Tenderness for a Sleeping Stranger

The last two years we have taken the few days around Christmas when everything is shut down and gone up to the San Juans and rented a house for a few days enjoying the chance to spend time together and see something that isn’t Portland. This year mostly because of the snow we ended up staying home instead (and we did spend plenty of time together) but thinking it would be fun to get out of Portland at least temporarily, we bought tickets on the train to go to Seattle and back yesterday, New Year’s Day, leaving around 8 in the morning, getting there at noon, planning to do lunch and a museum then catch the 5 o’clock train home, getting back to Portland at 9.

Insomnia and the sounds of other people’s New Year’s Eve Revelry kept me from sleeping much the night before, but as we got on the train, the exhaustion was magically transformed into almost a sort of coziness, the kids were delighted with the experience, and I sat down and opened up my journal. Asking for six seats together, they put us at one one end of a passenger car where the rows faced each other, four on one side of the aisle, and the two facing aisle seats on the other, and we happily took the whole space, enjoying the ride from Portland to Vancouver, with no one else assigned the other two seats. My journal has a line about the industrial backside of cities always shown to railroads, and the grayness of the early morning light with the steady rain. And then in Vancouver, one of “our” seats is now occupied by a boy perhaps nineteen or twenty. He is dressed with the baseball hat askew and the baggy pants that have the crotch somewhere around his knees. He asks Raven “Where are you going, homie?” and my very non-hip hop Iowa-bred husband answers, “We’re not going home, we’re going to Seattle to visit.”

Slowly it sinks in that, with his language peppered with words my kids are not allowed to use, the fact that I can smell him from across the train, the swigs he keeps taking from a two liter bottle with a generic soda label on it, this may not be a completely comfortable trip. Raven and the kids all head off to the dining car to find breakfast foods, and I put in headphones and continue writing trying to signal my unavailability for conversation. One conductor, a woman comes by, to collect tickets, and he is all about “Do you remember me?” and she, reluctantly it seems to me, says “Oh, right, you’re the rapper.” Shortly after this the male conductor comes and tells him that if he gets any complaints the guy is off the train. The guy mutters defiantly and laughs to himself bitterly and makes posturing remarks about what will happen if they kick him off the train, but there is no one really for him to talk to — nobody on the train is willing to be his audience.

Raven returns with coffee for me, we get the four boys settled in the four seats together across the aisle, Raven gets to sit next to this kid, I am across from them. He “sirs” and “ma’ams” us, and seems eager we not complain about him, and I say something about how if he can just watch his language a little (I feel like such a hypocrite) we’ll be fine.

He doesn’t really seem to pick up on our sort of stiff unwillingness to engage, or maybe he does and is enjoying pushing our boundaries, but I keep the headphones in, Raven puts all of his attention into the boys, and this kid falls asleep.

But of course my morning pages are full of him:

“I think about how he makes me feel stiff and square within my sudden awareness of boundaries, and not wanting my children next to him. I think of the population of strange, troubled and troubling people who would wander into the video store I worked in on Central, right across from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, me all 19 and naive and fearful, and watching co-workers who were skillful at smoothing situations that were potentially fraught, at handling people. And I can appreciate the diversity such people bring to the world, even, with a little effort summon compassion.

“If this weren’t a special trip with the kids, if I didn’t worry about Raven’s day being spoiled, I can imagine myself in a movie role, a stranger giving an older sister’s advice: look how you’re making you own life harder, kiddo. The posturing, it’s not impressing anyone. I’ve watched too many movies, I imagine being able, by small acts of kindness, to change this boy’s life, if only. I wonder if one day, one of my sons, puffed up, dressed all in black will make strangers move uncomfortably away from him, those subtle social cues. And I have always been prone to imagining myself responsible for strangers, and clearly right now responsible to children, to husband is enough. Stealing a glance, the boys is either asleep or doing a good job of feigning it.

“Am I projecting to imagine that the swagger, the taking up of more space than one would guess he could from his sleeping figure, the desire to be remembered, the performance he was putting on, are just another variation on the struggle for self, for meaning, for connection, the longing to find one’s place, to feel heard and respected? He might not see himself that way, and I wonder if my seeing these things is patronizing? It amazes me that the simple core elements of human need find expression in the range of human activity from philately to arms races, from gardening to mining, from scaling Mt. Everest to writing poems, but when you think of how all DNA is made up only of four bases in endless permutations, maybe this shouldn’t be surprising. This boy and I are made of the same stuff, and he sleeps and it reminds me of my tenderness for my own sleeping children.

“I could, I think, write a letter to him slip it into his backpack so he doesn’t find it until we have separated, never to encounter each other again. I could tell him, secretly, I like you better than I would have if you were smug-seemiong or complacent, if I felt like you felt entitled, had your whole life all worked out at nineteen, like you better than that less boisterous fraternity-looking guy halfway back on the train with the blonde girlfriend looking all adoringly at him. I don’t show it of course. I don’t want to encourage you. You remind me of the sort of wounded I once dated, your misunderstood sensitivity, but not marriage material. Not that anybody is wholly un-wounded, at least, not anybody I’ve met so far, but we mostly manage to live pragmatically with the wounds boxed neatly in the back of some closet, where we don’t have to encounter it every day.

“Of course this is my journal, and consequently all about me. How anxious I am to be any sort of a healing force on the planet, a not-so-subtle messianic complex. I have, under only the thinnest of protective coatings, this tenderness for anyone who is angry and afraid, who feels he has no place, who has felt betrayed by those in authority. I feel tenderness for the hopeless, the seekers after oblivion, I feel compassion for those who feel misunderstood, even if they are deceiving themselves a little bit, for those who write self-revealing blog entries, for the awkward, for the embarrassed, for the misstepping and the wishing one could take it back. Is this a selfish compassion, felt because I have been, frequently am, all of those things, and can, by compassion, reassure myself to me that there is, indeed, more to me than that? Out of control now, like something from a 1950′s sci-fi movie, I realize my compassion crawls back over the train even towards the jock-ish fraternity type and his pretty girlfriend, that it fuels itself and grows, could encircle the whole world in verses of kumbaya and waves of pure agape. Somehow this is the most well-being I’ve felt in weeks, and I had worried this guy was going to ruin our train ride!

“I want my own compassion not to drown me, want to know it isn’t pure egotism: that the spasmodic annoyance at loud celebrants of the new year last night, the hour of fireworks when I was hoping to drift off, the bitterness of feeling excluded from boy jokes and from the human race generally, the children choosing video games over a movie and the total absence of festivity within our house are as real as the compassion, more real, maybe, even than the desire to put in a letter to this boy an explanation of my woman’s perspective on how one becomes a man. But this is a tender start to a new year, a feeling of fresh and unexpected growth. Better, I think than the resolution to drop ten pounds or bicycle more or cook at home more, is this glimpse of Rilkean commission to find myself more deeply, more meaningfully connected; that this is not suggesting I am going to walk around beatific, purified in practice and thought from fear, annoyance, and self-loathing, from the desperate need for something I cannot name, but that instead of allowing the deep discomfort to become an obstacle to connection, to draw on it in recognizing the discomfort others are feeling.”

I don’t, of course, write the letter. It wasn’t a movie, though I think I should be played by Kate Winslet. I listened to podcasts and fell asleep briefly, and we made it to Seattle, which was an adventure in itself (were we wearing our “crazy magnet” tshirts, I ask Raven?), and ride the train back to Portland with people I don’t need to write about at all.

And now it’s weekend, more than vacation, and we will resume our regularly structured lives, and I admit to a fair degree of relief at that.