Waiting for the Train

I avoid eye contact on the train platform as usual as I look for a place to sit among the benches that line the track.  Friday afternoon is busy with other college students going into Chicago for an escape from classes.  They stand in huddled groups, a few in dresses or ties.  Going to the symphony or the opera, probably.  Some carry bags stuffed with picnic blankets and dinner, preparations for an outdoor concert or a few hours at the beach.  I stand with only my purse.  I'll be meeting my Bible study group north of the city.  I just have to bide my limited time as a forlorn figure until the train comes to carry me to friends and food, my refreshing weekly routine of acceptance.

No benches.  The one closest to my chosen sentinel spot holds three people, the nearest occupant with his back turned to me in order to talk with his neighbors.  The white button-up, black slacks and shiny black shoes mark him as a businessman.  Or a missionary, I think.

The words of the woman next to him, the woman blocked from my view, are slurred by a lisp and a nasally tone.  

             "We's just don't know what we're gonna do.  There just ain't no money, you know."  Her voice sounds like she's speaking through a snorkel mask.  A voice that carries over the blending, pleasing monotones of others, that makes you want to stare, but makes you feel bad for doing so.

I dare a glance around the back of the white-shirted man.  The owner of the voice sits, slouched over, in an oversize t-shirt on which the iron-on colors have been faded by too many washings.  Her short red hair is pulled back with a purple scrunchie.  Blue eyes as faded as the t-shirt meet mine just as I look and in the millisecond of connection I see her self-consciousness.  I wonder if she sees mine.

What does a woman like her think of a girl like me?  Maybe she asks the same question of herself, but something tells me that life has taught her the answer in glances like mine, glances she has come to fear.  She stumbles a little, like she wants to begin a sentence but has forgotten what she was going to say.  I apologize by looking away and forgive myself silently.  She has given me my answer.

             Her partner takes over in her pause.  He is older than her, much older it seems, but hard to tell.  The undershirt he's wearing is no longer white but clean, barely covering his large, brown belly.  His frizzed, black hair needs cutting and is fading to gray in patches fanning out over his ears.

 "I mean, I love Jesus, I really do," he says to the man in the black slacks.  

The uneducated accent holds a note of self-justification.  It also holds the simplicity of truth.  The missionary-businessman only nods in encouragement, as if this is what he has been waiting to hear but doesn't really believe it.  Maybe the other man understands this, remembering past conversations with similar businessman-missionaries.  He keeps talking.  I hear in his tone the same lessons of experience I saw in the eyes of the woman, the well-dressed man’s reaction as anticipated and expected as the thoughts the purple-scrunchied woman saw in my momentary glance.

             "I mean, I love God, and I think everything's 'bout love and faith an' all that...I'm working hard to get my life right," the big-bellied man says.

The man in the slacks and white collar keeps on nodding.

             "I love God, and I'm working to get my life straight.  I mean, I love my kids an' I want 'em back...so bad.  I love 'em.  I'm taking classes and working hard.  I want to learn how to be better."  

             I see him gesturing with his hands out of the corner of my eye, leaning forward and backward and forward and backward, like his hands are the hands of a conductor, his body the music.  

 I stare into the sunshine, the green park across the tracks, and listen.  I listen and see his children as he speaks, the three young boys who he wants to raise better than he was raised, but that don't listen to him because they don't respect him.  Their mother, not the red-haired lady, says bad things about him, and they don't listen, don't let him speak.  He doesn't want them to grow up like him.  He wants their respect.   He wants their love to mirror the love he has for them.

             "I hope by me taking these classes they can see how much I love 'em," he says.  His voice is deep, gravelly, adamant.

             The red haired woman nods.  The missionary-businessman nods.  

 "He's a good dad," the woman says, shifting her heavy weight forward onto her worn tennis shoes showing beneath too-short khaki pants.

"I'm trying to be," the man says, almost whispering, not looking at her.  "I mean, I love God, I love Jesus..."

             His voice is drowned out by the ringing bell and the roar of the approaching train.  I hear the missionary-businessman speak for the first time over the thunder, wishing the couple well and goodbye.  

            “It was good talking with you.  I hope everything turns out all right.”  He doesn’t even stop to shake their hands.

They don't board the train with us.  I stare out at them from my lofty vantage on the second level through the smudged glass when I take my seat.  They stare at the blank silver sides of the train, longing for movement, for departure.  Their tired desire molds their expressions into an almost-embarrassment for non-participation, only able to offer internal apologies, excuses, and explanations.  No one else is there to listen. 

It doesn’t seem right to me, sitting at a train station without boarding the train, while people talk and listen and then leave, moving on from the place where everyone moves on while you bide your time.  I turn away from the window and find myself ashamed to be glad that I could get away.  I was just waiting for the train.  I don’t know what they were waiting for. 

             

New Dimensions

The recovery is slow.  Slower than expected, I must admit.  I can read the magnets on my refrigerator now, but for some reason I still can't seem to make out the features of my face in the mirror.  For the first time, I can recognize the distance between the mountain peaks and my neighbor's backyard.  But I fail to understand the directions of street signs without recognizing their shapes and colors. 

A few days ago, I laid down on a table with a donut cushion to stabilize my head.  I couldn't see the nurses when I first entered the room.  They were hidden by the dim light, the blue masks, and my own blindness.  Ten minutes later, I had vision.  Cloudy, like looking through smoke, but I could see.  With my own eyes.

The process wasn't free of fear despite its rapidity.  Fully awake, I had my eyelids taped back and my cornea exposed first to a machine that cut off a perfectly shaped flap, then to the laser that would burn off single layers of corneal skin one at a time.  The whole machine was run by a program, not by my surgeon.  His main job was sealing my cornea flap back onto my eye correctly.

During the surgery, I felt disconnected from my own eyes.  When they are held open and not allowed to blink, being instructed to fixate on a steadily blinking green light, it feels more like a bad dream than being conscious during a medical procedure.  The light becomes your place of unfocusing on what is being done to your eye even as it becomes your sole focus, your one constant, keeping your eyes from wandering and suffering the indiscriminate burn of the laser.  

Though the skill of the surgeon and the advancement of the technology inspired in me an appropriate level of awe, I find that they only attest to the even greater awesomeness of the eye itself.  The cornea is made of skin, living and renewable, like the skin on my arms and fingers and the bottoms of my feet and the inside of my mouth.  But cornea skin is clear.  Skin that I can see through, perfectly.  Even the clear materials of contacts and glasses distort vision to some extent.  It is impossible to make them so clear that they have no affect on vision.  

My contacts, for example, kept me from registering distance.  After climbing a mountain and looking out on the city below, I always felt as if I could pick up the tiny cars and people and put them where I wanted, like museum dioramas of the battle of Gettysburg or ancient Aztec civilizations.  I had to learn to keep appropriate following distances when driving by learning the rate at which cars shrunk and grew when I held back or stopped too near to rear bumpers.  My world was flat because of pieces of plastic glued to my eyes.

And in ten minutes, by burning of all things, the world became real.  Horseback riding a few days after the surgery, I looked over the steep edge beyond the trail and knew, knew for sure and not just in conjecture, that if I fell I would fall a long way.  The horizon became an unfathomable, unreachable distance, not just a line separating air from dirt.  Everything became larger, though it has yet to get clearer.  But it will.  And then clarity will match the new dimensions.

My eyes have been repaired, but this smaller surgery has only served as a reminder of the bigger healing that I am working toward each day.  Layers are being burned away one at a time, not painfully really, though I often tell myself that I should be fearful, that I'm losing pieces of myself.  It doesn't really hurt so much as it is scary.  Scary, that I'm putting myself completely under the mercy of my Surgeon, blind and helpless on the table.  Daily, hourly, each infinitesimal cell of rebellion is being scorched and shriveled for the purpose of clarity and focus. I know the focus is vital.  I have the light, all I have is the light, and I know that allowing my eyes to wander from that point, I risk losing my vision forever.  But I so want to wander, to settle for the mediocre and try to live my life with half vision, half clarity.   Everything feels as if it is being forced open, told to concentrate on a single point, to wait and not move until the cutting away is complete.  If I move before it is finished, I will be scarred.  But the point is secure.  The lighthouse beacon continues to shine strong, blinking intermittently to remind me of His presence.

Burning and cutting done, there will be clarity.  At first everything will be smoky, hazy, unfocused, but then the skin will be restored, the tears wiped away, and the whole universe will turn out to be bigger and more beautiful than anything I could have imagined.          

Patience

First entwining of nervous fingers

A blush and a flutter hiding behind a veil

The child in the womb

Hand-wringing happiness

Shoes bought one size too big

And the cookie jar with the lid on

The growth measurements on the door frame

The bike ride up the long hill

A handful of sand on summer vacation or

The sunrise on Christmas morning

Spring

A fullness filled.

The Librarian

Meredith hadn’t always wanted to be a librarian.  In fact, she had never wanted to be a librarian.  It just seemed to happen.  Her whole life had just seemed to happen.  She supposed she once had dreams, maybe even an adventure or two before the library.  But she didn’t remember.  Her life was just like the books.  She had stacked the memories away somewhere, somewhere she could keep them for later when she wanted to check them out, read them one more time.  Or more importantly, where she could forget them without losing them completely.

            She had gotten used to being invisible.  Her job was to be invisible.  If people did come to the library, which wasn’t often, they didn’t come to see her.  No one came to the library anymore, much less to talk to the somewhat young, somewhat pretty, somewhat short, somewhat average, somewhat altogether uninteresting woman behind the desk that sat directly in the middle of the first floor, surrounded by evenly spaced rows of composite wood shelves.  Besides, she liked being invisible.  Perhaps it was the reason why she had accepted the job.  Things were just easier when you were somewhat invisible.   

            The library itself was unimportant and unnoticed to the majority of the people in the neighborhood.  Built in the time before internet and amazon.com and Ebay and even Barnes and Noble, before the time of coffee shops with free wifi and cafes with comfy chairs, the library had outlived its time of mystery and adventure.  The old armchairs tucked away in its corners were now lumpy and an outdated orange.  The books themselves were faded and dusty, many of them put back in the wrong place and forgotten, checked out indefinitely.  It wasn’t old enough to hold that mystery that is only attributed to the sort of buildings made of stone with pillars out front and marble curved staircases and light fixtures that are made to look like old gas lamps. It was square and made of brick and cheap linoleum and gray carpet and composite wood.  Utilitarian does not create mystery.  The library was utilitarian.  The library was old, but not old enough.  The library was not mysterious.

            Much like Meredith. 

            She didn’t look up when she heard the approaching squeaking of the shoes on linoleum.  No one ever saw her sitting at her desk, stamping the ten returns she received each day.  Before lunch, after she had unlocked the front doors, turned on the lights, and put her brown canvas purse, the one that she always thought was too large, behind the desk beside the wicker trash can, she would go the return box and recover those titles that had been so lucky as to be found among the thousands of ignored on the shelves.   Settling herself into her chair, she would then arrange the stack of books in a neat pile beside her left elbow, not the right, so that it wouldn’t interfere with her stamping. 

The ink for the stamp was pink.  She hated pink.  She had always wanted it to be blue.

Only when she realized that the squeaks were moving in her direction did she raise her eyes, only her eyes, from her task of placing the new stamp perfectly below the last on each yellowed inside page. She saw the disheveled curly head before she heard the voice, but the person across the tall, composite wood counter from her was too short for her to see his face.  She only caught a glimpse of golden freckles on a pale forehead that almost glowed in the overwhelming white of the fluorescent lighting.  The squeak of his sneakers on the beige-speckled linoleum floor betrayed the hurried frustration of his miniature purpose.  

            The hair was the same color as hers, except that it hadn’t been dulled by an entire lifetime spent hiding from the sun.  A soft, internal light radiated from the golden-hinted auburn.

            Meredith didn’t stop her mechanical stamping.  “Can I help you?” 

            The clearing of the small throat reminded Meredith of the high pitched grind her electric pencil sharpener produced, the pencil sharpener on the left side of her desk that sat at a perfect right angle to the corner and that she used everyday right after her lunch break.  Even if her pencils didn’t need sharpening.

            “I need an adventure.”

            The stamp hesitated for a second as Meredith processed the request.  Did they have a section labeled adventure?  No, no of course not.

            “We don’t have an adventure section,” she said, looking up from her stamping and addressing the red mop that seemed to hover at the edge of her desk.  It reminded her of…she didn’t know what.  “You should go to the children’s books.”

            She thought that would end it.  But the disembodied hair remained.  She heard the squeak of the shoes again and the hair gave way to a forehead, then a set of huge blue eyes framed by long golden lashes.

            “Please.  I can’t find an adventure.”

            The plea held the tremor of tears, but also confidence.  Assertiveness.  Duty.  The plea of preachers at altar call.  The call of patriots for liberty and judges for justice.  A prince pleading for the people of his nation rise up and fight for their way of life.

            Meredith sat with stamp suspended in midair above The Birdwatcher’s Guide to the Birds of North America.  Her hand trembled.  Only the when the stamp quaked from her fingers and bled a fatal pink stain onto the wrong side of the inside cover did she recover. 

            Preachers?  Patriots?  Judges and princes?

Leaving the desk now would mean that her stamping would be interrupted.  The pile of books would be left on the desk when they should be stamped and put on the shelves.  Those books were her only task.  She was a librarian, and librarians put away their books.  A librarian was what she was.

            The blue eyes blinked once.

            Her tongue rebelled against her and formed the one reluctant word of rebellion.

            “Sure.”                   

Revolutionary

“Jules, smile!”

            Christmas morning always brings the video camera.  More than birthdays, more than choir concerts, more than events like the day I learned how to tie my shoes.  Every December the 25^th, my dad’s hand brushes off the hard, black, twenty pound plastic case that holds the gargantuan icon of our holiday season.

Even though they all look the same, Simmons Christmases must be recorded.  To miss one, even one, would be disastrous.

            “Jules, say something.  The camera is on.  This one takes video, not pictures.”

            The relatives also come out from their dusty hiding places whenever the end of the year brings the smell of Christmas cookies to our tiny kitchen.  They’ll be arriving decked out in their finest lumpy, scratchy, red and green sweaters later in the afternoon, burdened with boxes of food and hurriedly wrapped packages of plastic toys destined to be torn apart by my younger brother and I. 

Even though they don’t care and have never cared what our house looks like, Mom seems to think they’ll notice the dust that’s collected behind the picture frames on the entryway table.  She’s been scurrying around the house with a frantic pace in her socks and gray sweat pants, vacuuming and wiping and rearranging surfaces in the house that only the resident miller moths have ever paid much attention to.  Now she’s upstairs, getting the sleepy Tyler, never a morning person, to come down and open presents with his impatient sister. 

            I’ve been waiting for the last two hours for it to be the appropriate time to open presents.  I’m always awake as soon as any hint of light makes it through the yellowed metal blinds in my room on this most anxious of mornings.  The sound of mom and dad’s creaking bedroom door as it joyously announces they are finally awake sends me flying down the staircase in my footy pajamas to sit, straight-backed, on the cold tile in front of the fireplace.  From here, I can have a perfect view of the tree, positioned proudly by the front windows so that all the neighbors can see our multicolored Walmart lights, the tree under which all happiness lies shrouded in pine-scented mystery.

            Except that dad blocks my view.  The video camera has once again emerged to interrupt my attempts at guessing what surprises the wrapped boxes might contain.  And this time, it’s also ratted me out.  The big black eye and the blinking red light have caught me, frozen, with my finger up my nose. 

            “Julie, take your finger out of your nose and smile for the camera,” Dad coaxes in a voice that only barely betrays his frustration and embarrassment for my sake.  Only the fringes of his tousled curly hair are visible behind the monstrosity of the camera, so I can’t guess his expression.

            The instant I realized I had been caught, I didn’t know what to do.  A good scolding usually followed the revelation of the crime, especially recently, since my parents didn’t want me to pull out a big green one in front of the relatives.  Putting the video camera in between me and Dad seemed to have changed something.  He couldn’t scold me.  And I couldn’t react in a customary pouty way, with a frown and a prominent bottom lip.  Not only that, but even though I didn’t want to drop the habit, I still had some understanding that I should be embarrassed.  But Dad was asking me to smile.  None of it fit.

            So I froze, hoping that I would fail to capture the attention of the all-seeing eye if I just did nothing long enough.  With my finger up my nose, I made a defiant stand against the tyranny of the video camera like no one ever had before and no one ever has since.  After those few agonizing minutes and several nervous laughs from my dad, its horrible gaze finally shifted to focus on Ty and Mom as they descended the stairs.  I had won, or so I thought.

            I lost in the long run.  Though I resisted the demands of the camera, it had marked me as a nonconformist in the records of Simmons Christmases for the rest of time.  Nearly every Christmas now, the tape of me staring blankly into the lens with my finger up my nose plays on the television for the entire family.  Instead of being recognized as a picture of the beautiful realities that are not a part of our Christmas because of the tyranny of the video camera, the clip instead perpetuates the way things always have been by teaching the youngest generations what not to do when they’re asked to smile for the camera.