April 12, 2012: There's a note on the kitchen table: Expresso machine not working! I already plan to swing by the Eugene School District Education Center to drop off a book I no longer need and so going for coffee nearby seems written in the stars. Just as I reach the train tracks, the red light starts flashing and I think, “Damn! Caught by a train.” On the other side of the tracks comes this young father with his baby in a buggy. He looks down the track and motions me forward. I wave my thank you as I drive across the tracks and he gives me the hugest smile. My day is made.
Even before my interaction, as I observed this young father out walking his child, I was already thinking how far fathers have come in their participation as parents. My mother, of course, did it all while my father lounged in his leather chair waiting for dinner to be served. But now I see young men throughout my neighborhood with babies strapped to their chests or bouncing in their backpack carriers. There are several women in my women's groups who are the main breadwinners of their families while their husbands hold down the household and care for the children.
On the way home from getting my coffee, I see this young father once again and we both broaden our expressions of happiness as we knowingly greet each other. I love my neighborhood streets. I love running into transient-appearing Peter on his bicycle who stops and tells me all about his family... a family I have never met. Peter has medium length, unkept hair, wears grungy clothes and lives with the help of food boxes. But he is the nicest man and I know he'd help out if neighbors needed him. Then there is/was this old hippy a few blocks down who “became sober” as he put it and started an imaginative garden. This garden has evolved over the years with tiny ponds and bridges, pieces of glass and found stones, all while incorporating the natural trunks, roots, grass of his surroundings. I haven't run into him this year and my intuition tells me he has passed on. But his garden remains and this is his legacy to the neighborhood.
One of my major hang ups is ever yearning for family and community. I feel estranged from my siblings, my parents are no longer here and though I know my daughter loves us, she is in her twenties, in the the middle of working, attending college, discovering who she is, not sleeping, having a girl friend, etc. So my home, my neighborhood, my community is where I am. And on these positive, bright morning days, I see that my family is here.
I decide to buy a travel mug from our local Wandering Goat Coffee since I gave one mug to my dear husband and the other to my dear daughter. I'm waiting for my latte when in walks Dan with a surprise kiss. He is definitely my family...even more than family...he is my soul mate and I know I am damn lucky to have found him over thirty years ago. We sit briefly at one of the tables with the sun streaming in through the window, sipping and connecting; then he walks back to his work truck and I to my car. My new travel mug fits perfectly in the container by my seat and I'm enjoying a swallow of coffee each time I come to a red light. Eugene, Oregon is such a down home town. Wandering Goat has dread locks, long hair, short and cropped hair, hippies, straight...I'm dressed for teaching with my black jeans and blue jacket and look so much more professional than most in the cafe. But we earth dwellers are really all the same and I never feel uncomfortable except when I am obviously with the very rich.
My sometimes hang ups about family extend to my hang ups about the upper class. My dad was a working man and we were a working class family. So I suppose this is the reason I gravitate to your everyday, average Joe or Jill. My sister would be appalled by the street people I have conversations with and she wouldn't be comfortable at Wandering Goat Coffee. But here I am creating divisions when basically, as I stated earlier, human beings are full of the same wants and desires: love, hope, dreams, purpose.
I guess what I'm after when I talk about neighbors and friends and community and family is caring for one another. “All you need is love,” is not an idle refrain. Daily my students and I have constant conversations about racism and hatred and wars. These young people inspire me, fill me with hope. They, like myself, do not understand why the color of our skin or our ethnic backgrounds cause so much discomfort, animosity and segregation. They don't understand why we can't sit down with each other and work out our differences...use our words rather than our weapons. Why haven't we evolved far enough to quit killing, torturing, hating each other? I am ever the idealist, even at 64.
I look out my kitchen window and there is another family pushing a baby stroller, sauntering down the sidewalk. Cars are whizzing passed, the students at the corner alternative high school are playing a pick-up basketball game, the sky is wiping away our usual deluge of rain and replacing this with wispy clouds and possible sun. With the final sip of my coffee I know how fortunate we are to be living in a neighborhood, on the streets we do.
© 2012
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