Naive enough to know better

You don't have to read this, I just have to write it.

Today...
I began by driving to the wrong school. An occupational hazard of itinerant therapy. The only truly astounding thing about this event is that it happens so rarely.

Once appropriately sequestered at the correct location (middle school), I started seeing students. Here's where the day went weird.

Usually I think of myself as someone with a lot of room for a lot of different types of people. Maybe my soul's shrunk lately? In any case, today stretched me. The range of students I saw occurred on a continuum from a bright student with a disease that is slowly destroying his body to a student with a very healthy body who will always function at about 4-years old to a student with a bright mind and healthy body who is socially isolated and often offensive due to autism. And all the ones between.

This relational range was compounded by the worlds I moved in to, out of and through. The gang tagging that I passed on four separate occasions as I crossed between the middle school and high school, over a rusty, chain-linked bridge spanning the freeway. The drug bust and chair throwing while working in a classroom. The sweet innocence of a kitchen scavenger hunt. Then, later that afternoon in the same kitchen, a student gets arrested (a minute earlier everyone was eating Amish friendship bread together. What happened?!!) The hopelessness emanating from teachers as an administrator plugs a scholarship program for low income students who graduate with a 2.0 GPA. It's not the 2.0 they're worried about. It's the graduating. The after school conference that the parent never comes to, but we're still somehow there till 5.

Then I have this bizarre moment where I wonder if I'd be better equipped to work with these kids if I'd actually screwed around a bit. Done some drugs, done some drinking. I never did, and I have no idea what's going on in their lives. I don't understand the racial dynamics. I don't understand the undercurrents of the drug and gang culture. I've never worried about teen pregnancy or not being able to eat in the lunch room because my parents don't let me shower and...well, I do understand that middle school's a hard world. And high school's no cashmere afghan.

So I finally leave work, driving through the bizarre blend of rural and urban that trails out around the hem of Tacoma. I go to a library I've never visited and find a used bookstore on that same block. It's the kind I like--no windows, just wall after wall of books, tight corners, precarious shelves, and more bags of books, blocking aisles and providing all kinds of imaginative fodder for various disaster sequences (earthquake? crushed to death by musty mysteries. fire? all escape routes blocked by trash romances. bubonic plague? disease is carried by dust mites). After receiving an unexplained but substantial discount on my purchases, I leave refreshed.

Ooh! What's that across the street? A Mexican corner store? Yes, please!

So finally I'm on my way home, a few strangely-flavored lollipops richer, a few cents poorer.

I still need to clear my head, so I start walking, down toward the water. I make it halfway. Whoomp. Diverted again. This time, by a co-worker and her husband who I spot walking ahead of me. They invite me in for a drink and the next hour flies by in a blur of conversation that somehow manages to link online sped documentation programs, the implications of under-funding support for those with mental illness, racial violence on the west coast in the mid-sixties and the Puyallup land-development oligarchy.

Wandering home past manicured lawns and tennis clubs, I get that strange feeling that sometimes overcomes me when I travel by air. You know, when you step off the plane on to land that's about 2000 miles from the last earth you touched?

I'm going to bed.