voices

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Here's the way my life progressed:

2002 - Finished undergrad.
2003 - Moved to Kentucky.
2005 - Finished grad school, moved home.
2006 - Lived in north Minneapolis.
2007 - Moved to Mozambique.

I got an email today that made me remember everything stuffed inside that cursory line: "Lived in north Minneapolis". The problem with looking at a life's bare facts is we miss all the accompanying sweat, grime, and emotions holding it up. My little timeline there, for example, obscures that I spent that entire year getting over a broken heart, listening to this song on repeat for hours, and this song, and especially this one, the most aching tribute to love-lost in the history of music. (Or, as an old friend said while getting divorced: "that line: 'what a beautiful piece of heartache/this has all turned out to be'... what else could they possibly have to say past that line? what is left? could they try to say it better? NO! that stark first line has haunted me forEVER.")

Living is so ridiculously difficult sometimes I can hardly believe we're supposed to do it.

I lived in inner-city Minneapolis in 2006 as part of a beautifully idealistic group called Urban Homeworks. Five of us lived in the top half of a low-income housing unit in the core of north Minneapolis. I deeply loved my bedroom, which was small and full of light, with bookshelves built into the wall directly above my mattress, a room that overlooked our Hmong neighbors' small vegetable plot, a room full of quiet and healing. I spent a lot of time in there during the raw Minnesota winter, wrapped in a tatty teal bathrobe and afghans, my space heater whirling, not doing much of anything, just hurting and being.

I did a lot of writing. The loss of someone to share my life with brought out my muse, much like being here has. I had four roommates and we were each experiencing a lot living where we did. Right before I moved in someone was murdered on our front lawn late at night; Mikhal called the ambulance as the dying man shouted for help. Michelle was mugged and pistol-whipped on her way home from the bus stop a few weeks later. The neighborhood was impoverished, sprawling, and disintegrating. It was full of brown and black folks; plus some highly-educated gay white men looking to establish their own little space in peace, some invisible white pensioners too penniless or tired to move, and us, born-and-bred white surburbanites, curious, full of convictions it seemed important to test.

I didn't discover the hidden beauty of the inner city. There's nothing redemptive about urban poverty and cycles of oppression or addiction. We'd watch middle-class folks driving in to buy drugs, then getting out as quick as they could. I'd sometimes be mistaken as a potential customer. The community dynamics were complicated and tricky for me to understand.  

So it was a hard year. But - yes, cliche - I loved so much about it. I think we all did. There are snatches of beauty to be found everywhere, especially in friendships. I absolutely could not have healed my broken heart any other place than in that ugly corner of inner-city Minneapolis. You never can tell about things.

The email I received today invited alumni to a fundraising function they are holding in a few weeks. Getting people to care about the scary American inner-city, especially the lack of low-income housing therein, is a hard sell. But like so much of life, if people'd just listen to Over the Rhine, they'd get it!

From March 10, 2006:

Today I came home in the middle of the day, unexpectedly, at a time I'm not ever usually home. None of my roommates were home either: Michelle, taking a break from grad school, was showing off her barista skills at the unlikely coffee house/liquor store a few blocks away; Mikhal was employing her business-savvy for a nonprofit downtown; Ann, wearing one of her 36 colorful turtlenecks, was teaching immigrant kids how to read at Hopkins High School; and Julia, ah Julia, one of those joyful, perpetually irresponsible people for whom it always works out, was gone to Colorado because she decided that, well, this week she'd rather be in Colorado.

So I came home to an empty house, at least our half of it, and happened to trudge up the musty, creaking stairs at the same time the garbage truck screeched to a stop in the alley out back, its gears grinding and rubbish clanking noisily. In other words, my arrival went unnoticed by anybody that might be in the bottom half of the house, where our neighbors live.

Tim is the undisputed head of the household downstairs. He is a large, early 30s-ish Native American guy, trying to hold it together with a lot of kids: Aaron (7), Justin (8), Sasha (9), and Clayton, sweet quiet Clayton, who is also trying to hold it together as the oldest child, only 12, whom I'm sure has seen far too much for his age. Then there is Rose, Tim's wife, who is missing several teeth in front, a tiny wisp of a woman. Even when she's present you don't really notice. She'd only just returned home after months in rehab when she gave birth to their fifth child, Sianna. Tim celebrated, in good faith, by buying Rose a pack of wine coolers, which he honestly did not see as a problem.

When I stepped into their crowded three-bedroom apartment right after the baby came home, I asked Rose what her name was and she answered softly: "Sianna." And then, after a pause, she added: "How do you spell that? We didn't know what to put on the birth certificate at the hospital because we don't know how that is spelled." And I bumbled at first, embarrassed and caught off-guard, then finally replied: "You can spell it however you like. But it sounds to me like SIANNA."

"Thanks," she mumbled, and headed out for a smoke in our entryway.

Tim is a good guy at heart, I believe; he's got a lot on his plate. He smokes weed  late into the night, and the odor wafts into my bedroom as I lay in bed and read. (Enhancing even the worst books.) He subsists on Red Bull. He's trying to make it on one income – shoveling snow, and it's been a dry winter – with 5 kids. One day as I bounded out to my car, in a rush to get where I was going, I bumped into him, sitting on the stoop chain-smoking; he looked like a wreck. "Everything okay?," I called out glibly over my shoulder, hoping he wouldn't answer. Instead, he burst into an uncharacteristic 10-minute, 100-mile an hour monologue about his own alcohol recovery (which sounds like a work in progress) and a multitude of other concerns (including Rose's aunt recently found dead in her house up north). Tim has a terrifically ugly temper: knowing some of this information about his life helps me when I overhear him shouting at the children to get their fucking stupid selves out of the room.

So, today I slipped into our empty house unnoticed. And I was standing stationary in the kitchen eating cold pizza and daydreaming when my ears caught hold of something strange coming from downstairs. It was someone sort of singing, but it sounded odd, maybe like chanting. And I can't help it, my initial reaction was: My God, someone is in a trance and channeling evil spirits.

But that was a stupid first assumption. After a few more moments eavesdropping, I realized it sounded strange because it was coming from Tim: Tim who must have been alone in his apartment; Tim who must have assumed he was alone in the house; rough enormous Tim who sounds like he is hacking up a lung when he tries to clear the cigarette crap out of his system so he can breathe; raging sometimes-alcoholic Tim, crooning an off-key, made-up love song:

"Si-aaaannnnnaaaaa, Siannaaaaaaa, SiannaSiannaSianna, I love youuuu Sianna, Siaaaaaaana..." [and then in that funny baby voice people use] "How's my big girl doing today? Si-annnnnnaaaa..." [more indistinct singing]

I was stunned, really. I'd never heard him even mention the baby up to this point. Also, the kid was tiny, though not premature, like holding a subway sandwich with all the fixings, and she never, ever, ever cried. I'd NEVER heard her cry. I was beginning to think she didn't live there anymore; or worse, that she didn't live anymore. But the family just kept to itself is all; and here now was Tim, as my mom would say, "filling up Sianna's love tank", loving on his newest little girl in the shameless, slobbery way people show their love when no one is watching.

Then I made the mistake of shifting my feet and our kitchen floor squeaked. And just like that, as if a switch had been flipped, the singing stopped. I froze mid-stride, hoping I really hadn't broken the magical spell, but after that no sound at all floated up from downstairs.

Ahh... but now I know, Tim!, I winked at him from inside of my head. You can't ever fool me again.

Then I sat down, in an inviting patch of sunlight on my bedroom floor, to the soundtrack of a ticking clock and tin windchimes outside my window, to think about it and write about it.

You know, I really believe one of the main things we're supposed to do in life is share with each other what we've created. I don't know why that is; it seems miraculous, profound. 

Anyways - that's why I put this here.