Taped

I have seen my family the past four days in a row. If you know me at all, you know that this is like, a world record or something. On my mom's side of the family my brother and I are the only people left and on my dad's side, in Oregon it's just he and us, plus the stepmom. Most holidays either my brother or I or both of us have to work so usually there is three, maybe four of us at best, celebrating a given holiday together. Well, needless to say, this Thanksgiving was different.


My dad's mom, my grandma Lou, lost her husband and my dad's stepdad this year at the age of ninety nine. This is her first holiday season without him and so she came out for two weeks for Thanksgiving. As a surprise, my dad's two brothers and their wives came out to from Colorado and California to surprise her. They have all been here, along with one sun-kissed, Justin Beiber-looking sixteen year old cousin from California as well and Los Angeles to be exact. We had Thanksgiving dinner with them at my dad's house and then Friday night all met at Meriweathers (my favorite restaurant, score!) for dinner and then on Saturday night went downtown for dinner and then took my aunt to get a now nationally famous, maple bar with bacon on top at Voodoo Doughnuts (she saw a show on the food network). Yesterday afternoon I met everyone for a big exciting Max and Portland streetcar ride around town so my grandmother could see more of the city and needless to say, she loved it. 


Family, its a funny thing. I've never known much of it and have always a sort of awkward relationship with most of them as I'm sure many people can relate to. Other than my parents and grandparents, three out of the four of them who are now deceased, the rest of my relatives I see every five to ten years and don't really know at all. They don't seem to understand or want to believe that I am gay and there is always awkward conversations about why I don't have a boyfriend. Politically and religiously we are on far extreme ends of the spectrum so any current events and politics are usually also not good topics to cover. One of the things I have always wanted most in the world is to create a family of my own. To have a spouse and children with them and to, although my upbringing was pretty darn good, create what I had and then some, giving my children every ounce of love I can squeeze out of me and helping create people who grow up to help make the world a better place. Perhaps much of the depression I'm facing at thirty has to do with the fact that I worry that I'm getting older and there isn't even a glimmer of hope at this point that I will ever have those things. In any event,  something happened yesterday that reminded me to be thankful for this odd bunch of family that I do have even if it's not the family tree I would have imagined myself to be clinging to at thirty. 


After a few hours riding around town the sun had gone down and it was starting to rain and we were on our last leg of our big exciting public transportation tour of Portland, headed back to Lloyd center to get in our cars and go our separate ways, and a man got on the Max and sat down near my family. My dad was seated next to me and my grandma and stepmom next to him and across from him my aunt and uncle. He was probably in his late fifties, early sixties and was I think, homeless. I could see he was thin and dressed in many layers but only when he sat down was I able to see the boniness of his knees jut out through his jeans and his thighs seem to be non-existent, burring themselves in the small scoop of the seat. He had grey hair and was balding in the back, his long hair slicked back away from his face. His checks were sunken in and he had deep wrinkles in his face and rough skin on his hands. His nails were trimmed short but there was dirt under them. I was glad at least to see he had a newer, comfortable and warm looking pair of shoes on and a giant down jacket. The most interesting thing about this man, at least from outside appearances, is what he carried, a suitcase. Most homeless people you see around Portland have sleeping bags or blankets or garbage bags or backpacks or rolling suitcases but this many had something that almost looked like a stage prop. It was smallish, about a foot and a half by two feet and boxy, completely square in shape. Each half, the upper and the lower were exactly equal in depth and it had a hard plastic handle on the top. It was a dirty, dingy brown in color and dented, the sides curved gently in. All of the corners and edges were covered with layers and layers of frayed duck tape indicating that this suitcase has probably been around as long as it's owner has and that he had taken great care to patch up it's sores and cracks quite diligently over time. In any event, the suitcase looked like something I've seen a hobo carry in a movie or a clown would pull flowers out of at the circus; I'd never seen a homeless person with a suitcase like this until yesterday. I don't know what this man's story has been, what unexpected heartbreaks and decisions brought him to be homeless and riding the train with my family yesterday, but his suitcase indicated to me that they had been on the streets together for many years, he and this small square bag. 

The part of this experience that really stuck with me, and the part that I really wanted to tell about this man, was how he looked at my family. Seated next to him was my blind uncle who wears glasses as thick as two coke bottles and squints incessantly and my overweight, disabled aunt who spent three months in the hospital this year after a bad car accident and now walks with a cane. This is at least how I'm sure they are often described, how the outside world sees them but they, just like all of us, are much more than they would seem to be from outside appearances and hold beautiful things inside of them. They are an odd couple indeed, both living outside the standard societal norms of what good people, valuable, worthwhile people look like. But they love each other dearly and have for over thirty years and I'm sure see and appreciate in each other all of the things the rest of the world may and probably does find flawed about them. As they sat on the train and rocked back and forth with each stopping of the car, they held hands and at one point my aunt rested her head on my uncle's shoulder and you could see her whole body exhale in the comfort of him. I watched the man with the suitcase sneak glances at them. I wonder if he had love like that in his past that he was recalling. I wonder if he was thinking that looked nice and he wished he had the same or if he was thinking about a woman he used to know in such a way. Mostly though, more than looking at them, he looked across the aisle at my dad. I'm not sure if my dad noticed, I think not, but I did. He watched my dad, who ran most of the conversation during the train ride, quite a lot. He and my dad are probably similar in age, both gray in the same places. My dad however, has less wrinkles because he's been well fed over the years and his cheeks and the corners of his eyes are plump. My dad was sporting some sort of fancy gortex winter coat from REI that probably set him back a few hundred and equally expensive clothes and shoes. He had around him a cadre of family that looked at him and listened to and responded to him. His mother and wife on one side, his child on the other, and his brother across from him. And although when I look around at these people I know the issues and struggles we all sometimes have in relating to one another and trying to figure out what being a family really means and should look like and find myself wondering what the hell any of us have in common besides blood anyways... I suppose to many people looking down onto this scene of six seemingly happy people, my dad would look like a king on a throne. I wondered, as the man with the suitcase watched my dad and studied his outfit and how he spoke and how we responded to him, if this envy or admiration for my dad's obvious wealth in life, not only materially, but more familialy (if that's a word), is what he felt. He seemed to have a curious, longing sort of look on his face. Not one of anger of of jealousy even necessarily, but one of wonder and almost... one of awe. 


This fall has brought quite a bit of heartbreak and disappointment to my life and I have felt at times like I am floating around the world in a bubble. Like the world and it's people, like color and sound and vibrancy are out there... and I am in here, wherever that is, invisible. I feel onside of myself, alone, quiet, watching and listening, but not participating. Like I'm waiting for the right moment to rejoin the world somehow if I can only figure out how to manage this. I go to church some weeks and I sit in the back and look at all the people around me and as the minister speaks my mind floats off into other places and I watch the congregants around me focusing intently on the music or the sermon and I wonder if they feel connected to the earth and each other in that moment, if they feel grounded in community, in love... or if they feel sort of like they have ear muffs and swimming goggles on and walls of plexi-glass around them separating their muffled and lonely reality from the rest of the world like I do. As I watched the man with the suitcase the other day study my dad and my family, I wondered if he felt the same way in that moment because I'm pretty sure I saw in his eyes, the reflection of myself. I saw those feelings of separateness and of longing for something more, for a deeper more meaningful human connection, for a yearning to be visible, to be seen... for what I think so many of us sometimes in moments of struggle believe everyone else but us has.


I wonder metaphorically speaking, we are all a little bit like this homeless man with a suitcase at many moments in our lives. On the outskirts of the world in our head and in our hearts. If we have so much going on internally that we find it hard to take off our swimming goggles and earmuffs and break through the choked bubble we live in to join the rest of the world and really live. For the man with the suitcase, I would assume many of his struggles are physical in nature; finding a warm place to sleep at night and a hot meal, on top of all the more mental struggles that people like myself face. I am blessed more than most people in the world simply to have a roof over my head, and yes, even a family of sorts and heck, I have a job and food in my cupboards and there are ten percent or more Oregonians who can't even say that right now. And while I have these things, I still have longings and dreams and desires for my life and have often as of late like I am watching the rest of the world live from the sidelines while I sit here in my quiet, invisible bubble racking my brain to figure out how in the hell I'm going to just survive until the next day, let alone thrive. 


To use an oft quoted saying, nobody ever said life was a walk in the park. And isn't that the damned truth. Some days, weeks, years, probably even decades for some of us, it can feel like one God forsaken struggle after the next. Why some of us are blessed with a family to go on Sunday streetcar rides with and some of us are not, I will probably never know. In my own assertion, there isn't explanation for a lot of the things that happen to us although we are absolutely the captains of our own ships and to much extent, are able to steer the course of our own lives. The trick to life is not what happens, but how we respond. This is the part we can control. I suspect most of us are just here trying trying to tape together the cracks and fissures that appear from time to time in our lives in an effort to hold ourselves together, just as the man on the train has appeared to have done so dutifully with his suitcase. By the end of our days most of us will have so many layers of tape holding us together that the person we once were or people we have been throughout or days is barely visible, each new layer of tape a fresh start, a new attempt at piecing back together our lives and closing up a wound after life throws us a curveball. We will likely be dented and bruised and battered looking... but we will have stories and memories and a lifetime of some extent in our hands. I wonder the stories and the memories that the man on the train's suitcase could tell, I wonder what memories are underneath each layer of his tape. May we all go forward with gratitude, recognizing all of the many blessings that we do have, the things that we have folded nicely and put in our life's suitcase and stop focusing as much on the things we feel like are missing, the things we used to carry along with us and miss dearly or the things we have always longed for, but haven't as of yet had. May we see in ourselves and in other people, beauty in all those neatly folded and rumpled things inside of ourselves, in all of our the many frayed layers of our existence and in the dents and bruises underneath it all and be thankful for them having made us who we are. May we try to be conscious and aware of those who eye the beauty of our lives from the sidelines and appreciate them for pointing out the blessings we may have been previously unable or unwilling to see ourselves and may we go forth with thanks, always trying to share with others in our abundance. 


Namaste.