Aileen’s Blog

So I had this lovely Saturday night.  It was emotional not in an overt way, but in that back of your mind way– like I talked and laughed and drank coffee and ate more than is advisable, and only sensed about midway through the evening that I was feeling good, yes, but also strangely stirred up.

Or actually no, I got my first inkling that my mind was occupied with things it wasn’t telling me about when I was asked, in the most friendly and jovial of ways, "What have you been up to?"… or maybe what am I up to these days– it was just one of those questions you ask someone you haven’t seen in eight years.  But I was totally unable to answer.  I think I actually didn’t say anything.  There were three of us just arriving & sitting down so it wasn’t awkward, conversation went on, I was talking again in a moment, about other things… but I did wonder what the heck just happened there.

I got a more specific clue to where the non-chatting parts of my brain were as I found that I felt inexplicably reluctant to talk about work.  My work, that is, not theirs– I loved hearing all about them, their lives and interests, I was really having fun & enjoying them– and in fact I did enjoy talking about my work when I eventually did, it always makes me feel good to talk about my life and the things I’m involved in, because I sincerely am loving it all– but I hadn’t said much about my work before I felt a low burn deep inside, and as I smiled and talked about the organization I work for, the children I work with, I felt my heart beating in my chest.

So I was feeling emotional about work, and now I know why.  That very afternoon, on the way to meeting my friends, I’d had one of those encounters that should sound pretty familiar to any woman who walks alone a lot:

"Hello, ma’am!"

I look away from the cute mother and toddling daughter walking ahead of me, at two boys sitting on a stoop who can’t be older than 13.  I smile and nod as I walk by, "Hello."

"Hey wait girl!  What’s your name?"

I’m already past them, and hear the boy who hasn’t been talking go "Aww!" like his friend just got dissed.  "I’m too young?" the boy calls out to my back, his voice so bittersweetly adolescent: childlike but teetering on the brink of low.

"I’LL TAKE YOU IN THE BUTT!"

"Yeah!" his friend goads him on.  "Hit it in the butt!  Hit it in the butt, hit it in the cut…"

I’ve already gone back to watching the little toddler ahead of me, one chubby arm raised to hold her mother’s hand, the other pointing, questioning, curious.  Fearless.  Perhaps eight or nine years, I think, before she regularly hears such offers as she moves through the streets and school hallways and workplaces of her life.

I walk slowly and think about the boys watching me walk away, yelling and cursing, laughing like kids.  And I think about the kids I work with, I think about sitting up all night in the teens’ cottage, listening to their bittersweetly adolescent voices snore and cry out in their sleep, reading their files.  The snapshots of their short lives.  Police reports, court dates, thefts, beatings, sexual assaults.  Threatening foster mother with knife.  Assault on younger sibling.  Refused to speak with assessor, caseworker reports client has been oppositional and not spoken since his removal from last foster family.

So yeah, I met these two that night, friends from my own bittersweet adolescence, with these things all stirred up in my head. And hanging out with these two I just felt so sharply how beautiful our lives are, how content and successful we’ve turned out.  I mean not successful like we’re rolling in cash, but successful like we’re all well-adjusted and feel effective in our lives, we all respect ourselves and our abilities.  I knew these folks because we were all in the same AP classes at our high school, we were all tracked together for college, for high self-esteem, poised to reach towards and work for our own personal versions of success.

Is it totally ridiculous to say that our world, my childhood, my *life* is so completely different from what my kids at work have experienced, are experiencing now– from what their prospects are, from what the statistics say will likely become of them?  Well, the knowing of it may be common sense, self-evident… but the *feeling* of its real-ness, of what it means about their lives and about mine… I felt like I was holding an inappropriate intensity back from my voice and eyes as I talked– and didn’t talk– about work.

http://kpfa.org/  "KPFA - Free Speech Radio"

http://www.kngy.com/  "Energy 92.7 - the beat of the Bay"

And if anyone would like to tell me whether or not anyone besides me (and perhaps only on my own computer?) can hear the radio station at

http://music.yahoo.com/launchcast/station.asp?u=1748176285

that’d make me smile.  I’m thinking maybe other people have to be signed into Yahoo to hear it?

"… I was on BART and this guy came on asking for spare change.  He got on right behind me and was standing like there, y’know, "Excuse me, people, I haven’t eaten all day," and no one was really looking at him.  Y’know what I mean, everyone was just not looking at him.  And he started crying.  He just stood up there and cried.  And everyone just kept like staring straight ahead."

 
There’s a pause.  I imagine neither girl knows quite what to say next.  I look up into the window for them, at their reflections across the train from me.  "I mean it’s sad, but" she begins again in a lower, less bright tone.  But I’ve stopped listening.  I’m on my way home after working a Friday overnight shift, in the cottage of middle-school aged kids.  And I need to close my eyes.

Around 3am that morning, a boy who’s been oppositional and defiant with me at the non-public school affiliated with the home came shuffling out of his bedroom half-awake, to ask if I could tuck him in.  I tucked him in, and he asked if I could sit in the chair set up closer to the boys’ side of the house.  I moved there with the file I was reading, and turned the pages softly and regularly, and in about 20 min. he was able to fall back asleep.  "Nighttime can be hard for children who’ve experienced abuse," they told us in new-hire training.  This kid has been on both the receiving end of violence from adults, as well as sadly the perpetrating end, acting out his own trauma upon younger children.  I listened to him fall asleep, sighing and quieting, snoring like a child (- his roommate already snores like a teenager- ), interrupted, like the sleep of many of these children, by occasional whimpers and unintelligible protests, or tears that the child won’t remember in the morning.  I actually had to leave the boys’ hall because a girl called me to their side of the cottage asking, "Is the fire alarm gonna go off?"  She was homeless for a while, and this contributes to her many nighttime fears and desire to stay awake.  Her file also indicates prenatal drug exposure and developmental delay, so her chronological age belies her actual understanding and emotional, psychological maturity.  She was the first student to speak to me on my first day at Edgewood, and within moments she was screaming at me and having to be escorted from the classroom to a seclusion room, because she asked for a pencil and I had to look around and find one because I didn’t know where anything was.  I sat in her doorway, turned away from her room– but enough towards her that I could see if anyone in the room moved from their beds .  Because well, you just never know.

It was too dark in the girls’ hall to read, so I could only sit there for so long before I had to move back to the bright landing between the two sides of the house, so as not to fall asleep.  I don’t know if she ever fell asleep again that night; if she did, it was so restless that she still sounded awake in her bed.  All I could do was note it in the cottage’s log, and wonder if her meds were keeping her up, or her thoughts.

Now we’re going into the transbay tube, the train angling downward, the sound of the rails changing slightly, everyone’s ears popping as we all don’t look at each other.  I think about the man standing in the aisle on one of these trains, weeping out loud while his ears pop, surrounded by people pretending he wasn’t there, a fluorescent-lit scene rushing through the stale, electrified air of the underwater tube.  And pressing against the tunnel, the San Francisco Bay.  Fish I guess, plants, lost watches and sandals, dropped eye glasses and ferry tickets.  Run-off from the storm drains.  Sewage from the north and east.

I wonder if he has any children.  I wonder if I, or someone like me, works in their group home, will be tucking them in tonight, and helping them pack tomorrow to move to a new foster family.  If they will suddenly disappear from the home, no explanation for the children who’d been living with them, nor for the staff who’d listened to them sleep, to be "rehabilitated" by the California Youth Authority.  I had a close friend who I knew for years, who was homeless, who I could never get a straight answer out of as to whether he was a father or not.  He used to be a big name in the  Longshoremen, as well as in the local Black Panthers.  We met when I was eighteen and he a tall, confident, personable widower (back then he said he had no kids) trying to live off of SSI and spare change, sleeping outside to avoid the men’s shelters.  He asked me for a piece of bread when I was walking by with a bag from the bakery, on my way to drop it off at my dorm before going to (or probably skipping) class.  I stopped and ate a piece with him, because he seemed very friendly and sane and I passed by his spare-change spot every day anyhow.  And we just became great friends.  He knew me as a fresh-off-the-plane Berkeley transplant, he knew me when I was a queer anarchy riot in boots, he knew me when I was pregnant and freaking out, he knew me as sad, he knew me as a new mother, he knew me as the mother of a child who’d been given a lifelong diagnosis.  He knew me as strong.  And I knew him as strong.  He was a chatty and outgoing man who knew how to care about people, but found himself without many people left around to care for, or to care for him.  I knew him as a sick man I would bring banana milkshakes to in the hospital as his diabetes spiraled beyond his control, I knew him as a stooped man frustrated that he had to use a cane, I knew him as a white-haired, sunken-eyed amputee in a wheelchair, hiding cigarettes when he saw me coming because he didn’t want me to know he’d gone back to smoking.  I knew him for seven years; for five of those he never asked me for money.  He just wanted us to eat together, and talk, or walk the street together a while before I went home and he went wherever he was going that night.

I don’t know where he is now.  He just stopped being out on Telegraph Ave.  I knew his brother for a little while, and he had a few different stories for where he might have gone, one of them being to jail for drugs.  And now I don’t see him around either.  But if we never see each other again, I know we were good friends for each other.  I once heard him talk about his daughter.  But it was towards the end of us knowing each other, when he was sometimes confused.  I asked him about it.  He said he didn’t know what I was talking about.  And maybe he really didn’t.