Everyday Things

The week after the Presidential election of 2016 I heard an interview with Irish poet Michael Longley. The broadcast was billed as a celebration of ordinary things, because Longley’s poems assert a liveliness to everyday things (in the face of the broken and the difficult).

One of the poems he read was called, “The Ice Cream Man.” It was dedicated to a young man who was killed walking home from his minimum wage job. The poet’s young daughter, devastated by the news, bought flowers to lay in memoriam.

Longley says of the poem in which he names all the wildflowers seen in one day: thyme, valerian, loosestrife… “that the list is supposed to go on forever, like a kind of prayer; an agnostic’s prayer.”

I teared up listening because I thought it was such a beautiful image for a prayer of memorial.

But by the time I got home I forgot to tell my wife how moved I was.

Instead, I remembered to tell her about the lunch I had on Staten Island where a waitress started talking about politics as she cleared the table. I thought it was bizarre that young waitress with a neck tattoo, making minimum wage, would strike up a conversation with two men wearing ties about a divisive election to be held the next day and offer her opinion, “I’m worried we will elect the wrong person…”

And instead of just smiling, the other guy in a tie asked, “who the wrong person was.”

Which gave the woman an opportunity to say what I knew she was going to say, Hillary Clinton; and an opportunity for the guy to urge her to get better information…which I knew she wasn’t going to do anymore than he was.

— — —
The waitress was still on my mind when I was coming home on the subway late Wednesday night. Then a homeless woman started to move from the platform to the train. I was tired and had been leaning in the doorway. I stepped back. She slowly started to move, so slowly I hoped the doors would close; they did, but not before the woman got on. A cart with a broken wheel she was pulling got stuck in the door. Two men helped her get it on the train. The result was exactly like I thought; she smelled. The cart took up too much room. I looked down at her feet: broken shoes, swollen ankles, sure signs of chronic homelessness. I moved down the train car to the next door.

— — —
When my sister lived in Boulder, Colorado she had a morning ritual. She packed an extra piece of fruit in her lunch and gave it to the homeless pan handler on the corner every morning.

When she moved to Chicago and started taking the El to work there were too many people in need to give fruit to. She didn’t know what to do…I told her she could read poetry and think of dedicating a poem as a prayer to each person in need.

She liked that.

Then one day she called me crying. A whole train of passengers had moved from one side of the train to another when a homeless woman got on.

“She smelled really bad…but the way other people talked about her, like she wasn’t a person, it made me so mad and so sad.”

— — —
When I got off at my stop on the train I saw one of the guys who had helped the woman get on the train had bent down and was trying to fix the broken wheel on her cart. On top of the cart were bunches of withered flowers. Then I remembered the poem about the Ice Cream Man and the flowers…and the story about my sister giving fruit…I thought about the election and the waitress with a neck tattoo.

I was ashamed.

— — —
It may be artistic perspective to write a poem about a man who dies and imagine flowers as a prayer. It may be spiritual perspective that shares goodwill in the form of food; and political perspective that shapes who we vote for; but what makes us move away from those in need?

What makes us hope the doors close so they aren’t going to the same place as we are at the same time?

Surely that’s not perspective but something less than beautiful, less than spiritual; but something more than political.

Which means that we can learn to help those in need. We can grow into goodwill. We can grow past politics. We can hold doors, mend broken wheels, say the names of flowers like prayers and share them like poems.

The poet who wrote about the minimum wage worker who his daughter got ice cream from said that daily things lead to transcendence.

May they also lead to transformation and beloved community.