Today is the National Day of Listening. Black Friday? Today is the National Day of Listening! Check this link on The Books For Walls Project or go right to the Story Corps website for more. Instead of going to the mall, project leaders suggest, listen to someone’s story. Yesterday Kathy and I were driving from our home in northern Michigan to our daughter’s home in Cleveland to celebrate Thanksgiving. NPR carried a story about this project, asking listeners who we might want to interview, living or dead, among our relatives or friends. Not famous people, mind you, but normal folks. Kathy and I both thought of her mother, who died when she was 12, long before I met her. We mused about other family members – grandparents who died or disappeared before we were born, whose English was so spotty that we were permanently cut off from them.
But a story in this morning’s Detroit Free Press brings me back to our conversation. While Kathy was thinking about grandparents, I was thinking about people like B. K. Gaskins. He’s the guy in the picture above. I’d ask him to tell me his story. What was life like at its brightest? What went wrong? How does he survive?
I find this photo like one of those gold-limned icons
that invite us into mystery, that stop us and stop time and give us a glimpse, as brief as a face in the window of a passing train, a glimpse of Life or God or Mystery or Beyond. I look at the benignity on his face, the frayed edges of his sleeves. I imagine the smell of heavy old clothes like the ones that hang in my workshop, or in my garage – the ones I rarely wash, because I’m always doing dirty work in them anyway. I feel the cold handlebars on my own bare hands, my soft, white hands.
that invite us into mystery, that stop us and stop time and give us a glimpse, as brief as a face in the window of a passing train, a glimpse of Life or God or Mystery or Beyond. I look at the benignity on his face, the frayed edges of his sleeves. I imagine the smell of heavy old clothes like the ones that hang in my workshop, or in my garage – the ones I rarely wash, because I’m always doing dirty work in them anyway. I feel the cold handlebars on my own bare hands, my soft, white hands.
What would you ask B. K. Gaskins if you were sitting with him at his worn, rickety table somewhere not far from Woodward Avenue, wide and empty, if you were eating your Thanksgiving dinner out of the same kind of white Styrofoam carryout that he was eating from thirty inches away from you?
And if he asked you your story, what would you tell him?
NPR, yuk! Tax money being spent on something that ADVERTISERS support.
ReplyDeleteTry WGN, Chicago, WXLW, Lansing or WLW, Cincinnatti.
I find some VERY smart people in homeless shelters, like Degage in Grand Rapids. The lady that runs it, Marge, is really a peach. These folks, who need the shelter just have different priorities.
I met an older guy (a DOCTOR!)when went to pieces when his mom died- and life was never the same.
Thanks for your daily inspiration.
Tom