I was walking from my office Friday, coming out of the building just behind a woman, and as I approached the street, I stopped the way I always do. There were cars coming and even though there’s a great trauma one center a block over–one I was heading to it in fact–I don’t want to become a patient! So, I waited to judge my chances.

I heard the woman say, “Thank you,” and I didn’t know she was talking to me exactly. I did see in my peripheral vision that she was at the curb. She pulled back.

As I walked across the street, I saw her edge into the traffic and raise her hand. I always look around me, always need to know who’s behind me, even if I’m in Streeterville because I was raised on the south side.

The woman was then looking for a taxi, and she had thought I was calling one for her. She had thanked me based upon the assumption that I was going to hail a cab. It hadn’t occurred to me to call a cab. It was the last thing on my mind. I was going to see my patients.

I walked through the alleyway smelling Do-Rite donuts and asking myself how many assumptions I had made about people that morning. It wasn’t many because the day was still young, but I wanted that lady’s assumption to become an education for me. I chuckled as I shook my head to convince myself of my perception of the moment. I debated how right I was and eventually decided that it didn’t matter if I was correct about her assumptions of me, as I reminded myself that it never mattered.

I didn’t want to pivot toward those older assumptions of white women, the ones who locked their doors when I approached their cars even though I was only walking down the street, or the ones I avoided by crossing the street because I wasn’t ready to face their thoughts of me through their physical reactions to my presence.

I didn’t want to find something wrong even if the woman coming from my office thought I was the valet since there were valets at the building, black guys, even if they didn’t wear NM chaplain jackets or carry books with ribbons protruding from them that couldn’t be understood as sacred materials. I wanted to study my soul and interrogate my experience and question what I was assuming.

I wanted that moment to be an education. I wanted that woman, who I hope found her taxi and her destination, to be my teacher for the morning. After all, I was in a residency to learn and to form my (pastoral) identity in my beautiful brown skin and this was as much a part of the lesson as the patients I’d visit.

I’m writing this more for me than for the folks who visit these posts.  I’m not able to maintain the blogging habit these days, clear from the length between the last post and this acknowledgment.  It’s a small failure to state it so clearly, but the lingering of my blogs hurts just as much.  Perhaps I’ll return after my clinical pastoral education or after the dryness under my words has been refreshed.

 

I’m writing this more for me than for the folks who visit these posts.  I’m not able to maintain the blogging habit these days, clear from the length between the last post and this acknowledgment.  It’s a small failure to state it so clearly, but the lingering of my blogs hurts just as much.  Perhaps I’ll return after my clinical pastoral education or after the dryness under my words has been refreshed.

Last week I sat next to a man for one hour who looked so much like you I couldn’t turn to face him.  At first, I thought of Uncle Clarence but got convinced that it was you the guest speaker looked like.  I resisted the connection.  But I couldn’t avoid his glasses, his facial hair, the shape of his head, and the tone he took.  You could have been twins.  I almost cried when I asked him a question, as he answered me, because looking in his eyes made me think that you were in the room.  As long as I didn’t blink, you were there, one long breath away, sitting next to me, talking, explaining.  You weren’t gone.  You weren’t dead.  You were there, close enough for me to touch.

Speaking with you is good for me, and despite the time between our talks, I always walk away better.  Not necessarily without some soul work to do, some new focus, some clear direction.  But these things are very good for me.  When we talk, I feel like your life is an open box full of gifts to me, and I never take that for granted.  The word brilliance comes to mind when I consider how kind and sparkling and generous you are with your time and your wisdom and your words.  You say more than I deserve to hear, sometimes, I think, more than I can live.  There is weight to your offerings to me in our conversations.  I’m grateful for the life underneath those words and for how open-handed you are as a spiritual friend, director, and guide.

I hope this week holds a better end than last one for us, son.  You gave me and your mother a fit and a problem.  And I’m not interested in redoing what we did.  There are many things about you that are, simply, unforgettable.  You added to that list on Thursday and on Saturday.  For now, I’ll preserve the details.  You can ask me about the ingredients of this post some day, and I promise I’ll recall them.  You made us scratch our heads, collect ourselves in a bathroom conference while you sat and waited and no doubt thought we were going crazy.  But we were walking away from crazy.  And we expect that you, too, will walk away from it.  Let’s try this week.  Let’s all be better.  You, mommy, and me.  The alternative to being better doesn’t look good for you, so take the suggestion as firm.

Tonight I wish your mother was home to hear the sweet sound of your falling asleep, the sound of silence trading a days-long cough and a fit of sneezes.  But she was not home.  She was away, in class, accomplishing her latest midterm, doing the grueling part of something she loved.  But I will surely tell her how you fought off the cough monsters in your chest, how you prevailed against the sneezing that held you just this afternoon, and she will go in for herself to kiss your face, to check you visibly, to listen to you breathing.

Perhaps you are not to blame for my second cold in a month, the long slip into what was foreign to me before your arrival three years ago, where I started getting sick with what feels like every symptom imaginable, but I did follow you in these courses, my body falling into an otherwise unfamiliar congestion and stuffiness and tiredness right after you, like sea gulls moving one after another.  I won’t accuse you.  Instead, I’ll find fault in my unprepared immunity, in my lack of rest, in the current stressors surrounding me like raindrops.