My View from the Bus

It was cold and raining this morning, so I took the bus to work. Coming home, I was texting with a friend—my first friend I met through blogging!—who used to live here. 

She commented that it sounds like the city has changed a lot. 

It so happened she said that just as the bus was coming  to an intersection where there’s an encampment—one of several tent cities in town where people live. I snapped a photo (below) to text my friend. You can see a kid on a bike. Whole families live this way now, even in winter.

Because the tent camps are illegal, there get NO city services—no water, no toilets, no trash pick up. But there’s nowhere else for the residents to live—shelters are full and the wait for public housing is … I don’t know… months, maybe years? 

One day on the bus, a couple teenage girls in hijabs sat in front of me. The light turned red at the intersection by the encampment, and out the window of the bus we all watched a woman picking up trash around (presumably) her tent with a gripper-stick in one hand and a plastic grocery bag in the other. 

As the girls watched, they murmured to each other in a language I didn’t recognize. From refugee families I’ve started to see at the thrift store, I’d guess they were from Afghanistan. Wherever they were from, I wonder what they had expected America to be like.

I don’t know, but this isn’t what I expected America to be like. As I’ve said before, it feels pre-apocalyptic. An interesting thing is, you kinda adapt to it, kinda.

You stay wary but hang loose. You improvise.

II. Toys Are Magic

The other day, a frazzled and jazzed young woman came into the toy section while I was adding new toys.

My funniest coworker, Grateful J, is always messing with the dinos. This is what I’d seen when I got to the toy section:

The flurried woman who looked like she was on the street was tearing up the stuffed toy bins. She said to me, “I’m looking for a stuffed dog to keep me company. They watch out for me. I know I’m crazy…”.

“No, no,” I said. “They do! They have power.” And out of my cart I pulled a children’s plastic wand decorated with characters from Frozen, and I said, “Shall we give your new dog a blessing?”

She held out the one she’d chosen—“this is the one!”—a long-haired white and blue one— and I said to the dog, “This wand activates you to be a special dog to watch out for our friend”.

I didn’t know what she’d think, but she seemed really pleased with that.

And thus my time working as a sacristan in the Catholic Church and the magic I learned there was put to good use.

Of course I know that organized religion is guilty of all the evil that we humans can be guilty of. I see the pain. I am never denying that.
But from where I sit on the bus, religion is a good.
It is free. It is transportable.
It says that the spirit—your spirit—is real, and physical things (like toys) can hold spirit/magic, and you can hold them, and they can hold you.

It says that you matter. Who else is saying that to these people on the street? 

Yes, there are secular people who do. Public health workers are my heroes, and I’m not kidding.

But, honestly? I’ve come to think there might/should be more religion on offer to stitch lives tattered and scattered to the wind and rain.