Elevator Speech: Who ARE You?

In a moment of unguarded honesty, he hears her silent question: "Who are you?"  The camera catches him averting his eyes, and then looking back into hers.  The director has let us know the mute truth that he struggles with the subject of her question - his identity.  When we arrived here in our new home town almost a year ago, this was the question in everyone's eyes.  Neighbors walking by the Akey house see that it has finally sold, and there is a not-quite-as-old couple working on it.  Hi!  You must be the new owners.  Decoded: "Who are you?"

I sit with Ingmar at a table outside the coffeehouse, in the spring sun.  He's agreed to meet me, to fill me in on the work that he does with the special needs program that he runs.  He sees that I am struggling with the "unemployed" aspect of retirement, the non-paycheck, the non-engagement.  His blue eyes, that were just looking at me a moment ago, now look at me, and there are no words.  Decoded: "Who are you?"

Kathy and I sit across from each other at our little table at the window, the one with the view of the back yard, the one where we share every meal when it's just the two of us, which is most of the time now.  She's having a difficult time with my accepting the possibility of dying, as we adjust to the likelihood of heart surgery, the possibility of sudden rupture of my just discovered aortic aneurism.  She looks at my placid face, hers wearing heavily the very idea of life without us.  Decoded: "Who are you?"

I'm the new guy at Goodwill Inn, the one with the clip-on tag that says "Volunteer", sitting down at the Goals Group table, responsible for making some good use of their next hour.  I reach across and offer my hand to each of them, these homeless strangers who are new to me, in this new town whose problems I don’t yet nearly understand.  “I’m John,” I say, and some of them tell me their names, but names don’t tell the story, do they.  One by one their hands let go, but not their eyes.  Decoded: "Who are you?"

Kathy spent years as a Career Counselor preparing students for their job interviews.  She helped them develop their “elevator speech”, a statement about themselves, their talents and hopes, concise enough to express even on a short elevator ride. Sister Jackie Laster, a newly-minted Mercy Sister and seasoned grandma used to look at me when I was struggling on life’s elevator, asked for a response so concise that it did not leave room for escape.  “Stand in your truth,” she’d say, and I’d wonder how much of the wisdom of that statement came from her Grandmaternity and how much from her Sister-ness.  “Your truth,” she said.  Decoded: "Who are you?"


I look into the mirror as I brush my teeth, and I see a face looking back at me.  It was a day of making sawdust, with a few breadboards almost ready to be added to the stack, the maybe-ness of my new life.  Simultaneously we ask each other, "Who are you?"  

Who are you? 

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.