Blue on Center

Home Archive for April 2016

I received an email this morning:.

"Neighbors.. I had a visit from a detective last night. On Friday evening a little after 10 pm there were two related events in the neighborhood. One was a hold up about four blocks away as a woman was getting into her car. The second at 10:40 was in the alley. A woman was coming home from work and had parked on their slab. As she got out the suspect approached with a gun which he put to her head. He took her purse and phone and the locked her in the trunk of her car. She used the trunk release to escape. I thought the detective said it was also an attempted kidnapping…We need to be alert and if anyone saw or heard anything, I can connect you to the detective."

I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. I felt panicked. What can I do? What would I do if that happened to me? Why would someone do that? Why is this happening? I've had moments like this many, many times in life, although they're not typically as dramatic as this one. It's a moment when I have to decide all over again what I'm actually doing here. As in, what I am actually trying to accomplish with my life? These moments come with experiences of loss, grief, disappointment, frustration, anger, disillusionment. I feel powerless and out of control. I want to fix the unfixable. Do you ever feel that way? But you know what often happens in moments like these? Our community, our people rise up and rally around us. Our people show up. Our people don't know what to do to fix it, but they say to us, "I am here. I want to help. What can I do?" Even if there's nothing to be done, even if there's nothing they can fix, they still show up with casseroles, a cup of tea, boxes of tissue, a Netflix movie, an idea, a bottle of wine, chocolate, surveillance cameras, police patrols, the alderman, a prayer. I believe in the power of community, not because it fixes the problem but because a community rides it out together. A community says, "I will see you through this." There is a building in my neighborhood that had likely been a thriving business long ago but has been abandoned for years. This building was the site of a young man's death recently. Last summer, the community got together to decide what to do about this building. The majority voted to tear it down and last week, the crew got to work on the demolition.

The crew is still working to clear away the debris and I like to drive by and check on the progress of the project. In the near future, our community will be able to give input about how to use the land. A park? A garden? A green space? Perhaps allow a new developer to use the land for business? We will likely disagree on the best use of this space. There may be heated debates over the next steps. Each of us will likely push hard to get our idea chosen as the winner. There will be other ideas that aren't chosen and people who don't feel like they got a chance to give their ideas. Community is hard too, isn't it? We don't always agree with each other. We feel disappointment and discouragement in our relationships with each other. We hurt each other. This is what Glennon Doyle Melton means when she says, "Life is brutal. But it’s also beautiful. Brutiful, I call it. Life’s brutal and beautiful are woven together so tightly that they can’t be separated. Reject the brutal, reject the beauty.”
Community is a beautiful thing. It's a brutal thing. It's brutiful. But it's ours. It's not perfect or lovely always right at the end of the day, but it's ours and we're going to take care of it and we're going to love it.
Here's the nugget of community: it belongs to all of us. All of us participate and something new will rise out of the debris that not a single one of us would have arrived at alone. It will have the fingerprints of the community on it. It's ours. We will own this. Experiencing profound loss or disappointment can be unbearable if we have to shoulder it alone. Community provides us with a chance to belong to each other. You belong. I belong. And that beautiful belonging is the most compelling reason we have for sticking together through brutiful times.

Self: Hey Laura, remember that time when you chose a paint color for the exterior of your

home?

Me: Well, no. I don’t. I’ve never committed to a color.

S: Oh that’s right. You’re still looking. Hey—remember that time when you took the kids to an appointment and you liked the color of the door on the practitioner’s office? You snapped a photo really quick before stepping inside.

M: Why, yes--I remember. That was a great color on that door.

S: And what about that walk you had with Mari? You clandestinely snapped photos of other people’s homes in the hope that they wouldn’t notice. I bet you looked pretty creepy out there on the sidewalk, standing in front of strangers’ homes and snapping photos. They were probably a little freaked out.

M: [chuckle]. I guess I did look pretty funny. But I didn't let the creep factor stop me. It was an educational field trip.

S: There was that beautiful night last summer when you & Greg went out to Colectivo, remember? Rather than spending quality time with your husband, you positioned yourself to take a photo of the trim so that you could capture the most accurate color.

M: Well yes, I did do that. But after I took a bunch of photos and ensured that I had gotten a good depiction of that gray-green, we settled right in to a great conversation. I made sure I sat facing the building so that I could watch the color change as the sun set.

S: There was the trip to Florida too. You snapped a quick photo as you were walking into Restoration Hardware.

M: Yes, but it was too gray for my house.

S: There was the car ride downtown and you made Greg drive around the block twice very slowly so that you could snap a photo of this building:

M: I purchased a paint pot of that color but it was too green for my house. The color of that building is more limestone and I have a brown-yellow brick. [Sigh].

S: Of course, you've done a fair share of rubbernecking & pulling over to the side of the road to take photos. I bet the people behind you just love your erratic driving, huh?

M: Yes, perhaps I rubbernecked and drove a bit crazy from time to time while checking out colors. But surely if the people behind me knew my predicament, they'd understand.

S: And what is your predicament?

M: If you knew anything at all, you'd know that my brick is not quite brown or yellow. And the mortar is pink. Pink! What am I supposed to do with pink mortar?!?! Who else on earth has to deal with this?! I demand to know what colors they chose.

S: Sheesh. Settle down. You have two years of debate on this issue. I just assumed you would have it settled by now.

M: You seem a little judgy to me.

S: Not judging. Just observing. I see that you have over 200 pins on your Pinterest board.

M: Yes, I do. But not a single one of those colors looked great with my brick/mortar combination.

S: And because Pinterest left you unfulfilled, you started looking at real estate listings for ideas.

M: Yup. I thought it was pretty brilliant.

S: Not a single one of those worked for you, so you turned every excursion downtown into a color sightseeing tour.

M: You bet I did. There's a lot of yellow-y brick downtown. None of those colors worked out though.

S: You drove by the chocolatier storefront in the Fifth Ward and liked the color so much that you called the store, remember? That was a little weird.

M: I did call and was connected to the person who chose the colors for the store. He told me the exact colors! I felt like I was talking to a celebrity.

S: Surely those colors worked out for you?

M: No, one was too purple and the other wasn't deep enough.

S: Some may think you're being a bit too picky and neurotic about this. Others may think you've venturing off into some kind of mental health crisis.

M: Certainly not. I will be finished with this nonsense as soon as I find the perfect color palette.

S: You mentioned palette. At first you thought green would be a good fit, but for the past year and a half, you've been on a quest for the perfect blue-gray. Do you think a perfect palette exists?

M: I am certain it does. But I've switched off of the quest for blue-gray. It doesn't work with my mortar.

S: So what is your color quest now?

M: Dusty pink.

S: You're kidding.

M: Nope. But if anyone ever refers to my house as "that pink house" I will punch them square in the nose. It will obviously be not pink, but a dusty-pink-hued neutral.

The End.

I know. Catchy title for today's post, right? This week I drove to the grocery store. Grocery shopping is not one of the items on my Favorites List because it takes so much money, planning & time. I was grumbling about going because it was 7 pm and it was the last thing I wanted to do with my night, but we were down to crusts of bread. So in an attempt to be a good & responsible parent at least 85% of the time, I headed to the store. I drove past the coin laundromat on the way and saw some women doing their laundry. This is not a particularly unusual sight, but I thought about them for quite a while that night. It was a cold night and I began to wonder how they were able to haul all their laundry there. Did she have to pack it into the backseat of a car, or did she have to drag it in a garbage bag onto a bus? I wondered how long she would've had to wait for the bus to arrive. And what if the bag got a hole in it and all the clothes spilled out? Did she bring their kids with her, even though it was cold outside and close to bedtime? Did she have to find someone to watch her kiddos while she waited? Or did she leave their oldest in charge while she went out? I wondered how often she'd have to repeat this tedious exercise to launder clothes for her family. Once per week? Twice a month? Or longer? And once the clothes are done, how long would she have to wait for the bus to get home? It'd be pretty dark and cold outside by the time she'd be finished. I wondered if she'd have to haul it all up several flights of stairs to an apartment once she arrived home. Would she have to take it all in one trip, or would she have anyone to help her carry it once she got home? And just the exercise of wondering about this made me feel sad. It's such a simple thing for me--laundry, groceries--the things of a household. I have a car that I can drive whenever I wish. I have a washer and dryer in my home and can throw a load in between other things. But I've never thought about these things as a major part of my schedule that I'd need to plan ahead for. There's a mama & papa down the street from me that have two kiddos and recently adopted three siblings from foster care. Like, at the same time. They now have 3 three-year-olds. Just thinking about their lives makes me want to inject an espresso/wine cocktail into my veins. This mama posted to Facebook that she was trying to catch up on laundry while her kids napped. A mom of one of her Facebook friends was alerted to her SOS, came to her house, picked up her laundry and did it for her. I want to be a person like that. When I think and feel paralyzed about the big things--like politics, trafficking, injustice and grocery shopping--it's nice to be reminded that there's just about a million little things I can do for people too. Maybe you can think of someone who needs a little laundry or grocery help this week. An older person, a single mom, someone going through a hard time. We all wonder what we can do but feel paralyzed or awkward about offering. Or maybe we've never really given it that much thought, like me. Dude. Just get out there. And if anyone out there is handy and wants to build something for the mama of five down the street, she'd like this for her laundry room:

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