Waiting Rooms.

I met a woman at a party on Sunday who wore a green sweater and a green scarf. She had long, wavy hair. We were at a “naked lady party” which isn’t quite as kinky as it sounds but not a sort of party I’d heard about before Portland. Everyone heard from a friend of a friend and brought a bag of clothes they did not want anymore, and realized, upon arrival, that they knew hardly anyone else there. So here we were, in a situation that has become all too familiar since this whole thing started (gatherings with lots of strangers) trying on each other’s clothes. Creating new piles and then bringing them home without any expectation of seeing the former wearer again.

But back to the woman in the sweater. She, by the way, brought the best clothes. The most clothes. A large variety of J Crew sweaters. She did not hold a glass of red wine in her hand, because she is now expecting. (Which she found out a month ago, and is just now feeling the sicknesses from it.) But even though her stomach revealed nothing I could see the joy in the way she talked about it. The need to find a midwife. The bathtub her husband built in the attic for the birth. Family names. Maternity clothes. The excitement of a new life that she will have so much to do with. It was refreshing, and strange, to hear so immersed in thought about a subject that has hardly crossed my mind.

But the week went on afterwards. I made my morning rounds and called 911 after opening the door on the seventh floor. No, I could not see sharp objects, I told the man on the other end of the line, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t any. I printed off the patient’s information and handed it to the paramedics, my hands still shaking a bit when the papers transferred from my hold to theirs’. I watched them go up the elevator in their blue uniforms and then went back to the office, grabbed the basket of granola bars, and knocked on the rest of the doors. I labeled more post-its for patient appointments and stuck them to the large white board we have in the office.

Later on that day, I stopped at the food court Providence Hospital while waiting for another client to get out of his appointment. I ate the apple I’d brought from home and looked around at the people eating French fries and drinking diet soda through straws. There was a gift shop on the right and soft rock playing in the background. It reminded me of when my mom would take me to Children’s hospital in Boston for the check up on bone cyst on my index finger, or when my Dad and I stopped at Finagle a Bagel on the way back from getting the mole on my head removed. I must have known then that all of that was love—the hours my parents took out of their day, the choice junk food item, the drive through the city, the hour or two of school I missed. But now I know for sure. Maybe that’s one of the most beautiful things they did for me, buying me a bagel with cream cheese when I wasn’t sure what the mole meant, or sitting beside me in a waiting room of strangers. I guess that’s how I ended up here. I had someone to knock on my in the morning, drive me to my appointments. And someone to call the right person if things were to go wrong.

(Written 11/24/2009)

Mom's recommendation: a fat glass of wine.

All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting

While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.



-Hafiz



I think I have the potential to become a little bit obsessed with Hafiz. I'm discovering things about him now, or trying to, in the 20 minutes I have left to be in this coffeeshop before I walk home for dinner. It's raining out, and a guy just opened the door and asked if he could bring his bike in. The barista said yes, of course, "you don't want to bike in that." The biker hoisted the handle bars upward, and brought the wheel over the lone step. "I do, actually. But I'm meeting someone."

But Hafiz. I think, he is persian, or that's what this website says that I am looking at. The person who constructed the page says he is mystical. And beautiful. And from the 7 minutes I spent reading it, I would have to agree. It was Robert, a JV from Seattle, who visited our house last weekend, who first introduced me, as he sat at our kitchen table reading quotes from his anthology while the rest of us did dishes or ate the contents of our cabinents. So now, I'm happy to have his words in my life.

Today was a hard day. One of those frightening days that leaves you incredibly angry at a person for treating you like crap, no matter how ill they are, and then hopeless. How can you do anything in the midst of aggression? You can't, really. You can take a deep breath until your eyes fill with tears and you're directed to one of a small room in the back of the clinic where people who have been doing this a lot longer of you give you a small cup of water, and a hug, and tell you that it will all be okay.

So that was my first day back from the first JVC cascade region retreat. Which was beautiful, at a place where I could look out at the water and see tall trees stretching for miles. We ate lots of beans and fiber, talked about our personality types, and took fewer showers. It was good to get away for a few days. To be surrounded by flannel. To step back and remind myself there is still a lot to see when it's raining.

Scapegoats

First, I will blame the Internet connection in this apartment. And then laziness. And then indecisiveness. And then I will go ahead and post after a bit of a hiatus.

Everything has been moving along as it should as October comes to a close. It's been a good, razor-less month.There were leaves that turned from green to many other colors. The introduction of cold weather, and the introduction of my spiffy Recuperative Care Program winter jacket. Patients coming and going. New flooring. A filing rack. More rhyming words of wisdom from the man who sits in his wheelchair outside of our building. The intentional purchasing of bike supplies. A long wait for a bus that never came, followed by a whiney phone call to Morris house, requesting a ride home. Several examples of how wonderful it is to be brought out of crankiness, and how that can happen in so many ways.

I tried to post this on Sunday, and I failed, so I will post it now:

I woke up this morning wanting a pumpkin. Not just a pumpkin, but the experience of getting a pumpkin--the mud, the farm, the hot chocolate, my inability to wear socks that are warm enough. It's fall, and the leaves are beginning to fall in heaps on the sidewalk. I love this time of the year, the peak of the season, the last hurrah of beauty and color before the bare (or maybe this time rainy) winter rolls in. And as the leaves fall I've felt more and more pressure to take action--to hike around, take a hay ride, claim a pumpkin. And as the weeks go on, I find myself accomplishing none of these tasks. No hiking. No camping. No cider. No large cow standing behind the barb wired fence, or the tour guide that isn't at all disgusted with the smell of manure. Just me, and my hopes, and my inability to make them happen.

Today, I had it. The determination, the bus route, an enthusiastic housemate to accompany me on the quest. We took off around 1:30 without having to wait very long for trimet. And when we made it downtown I knew exactly how to get to the connecting stop. The bus came, the driver opened the door, and when I asked if the bus would take us to Sauvie Island, he said no, no bus would be going there today. He shut the door. We let go of our smiles as the reality sunk in. No pumpkins.

So instead went to the only other place that we know exactly how to get to by bus: Mt. Tabor. We arrived, to a lot of stairs, that we'd conveniently forgot existed. We climbed. It was damp out by then, but a pleasant dampness, and a thin steak of clouds and a sliver of yellow light above the city. I realized, once again, how much I love the sky here. How colorful it is, even at 2:30 in the afternoon. For the first time all weekend, I felt present to the place I was in, the conversation, the people walking their dogs near by.

(And that's all. Going to sleep. Happy Halloween.)

Pictures

"You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

Mary Oliver

I'm not a photographer. But I've taken my camera out occasionally, because I have it so I may as well use it, and store images on my computer, just to have. When I'm in a new place or had a bit to drink. To print out and slide under plastic pages of a decorated photo album.

So this one is from Seattle, where we went more than a month ago and stayed with Leslie Phillip's parents in the house she grew up in. The first morning we took a walk around her neighborhood, next to Lake Washington, without a clear destination or goal except to get some air. It was lovely, even in the haze, and when we turned around to go home I saw these geese. There were lots of them, perched along the grass. They were attentive. And I guess, for some reason, I wanted to remember them.

There are a lot of books in our house. Mostly about social justice, written my nuns and Jesuits about their experiences in small villages in central America. Jonathan Kozol's Ordinary Resurrections, Edward Hays's Prayers for the Domestic Church. All good. All pertinent. All very wise. And all things that I'm not very motivated to read on a Sunday late morning while curled up on the couch.

But in my room, I found an anthology called Earth Prayers. There are poems about loving the ground, praising large turtles, escaping your ego while in the forest. And then, there is a poem about Geese, by Mary Oliver. Which I have read everyday since I've discovered it. And has brought me back to the moment in Seattle, as I observed the consolidated force, before going on my way with my new pack of people.

There is something motivating in her words, that gave me small reassurance of what it is to be an individual while living in community, to keep your own self and your own needs, and be at peace with the fact that they will be different from others. I guess it's possible to act together, to create a life for a year in a random house in the middle of northeast Portland, and a little harder to claim exactly what that should look like.

Lunch breaks.

I've been slacking a bit with this blog. Which only makes me want to slack more... and be more indecisive about exactly what I want write about.

I decided to go to lunch early yesterday, before serving the leftovers from the elementary school to the patients. It was Friday, and Nic (my supervisor) was out of the office and like most days, around 11:30, I decided I needed a break. From the front desk, the beeping fax machine, the drives around the block in the red van to pick up patients. So I zipped my backpack and filled my water bottle and headed to Pioneer Square. Have I talked about the square yet? Across from the courthouse? The bricks, the water fountain, the Starbucks without a bathroom? The canvassers for international children's foundations lurking on every corner, who I politely (and somewhat self righteously) inform that I am already volunteering and only making $80 a month so will not be able to contribute financially, but approve and support of their cause? Pioneer square is 4 or so blocks south from where I work, that resembles a small brick stadium with nothing organized to look at. But most days, there are surprises--people spreading the word of Jesus to the disinterested crowd of professional twenty somethings eating their chinese noodles from environmentally friendly to-go boxes, a sun burnt man strumming on his guitar, field trips of third graders trading their potato chips, and festivals covering every heritage and every cause. I guess what I like about all of it is that I don't have to participate in any of the festivities. Friday was domestic abuse awareness week. There were fliers, and free coffee, and extra doughnuts. And I could be in another world without anyone asking for me.

This is what I like about being in a city, and what I like about working in the downtown area, that there is always something else going on. No matter how much I feel like I'm losing control of my responsibilities, how late I am to appointments, how frustrated I am with clients, or how frustrated they are with me--everything around us keeps going. The max rolls in and out, people sit on the brick steps eating their burritos, the fountain keeps running. It's a reminder, or an invitation to keep yourself open when you feel like everything is closing in on you.

So it was a good hour. Which may have had something to do with the free coffee, the surprise doughnut, the fact that Danielle (a JV living in MAC, the other Portland house) happened to be hanging out there in the late morning as well. We sat under the glass roof beside Starbucks. We did not take off our hoods. And I realized that there may be no such thing as perfect.

And now for my house. Above, is the porch, and some seattle JVs the day we moved in, and the day everyone else piled their luggage into our yard before taking off one respective trains. Above that, is what I see when I sit on my porch, after work, attempting to read but never really being able to stay focused.

There is a lot of joy to living in community. There are dishes and donated bread and the hectic mornings of never being able to brush your teeth when you actually need to, but beyond that there is this process of getting to know other people in a way you've never known anyone else. And through that, getting to know yourself. Learning, maybe for the second or third time, how you want to present yourself and the support you need on a bad day.

Yesterday, in the later afternoon, Henry's daughter came into the office. She was beautiful, and she was tired, and she came to introduce herself. I guess that's when my frustrations started to melt a bit, and I realized the humanity in Henry that I'd pushed away during my last ugly confrontation in him. He's an addict. And in many ways, a bit of a mess, and he has burnt a lot of bridges. But he is a father to two beautiful women, the one in front of me that looked close to my age, and that was enough to stregthen my patience a bit more. I could go home at 5 and potentially not think of him again. Someday he'll leave RCP and who knows if I'll ever see him again. But he'll still have his daughters. And his mother. And all of the people who after all of this time still depend on him, and no matter how much it hurts, are not able to give up on him.

It's strange to see what people remember the most about their lives. Harriet, for example, talked of the oatmeal that her sister hated to eat. Even years afterward. "It was all we had, you know. That and cornmeal." We waited for her to be checked in at the clinic, and she told me of her family, her father who died and her mother who spent all of the money on alcohol. At ten, and the oldest, oatmeal was all she had to give to her sister, who was four at the time. She must have been too young to understand, she said. And I guess there are somethings that you can just never make sense of, no matter how old you are, or how long its been.

what it actually looks like

I sat on the train on the way to Tacoma and looked out the window. I'd heard the view was lovely, although that night I would be unable to see it. It was nighttime now, and all of the passengers struggled to stay patient after the hour delay. I chatted with Jean, an older woman beside me, who advised me to not have 11 children if I could help it. I told her it didn't look like a possibility in the near future.

I thought mostly of my job, which continues to be hard, and leaves me distressed and slightly confused at the end of each day, and has made me realize that some moments are just hard to let go of. That no matter how hard we all try there are still people that seem to fall through the cracks. I thought of the dirty drapes above Henry's bed. How he tugged at the for no reason, how his pupils turned as small as pins. I thought of the almost empty medicine jar on the table, and how he wrapped his thin, dangly arms around the television in the corner and attempted to move it. I thought of Cathleen, laying helplessly on her bed, almost unable to lift the cup of milk to her lips. "How did she get back in here?" The housing specialist kept asking. The recuperative care program requires patients to be able to take care of themselves, and Cathleen, now 86 pounds, is not able to do that. But somehow it happened. And then Friday afternoon rolled around, and we were scrambling to find a different situation for her.

I've realized throughout the month that suffering does not always look like suffering. It is not always sadness, or honest remorse. Suffering does not always come in tears or crying or moments that are so insightful that you can feel your heart sinking a bit deeper into your chest. It manifests in other ways, in ugly, dishonest ways. The fake gasps a woman let out in order to get an oxygen tank, and the cigarette I see her smoking after my three different phone conversations with the home care company. The stolen pain meds. The anxiety from the stolen pain meds. The moments that spring up on me during the day, the ones that leave me feeling frozen in helplessness, fearing what else is out there.

On Thursday afternoon I came home from the afternoon where Henry took too many of his pain meds. When I stood by his door for 30 minutes waiting while my co worker called the hospital. Henry said he saw two of me, and a dog. He said his daughter wished he were dead. That he liked the book he was reading. He reached for something in the air and caught nothing.

So I walked in my house not knowing quite what to do with all of that. We ate dinner and danced around the kitchen. I baked Banana bread and packed my things for the weekend. And through all of it I felt a bit different than I did the night before.

Self Care

I’m sitting in my living room, sort of watching a movie about a high school history teacher with a cocaine addiction. I’m not sure of the name, and hesitant to ask my housemates who are actually focusing on the movie, rather than walking in half way through attempting to steal internet connection from the neighbors. I like these moments—the ones that take place in the living room, where I can be surrounded by people and not necessarily have to carry on a conversation. The fall is setting in a bit. It is drizzling out. We have our blankets over us, and appreciating the downtime.

We’ve talked a bit about vicarious trauma at work lately. Nic made it the word of the week after everything that happened the first week, and everything that continues to happen in the population we serve each day. How it’s important to be proactive about dealing with the pain that we see people go through everyday, and the result of being in vulnerable situations. What to do with pain that is not completely our own. So I’m trying to figure that out, and I’m not sure that I’ve reached any conclusions, or new ways to unwind. But there are the parts of my work day that aren’t completely work related that I’ve been hanging onto. The conversations I have with the parking attendant, Adrian, after I drop the van off. His yellow shirt and yellow booth and the large textbook he had opened on the small table. “I’m learning Japanese,” he told me. He paused for a moment when I asked him why. “To be cool,” he said. I nodded and went on my way. There is the bike ride there and back, the walk to the pharmacy to pick up the pain medication, and the walk to the primary care clinic to divide out the week supplies. I guess I never realized how much effort it would take for me to remind myself that the world that I’m working in is not all bad. That there are small glimpses of lights if you stay open to them. And no matter how crazy the day is, there is always time for short conversations.

On another note: we successfully survived our first trip out of the state, to the Cherry Abby JV house in Seattle. There is something about leaving your home for a few days, driving in a direction you’ve never been before. We left promptly at 7 on Friday, with the I pod ready, and arrived around 10 and spent a few minutes frantically searching for the house with prayer flags on Cherry St. It was a charming house, in the way that the Portland volunteer houses are, with shelves of books and dusty corners and bedrooms that may have once been linen closets. And how nice it was to hang out with other communities outside of the structure of orientation. To compare notes and what it’s really like to live with people you don’t know and have a job that you’re completely unqualified for.

jumping right into it

They promised me that it doesn't normally go like this. That yes, the recuperative care program does serve people who are sick, injured, addicted, and have no where else to do. That the Henry building, where I work, has 6 over a hundred rooms all housing people in different programs with central city concern, and many of the people have low incomes, mental illnesses, and a handful of complications keeping them from integrating with a large chunk of society. So yes, I'm working in a place where people are at risk all around me. But rarely (they promised) do three people die in one week. But unfortunately that happened to be the case during my first 5 straight days.

Death, I'm realizing, and the way people react to it, is a strange thing. On Friday a man formally in the program and living in the building passed away. A team of EMTs walked through the door and I directed them upstairs, and an hour later watched them bring the covered body out on a stretcher. On Tuesday a man jumped out of his 5th floor window across the street, from another low income housing building. I didn't see it, but I watched as some of the patients wheeled themselves inside. One cried. I gave her a paper towel as she talked in circles, wishing she could have known him, that she could have talked him out of it. Others shook their head. "Depressing morning, huh?" Ethan asked me, as he settled into the folding chair before my desk to use the phone. I nodded. Yes, it was a very depressing morning. I had no idea who this person was, but it was so strange going about the day knowing he wasn't around anymore. That he was so miserable that he couldn't keep up with it, or bear the reality that most of the patients in RCP have to deal with everyday.

Later on in the week a man in the veterans program made his transition. His caseworker found him in his room after unanswered phone calls.

And I keep going about my morning rounds. Handing out juice boxes and granola, and crossing my fingers that everyone is okay before I open the door.

But not all of it is emotional all of the time. There is faxing and running to the drug store to pick up meds and driving a large van to the primary care clinic and the attempt to properly work the handicap door. There is a brick park where I sit and eat lunch in everyday, and a sunburnt man playing the guitar. When I leave at five, there are people to say goodbye to, normally sitting on the sidewalk, smoking cigarettes against the doctor's orders.

The first week...

(And this is my community: Morris House 09-10)

After (almost) a full week of work, I caved and bought my first iced coffee. We only get $80 per month for such expenses, so I need to chose these coffee days carefully. It was after lunch and I could feel the afternoon yawns about to settle in as I looked out at the brick park that I'd sat in for my hour break. The sun was beating down on all of us, myself and two hundred or so other city employees or "unemployees" eating their lunch in solitude in the early afternoon. They read their books, pushed the buttons on their phones, and ate chinese noodles from cardboard containers. A man with a sunburnt face played the guitar on the highest step near Starbucks. I listened, packed my tupperware in my backpack, and headed toward the walkway. It was time--after the first chaotic days of work behind me I decided I'd earned it.

In that small treat the world seemed to open up a bit. Maybe it was the friendliness of the clerk, who smiled at my acceptance of a free dulup of whip cream on my drink, or the fact that the caffine kept me from falling asleep at my afternoon software training session, or the small comfort that keeps building with each day at work. But whatever it was, I enjoyed myself.

The first week at the Recuprative Care Program has had its ups and downs. I work in downtown Portland, which houses a hundred or so clients from Central City Concern (a portland non profit that runs programs focusing on employment, housing, and heathcare for the homeless). There is a small office that I sit in with the 4 other RCP staff members. There are white desks againt the walls, metal filing cabinents, and two-hole punches. There is hand sanitizer, and a basket of granola bars that I must pass out to the clients during my morning rounds. Billy often sits outside, in his wheelchair, sometimes drunk and sometimes sober, yelling his insightful rhymes to anyone who will listen. He is thin, and permently wounded from all of his leg surgeries, and seemingly traumatized from all he has experienced on the street. Patients come in and out of the elevator, smiling and moving on their way. And so far I've spent a lot of time in that small corridor of the office, looking out to those walking in and out of the building, adapting to medical lingo and answering the phone.

Tom, the logisitics coordinator, described the RCP as a place of a lot of darkness and a little bit of light. He, and other staff members, said it would be best not to trust the clients. They steal. They sell their pain meds or take too much of them. And he's right, the cruelness in the streets does not go away in the Henry Building, when the patients have a place to rest and recuperate from their time in the ER. But I guess the only way to get through a job like this is to notice the light, despite how small: a "good morning" from a sober Billy, an occational iced coffee after lunch, and a new client, Dan, morbidly obese, coming in after major surgery, and opening the door to his room, sitting down on his bed. He took a deep breath, and looked out the open window to the food carts across the street. "I think I'll relax now," he said. And we both knew that was something to smile about.

made it...

So I'm here, on NE Morris street in Portland, Oregon sitting in the attic trying my best to hold onto the first dose of Internet connection available since my arrival on the west coast, listening to an album I haven't heard since high school as my housemates come up and down the stairs.

I've been anticipating this moment for a while. Or maybe I've been anticipating a lot of moments since signing onto JVC northwest, as I committed myself to working in a transition home for people who are homeless that have just been released from the emergency room, living with seven other people I haven't met, and relying on a small stipend every month. But after the thought of all of those realities, came the ultimate challenge: the blog. The way I would somehow make all of this psychoticness seem somewhat compelling and interesting to not only people who cared to read about it, but myself. I'm here. Ready to be ruined for life.

This year will unfold differently than this past week was, as 120 brand new Jesuit Volunteers (or "JV's" gathered in the woods 40 or so minutes outside of Portland for orientation. The days passed by like a college orientation might, except in the woods, with sing-a-longs, long discussions about composting, and late night games of yuker (which I never actually learned how to play.) I stayed in a cabin with the girls from communities that I will be on retreat with, volunteering in the Portland and Seattle area. We were excited. We had our journals on hand, and were pleasantly surprised to find out the amount of people we coincidentally knew or knew of from our respective colleges or what not. I guess I was surprised how easily it all came, how quick the bonds were formed and the strange feeling of familiarity that came with complete strangers.

We had speakers several times a day, as you normally do during conventions in the woods, (not that I've been to many before) but I guess what I got out of everyone that came to share their thoughts was a certain fullness I saw in them, a strength that they'd developed throughout their JV year. The hour long discussions of what kind of milk to buy, who forgot to do their dishes, who farted on whose pillow. They had a certain spark in their eye that living in community, working among those who have been marginalized by society, and surviving on an $80 a month stipend had given them. "Every single moment has an opportunity to be holy," Maryland (I am forgetting her last name now) who works at the University of Seattle and served as JV for two years in the city 16 years ago. She paused for a moment. And we, the crowd in our creaky chairs, sat silently. She was right, we all knew this. Religion aside, every moment is special and alive and life changing, as long as you could see it that way, and her JV year was her chance to realize that.

So now I will try to live out her words. In the conflict and in the joy. In the slight awkwardness of orientation, the silly songs, the slices of ham that I accidentally put in my sandwich on the first day rather than turkey. I am now moved into my house. It is big and old and their is dust piling up in the corners. Stacks of books and cassette tapes line the shelves. It feels good to be living in a home that has been occupied by volunteers for the past few decades. My housemates are now mostly asleep. I can see the dark outlines of trees outside the window. I have no idea where I am, or what it will be like, and am slightly reassured by that.

(pictures soon to come)