cold winter. My eyes searched for snow melting, dripping off branches. My ears longed to hear bird's sweet songs. But no. Instead, I saw flurries of white, heard howling wind.

And BAM. Claire wholloped me in the back of the head. I looked from the ground, where I lay. She was hopping up and down impishly, circling me in a victory dance. "Ha ha ha! Gotcha."

She's a good little actress.

Winter wears on me more than I think it does, and I long for spring without knowing it. Lately, it's been getting too hot in my room at night -- I wake up with a parched mouth, hoping that winter's over for good. Last night, with great celebration and ceremony, I opened my windows wide and pulled the wool blankets off my bed.

This morning, I awoke to birds' songs. I rubbed my eyes, and sat up. The sky, tinged with pink, spread itself before me. A breeze waltzed into my room, touched my face, and then left. Outside, below my window, I heard the gravelly voices of construction workers as they joked and jostled.

I suspect -- I hope -- that spring has come. As I say this, I'm looking around nervously, afraid to look out the window, afraid that a winter storm will creep up behind me and clout me in the back of the head.

One self, two self, red self, blue self

I've been trying to write a new blog entry about the interview process. Now I’m realizing that my thoughts are complex, just like the people I talk to. I need more time.

For now, I'll just write about one aspect of interviewing, one that has challenged and intrigued me, namely that formerly homeless people never want to talk about life on the streets. They want to fast-forward to having it together.


I’ll ask someone what being homeless was like, hoping that he’ll share sensory details, specific memories. Instead, he’ll tersely say, "It sucked." In other words: it’s none of your business. At other times, the interviewee confuses herself as she tries to remember: “It was like a dream,” she concludes. And so I have to press further. When I do, people will usually oblige with more specifics. As they share details from their pasts, many people break down. Some lose composure completely, shoulders heaving, cradling their faces in their hands. Most often, people pretend that the tears glistening on their cheeks do not exist. “Something in my eye. One second.”

Of course I do not blame anyone for trying to avoid painful and shameful memories. Who would want to relive waking up on the cold pavement, smelling of alcohol and urine? In telling my own story to others, I too gloss over the parts I want to forget. If somebody asks for more detail, I balk.

Initially, I believed that unwillingness to talk about pain or shame stemmed from the desire to avoid revisiting these experiences. Now, I wonder if reticence with regard to the past has a deeper root than eluding discomfort. Perhaps in our unwillingness to speak of the past, we wish to dissociate ourselves from who we once were. I believe that this effort to discard our old selves for better selves shapes the way we think about our lives, and the way we tell our stories to others.

The power of this impulse -- to become new -- is particularly evident to me when I talk to graduates of our long-term rehabilitiation program.

For example, the last person I interviewed from the long-term program -- let's call him "J.R." --gushed, "You should have seen me before. I had long scraggly, hair. Today, I've put on weight and I have a nice haircut. I'm a new man!" What J.R. most wanted was not merely to escape the discomforts of life on the streets, but to become a new person. The only extant evidence of his old self is a single photograph, he said. Today, this photograph is stashed away in the filing cabinet at a detox center -- somewhere in Nevada.

Here’s another example of someone trying to don a new self. One of my favorite college professors – we’ll call him “M” -- told us that when he was four years old, his parents came home to find that someone had colored all over the wallpaper in bold, broad strokes. “Who did this?” they asked their kids.

“It was him,” the children said, pointing to the young M.

All eyes turned. “Well?” his parents asked.

The young boy hesitated, thought for awhile, and then said: “That was the old M. The new M wouldn’t do that.”

M’s story illustrates our willingness to leave behind old selves when we find ourselves in trouble. Of course, for J.R. the stakes are higher than a spanking. Desperate, alone, and confused, he needed to find - or to be given -- a new self, if he was to beat his addictions and (self-proclaimed) self-hatred. Today, J.R. believes he's found that self. "I'm a new creation," he says, beaming from ear to ear. Then, he goes on about his new, smooth hair, and how every day is a beautiful, new day.

He's happy talking about this, I think. I don't want to ask him to go back to the days on the streets. I can tell he won't want to go back. I wouldn't.

But it's my job to unearth his buried old self. From studying focus groups, I’ve learned that donors respond to need, rather than to solutions. (Apparently, middle-aged women especially respond to older men who look like they need saving.) So, if I’m to write effectively, I’ve got to hunt down this man’s former self – the dirty self who lived under a bridge, who ate one meal a week, who fought with cops and had no hope. I've got to find the self he'd rather forget. In pressing for details, I feel rude and invasive ... I wish I could let him continue to delight in his newfound gladness and his new sense of possibilities ... but I can't.

And so I say, slowly … "Let's back up a little bit … to when you were living in the park.”

Under the bridge

I write under a highway. It's my job. Under I-70, the air is thick with dust and ash. Sometimes, debris falls from above, damaging co-workers' cars. (So far, I've been lucky). Homeless people walk up and down the train tracks, picking at trash, possessions slung over their shoulders in hapless bundles. Today, coming back from lunch, I saw a prostitute (I assume) tumble out of a truck's passenger side. The truck screeched away. She tossed her hair out of her face, got up and began to dance, flailing her arms, swaying her hips, smiling with the maddening secrecy of the Mona Lisa.

"Man, she's loaded," my friend, who was driving, remarked.

I peered closer. Deep purple bruises burgeoned under the dancing lady's eye. When shafts of sunlight caught them, the bruises winked and glimmered in the sunlight.

(When I started my job here, I'd naively assumed prostitutes wore slinky boots and red leather. Not so. Prostitutes -- at least, the ones I see out my window soliciting the truckers -- dress and look like tired mothers at church potlucks. They wear Keds and applique sweaters.)

My job is to write about these people -- the desperate people under the bridge, the needy people all over the city. My job is to tell homeless and low-income people's stories in a compelling way, so that our donors will give us money to help them. Initially, I was ashamed, I think, of writing to raise money, rather than writing to create "art" or "literature." Now, six months into my job, I regret my stupid elitism. I am a very lucky girl. I get paid to drive around the city, to meet people in their homes, to listen to them tell their stories. I see their children's shy smiles. I see gruff fathers' faces crumple into tears. I watch their eyes light up when they make discoveries, as they piece together their own lives.

I get to write not only to reflect the world, but to try to change it, to advocate for people who are desperate. That's a privilege.

So, my job has humbled me, and prompted me to rethink the hierarchy I'd formed in my mind about "types" of writing. In addition, my job has helped me grow in that assignments' guidelines have refined my writing skills. For example, since I have strict word limits, I must choose words more deliberately than ever before. And since each piece is designed for a purpose, I must order words carefully, marshaling them on the page, as if for battle. Sometimes, my audience is a donor base of 100,000+ people, as diverse as it is wide. In these cases, I must try to appeal to basic human instinct. Forget the lacy, complicated, useless theses I so carefully wrought as an undergraduate. Instead, I've learned to write around everyday, "universally appreciable" realities. A gurgling stomach, for example. Shame in asking. Huddling for warmth. Worrying about children. Longing for a home. Wondering, "how did I get here?" Looking to the sky for a sign.

I don't think I'll stay under the bridge forever, though. Yesterday, I took the Strengths.Finder 2.0 online test. My employer paid for each of us to take this. I find my five strengths hilarious: Input, Intellection, Learning, Ideation and Context. Read here: I'm a huge, awkward nerd. According to this test, I love to learn, to observe, to absorb information and sensory data, and to engage other people in conversation. ("You should stop thinking ... you'd feel better," a coworker said to me today). Sometimes, the solitary act of writing burdens me. I want to see my readers' faces, want to argue ideas aloud, to make a fuss and some noise. Perhaps, someday, these "strengths" will lead me back to university, to teach writing or acting. In the meantime, I am content to listen to people who've struggled mightily, and to try to honor them with words. On this particular afternoon, here in the cool darkness of my office, I hope that my writing will help Denver to see and consider people who might have otherwise remained invisible. (As I hope for this, crazies pound on the window, drunk people stagger through the parking lot, and passing trucks make the earth shake and rumble).