You played a game of peek-a-boo with my
teenage son last night. You caught his eyes through the glass door that
leads from our rotting deck inside to our kitchen. Maybe you also
saw the avocado sitting on the counter and the jigsaw puzzle with only the
frame assembled, nothing inside.
There was a blender half-filled with
iced coffee sitting in the kitchen, which perhaps I should have shared with
you. We could have sat together chatting about the meeting that I
attended with my friend on Thursday, the one held in an airless room, the one
where we prayed for serenity and listened to some guy named Ron unload his
cargo of loss.
I told the dispatcher how my boy had
spotted you standing there, how you had pulled him away from the thirteenth
inning of the baseball game on TV. No, he did not know what you were
wearing. Yes, he thought maybe you were twenty years old. Yes, you
were black. Yes, male.
Eleven miles away last night, police
lassoed a black male my son’s age, a teenager with a gun in his hand, all part
of this pandemic of decay.
You climbed up our five stairs, past
the swinging green hammock chair and the empty box of Life cereal that had not
quite made it into the recycling bin. You slammed your palm into
our glass, knocking a hollow knock, suffocating the two of us with the sound.
The dog sat silently on the sofa.
To him, the world is not a carnivorous battleground. To him, there are no
prowlers, just pilgrims. He would have rested his head on your lap, kissed your
palms, invited you to rub his gray belly.
You ran. You collapsed onto the
driveway next door, wheezing with asthma, this marathon sprinting foreign to
your weak lungs. Four cops reported that you’d fled from a sobriety
checkpoint miles away down on Olive Boulevard. They huddled with a
collection of quiet neighbors who plant daffodils and loan each other sticks of
butter, sharing this small-town news.
Maybe you called your mom from inside
the county jail early this morning and heard her crumble into the oak rocking
chair in the corner. Maybe you felt her clutching the wicker
basket laden with soft prayers.
During
the Tikkun Middot experience this past year, I repeated the following words in
my head. “Even though you have wronged
me/hurt me/frightened me/done that which I fail to understand, I will not
withhold my goodness from you.” This
reminds me that I get to choose my response to challenging moments in my home, with
my colleagues and students, and out in the wider world. This reminds me to listen with an open heart
to the cries of individuals and of communities, even when I do not know their
pain. This reminds me to chip away at
the us-them mentality that plagues our city, our country, and our world, not to
shove people into categories, to embrace our common humanity.
I
can choose to respond with goodness. We
all can. May we continue to train
ourselves in this new year.
Debra Baker
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