mixtapes from babylon, vol...10 or 11, i think...

bro·ken  (brōkən)

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v.

Past participle of break.

adj.

1. Forcibly separated into two or more pieces; fractured: a broken arm; broken glass.

2. Sundered by divorce, separation, or desertion of a parent or parents: children from broken homes; a broken marriage.

3. Having been violated: a broken promise.

4.

a. Incomplete: a broken set of books.

b. Being in a state of disarray; disordered: troops fleeing in broken ranks.

5.

a. Intermittently stopping and starting; discontinuous: a broken cable transmission.

b. Varying abruptly, as in pitch: broken sobs.

c. Spoken with gaps and errors: broken English.

6. Topographically rough; uneven: broken terrain.

7.

a. Subdued totally; humbled: a broken spirit.

b. Weakened and infirm: broken health.

8. Crushed by grief: died of a broken heart.

9. Financially ruined; bankrupt.

10. Not functioning; out of order: a broken washing machine.

--American Heritage Dictionary

Ring the bells that still can ring.

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

--Leonard Cohen

I never saw a wild thing

sorry for itself.

A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough

without ever having felt sorry for itself.

--DH Lawrence

The Word became flesh to communicate to us human beings caught in the mud, the pain, the fears and the brokenness of existence, the life, the joy, the communion, the ecstatic gift of love that is the source of all love and life and unity in our universe and that is the very life of God.

--Jean Vanier

What I can tell you for sure about living in Babylon is that getting right with brokenness (my own and the world around me) was and is what could be categorized as “a major undertaking”. I don’t deal with brokenness, especially my own, very well, at all.  Other people’s brokenness or the way society is broken—those just make me uncomfortable, like the way a tension headache sets into your back teeth, and slowly heats up the back of your head and neck-- just achey enough to not be able to concentrate, but not achey enough to stop what you’re doing and take an Advil.  I’m realistic enough, on most days, to deal with the fact that brokenness, as a construct, exists. 

When I say “getting right with brokenness” I’m not just talking about those odd days when brokenness rears a very obvious head, all wobbly and woozy and wonky in the middle of my regularly scheduled Tuesday.  I’m talking about the brokenness that lives at the bottom of all of us, the gaps that gape over chasms, the way we have such a hard time being kind to each other, and how sometimes, for no good reason, people are broken in ways that cannot be transcended in this life.  I’m talking about 24/7 broken. 

It’s miserable.  It’s life-changing.  Once I engaged it, nothing was ever the same.  See, I think sometimes we forget that part of being a real person, with his or her shit together doesn’t mean that we only get to feel one thing at a time.  We imagine the divided lunch room tray of adult life, where the fun parts don’t touch the sad parts don’t touch the romantic parts don’t touch the political parts don’t touch the religious parts don’t touch the delayed or impaired or physically or mentally impaired parts.  And everything, whether it’s sad or happy, is tied up in 30 minutes, with only four two-minute commercial interruptions.  That’s the format.  That’s the way be believe we do business, because that makes us feel safe and kind of superior.  Because when our broken edges rub up against the veneer of polite or politically correct or post-modern society, things have a way of bleeding in a rather unsightly manner.  And we hate seeing things that are unsightly, or hearing  a cry that can’t be soothed, or knowing that some things just stay broken. 

Which brings me to Theodore.  God…Theodore.  Poor Ted.  I mean it.  Poor Ted.  He was just “with it” enough to know he wasn’t “with it” enough to really be independent and live on his own.  Ted’s momma was older than Enoch, and probably had Jesus in Vacation Bible School, and I think was just too tired to die, when it came right down to it.  I imagine it had just been Ted and Momma for a long time, because I knew they hadn’t driven themselves to church in…decades.  Same for the grocery store.  Ted’s momma fought to keep that much independence for her youngest son, and managed to do it at a time in history that wasn’t particularly kind to children and families with the kind of differences Theodore exhibited. 

I don’t imagine growing up in that house was much fun for Ted’s brother.  I don’t know how much fun it was for Ted, either.  I hope it wasn’t just awful.  I don’t know many details about the early chapters of Ted’s story, or the middle, really either.  I sort of inherited Ted and his momma through my job.  For much of my tenure, all I did was check in on them, every week or so.  They handled their own transportation, and shopping, and doctors’ visits.  All I had to do was wonder what was in the rolling suitcase Ted carried with him EVERYWHERE, and whether or not his mother would ever part with her old-school Czech kolache recipe, which I knew had to be good.

And then one day, his momma went to the hospital, and Theodore was left at home, all alone.  He’d been on his own for a day or two, here and there, but this time, Momma wasn’t going to be able to come home.  And despite everything I tried—down to bribing him, Theodore refused to even consider moving from his home into a group home, or retirement center, or even the place his mom was living.  RE-FUSED.  I’m talking heels-dug-in-over-my-dead-body-this-is-a-closed-subject refused.  Whether I agreed with his choice or not, I had to admire his desire for independence, his desire to organize his day and his space independently, for the first time in his life. 

I know Ted missed his mother terribly, even as he relished his version of a swinging bachelor life.  We went to see her on Sundays, and he would take her a donut from coffee hour, and the Czech-language newspaper she still had delivered to the house.  And we’d all have communion together.  Then, I’d drop Ted back home, and back out of the driveway, silently praying that this wouldn’t be the week he’d decide to try and boil eggs on his own, on the gas range, and blow up half of the neighborhood and parts of the interstate.  Ted, among all the interesting things he could do that would surprise you, did not see well, at all.  I mean, Mr. Magoo aced his vision test, comparatively. 

Ted understood and used the entire bus and handicapped accessible taxi system all over town.  He could navigate them like a pro.  And he would stand there, asking questions of drivers, ticket vendors, station managers, what-have-you, until he understood where he was, and what he needed to do to get to his next destination. 

He loved figuring out how things worked, and as a result, took apart several medium-end men’s electric razors, trying to clean them.  He understood how to do this, understood how the mechanisms worked, but couldn’t see well enough to put them back together without breaking these really irritatingly small and oddly fragile little plastic filaments.  And Ted was not interested in waiting for me to clean them, when I brought him his groceries once a week.  So we went through three of them in six months.  Three.  I could almost have charted out when he was going to break one.  And even though I knew he couldn’t help it—not that he was on the bad side of blind, or that the pieces were really small and tricky, or that he loved to tinker—it still drove me ape-shit every time I had to go buy a new razor. 

During a time in my life when I was solely shopping at the grocery store for cat food and litter, cans of soup, toilet paper, bagged spinach, and shampoo, I agreed to go to the grocery store once a week for Theodore.  And truth be told, it probably saved both our lives.  There was a stretch of weeks that the only things that kept me sane were ritualistically grocery shopping for Theodore, and cleaning out the cat box.  Theodore only got Meals on Wheels during the week—he was on his own during the weekends, and Meals only delivered two a day.  (The cat…well…you know cats—if I had just died from being worn out and sad, Jinx would have waited maybe two days to eat my eyeballs, depending on how much food was in his bowl.) This was something I could do, I could help.  I could make someone feel better at a time when I had no idea how to do that for myself.  Because I’d gotten to that point in life where I had realized that some things, no matter how much therapy to you’ve had, or how realistically you’re looking at a situation, hurt us down to our bones, and it takes us a little while to get back up.  And that is just life.  And it happens no matter how much you love Jesus.  Loving Jesus just helps you make a way to get up.  I had also realized that sometimes, the best thing you can say about what you’ve accomplished in a day is that you didn’t lose any ground.  Being with Theodore taught me those things.

Shopping for Ted was easy—it was pretty much the same thing, every single week.  The only variances would be choices for breakfasts, or a different lunch meat, or cookie option.  Sometimes, he would need toilet paper, or shower soap, or would want ice cream.  During one month, he asked me to buy dishwashing soap three times.  I finally asked him why he was going through so much soap—hoping he wasn’t developing some kind of hand-washing thing.  Come to find out, when we were putting his groceries away, I’d put it too far back in the sink cabinet, and he couldn’t see it.  …so he had three huge bottles of Orange Ajax lurking under the sink.  We moved the soap. 

The putting away part of the grocery shopping mostly made me want to have a drink. Ted was a close-stander.  He would stand in your armpit, if you let him, occasionally whacking you in the knees with his giant roller bag, which he sometimes had to be reminded not to bring into the kitchen (…because we’re just unloading groceries, Ted.  You won’t need those missile launch codes, or anything else in that overhead-compartment sized-suitcase, any time soon, buddy...).  I think part of that is because of his visual impairment.  I also think part of it is just Ted…there is something about him that is odd, and has nothing to do with his visual impairment.  After about ten minutes with Ted, you’d know he was not like anyone else you knew, and that his physical and psychological differences really weren’t what made him different.  But that’s just my opinion.

What I can guess is that Ted would probably have been an odd little bird, even if he’d hadn’t been visually and cognitively impaired…some folks are just different, all the way down. But because Ted is impaired,  it’s impossible to ignore his brokenness. 

Ted was also deeply paranoid.  He would worry a lot that people had been listening in on his phone conversations.  Sometimes, when he’d call the office, he’d almost be speaking in code, in these very veiled references to conversations we’d had about his grocery list or the next time we would be going to see his mother.  Ted was constantly reporting to me that things disappeared and reappeared, and he had no idea who or what was happening.  He also had periodic focal point and grande mal seizures, which were only kind-of –sort of-not -really-well-controlled with medicine.  All those things would run through my mind when I was finally ready to get into my car and go home, every week.  But I could only do my little part, I couldn’t fix the vast majority of things that were broken in this scenario.  I could just do my little part to make the mess less bad, or at least not to contribute to it.

I could kind of tell when he’d maybe had a seizure, or when he might be about to have one, but I was mostly just guessing.  I’d try to convince him to sleep at night (because there was that three week period when he convinced himself that he could speed up his metabolism, if he kept moving all the time), or not to work on his projects so late.  Or to sleep on the bed, instead of the sleeping bag next to his perfectly good bed.  I’d ask him if he was eating.  I’d ask him if he had any doctors’ appointments he needed help getting to.  I bandaged his head when he fell, trying to put up a book case out of brackets and boards that had collapsed.  There was blood everywhere, and I was worried he’d poked one of his eyes out.  He kept insisting he was fine, that he was just distracted, that he thought the bracket was right by his hand, but it had disappeared, and then everything came crashing down. 

Being with Theodore, trying to help him live on his own terms, was sometimes so frustrating I would cry from the minute I left his house, until I arrived back at my own.  I wasn’t angry with Theodore, ever.  Not really.  Most of the frustrations I had were about the ways he was broken, about how that brokenness made me feel, about how confronted I felt, about how sad I was that I had no idea how to help Theodore plan and execute any kind of long-term independence. Every call I made to his family was a dead end.  Every call I made to social workers put me in a message queue, and I’m still waiting for a couple of returned calls.  There was no way for me to save Theodore.  I was having a hard enough time managing to keep myself independent, so becoming a conservator or guardian wasn’t something I was even remotely equipped to handle…but I thought about it.  I thought about it a lot. 

Those last months at that job were brutal.  And at the same time, they were some of the most important months in my adult life, and I knew something really important was happening inside me. Some days, it felt like everything around me was broken.  There were no soft places.  There were precious few safe places.  There were car rides from all manner of places, back to my little house, where I would run a bath and cry for hours, because everything was broken.   And buying groceries for Ted, and unloading them and explaining them to him in that abysmally small and claustrophobic kitchen both seared and soothed my tender spots. 

On the one hand, I was engaged in an activity (buying Ted’s groceries) that was never, ever going to end, unless I ended it.  Ted would have lost at least half a day in a grocery store, and likely suffered physical and verbal abuse in the cereal aisle, not to mention what might have happened in the freezer case.  Every label, every coupon option, every bit of information on every box and bag he purchased would need to be read and understood before it went in the buggy.  I know this because I took him to the market with me once.  I can’t say much about that trip, but I will say these  things: 1) I never took him to the market with me, again.  2) I totally understand why parents beat their kids in grocery stores.  3) I didn’t yell at Ted.  This took a lot of doing.  On the other hand, the act of buying essentially the same items every week, unloading them in the same fashion, issuing instructions for when to throw things away and when to put them on the grocery list for next time became a kind of liturgy for me.  It became an offering not just to Theodore, but to God. 

When we see people who are broken on the outside, broken in un-ignorable and unmistakable ways, we are sometimes confronted with the inner brokenness in ourselves.  Some of what is broken on my insides (and probably yours, as well) has been caused by interactions with people who have been less than careful with me and my little self.  But there are other jagged edges, hidden faults and knicks that just come with being human, come from living a life that is full and active, come because everything in this world is broken and dying.  That is something that I must intellectually accept as a tenet of faith, stemming from my understanding of the allegory of the Fall. 

We break things all the time—each other, the planet, the church, homes, relationships, you name it.  And this is why we can’t have nice things, people.  We are so twitchy, sitting next to brokenness, watching it be awkward and lost and other.  And if we touch the different, it might get on us, or make us sad or remind us that we really are all in this together.  It might bruise our shins with its giant fifty pound rolling suitcase, or breathe all over us while we put the Oreos in the stay-fresh container in the fridge, and it might take up every inch of the front seat of the car as it fumbles around for the seatbelt clip.  Sometimes, the different keeps us up at night, and we spend sleepless hours trying to figure out how to see it from another angle.

Ted had to deal with my brokenness, too.  I couldn’t always come at the same time, every week.  Sometimes, I wasn’t able to take him to his mother’s assisted living facility. There were also days when he’d ask for a specific item that I couldn’t find in the regular grocery or big box store, and I’d have to explain to him that I couldn’t find something.  When he asked me to help him figure out how to make his handwriting better, so he could start sending Morse Code messages, I was unable to be of much service.  But what I could do was buy his groceries for him, once a week.  I could also teach him how to peel boiled eggs, after they ‘d cooled down (and after I’d made sure they were boiled, and the gas was turned off).  One time, he asked me if it would be ok for him to buy some new underwear and pants, and showed me a couple of pair that were mostly holes, and I said that yes, I thought that would be fine.  He said he had a bunch of clothes money, but because he couldn’t see well, he didn’t know if he needed anything new.  And that was one of the days I cried in the driveway.  Because there were things that he had never had to do for himself, and that I never anticipated he’d need to have explained.  There were so many ways in which my brokenness was something Theodore had to deal with.

Going to the grocery gradually became this thing I loved to do.  I mean, the list making was total hell, because it would necessitate at least four phone calls between me and Ted, and BOY…he was not good on the phone.  And he would try to read his list to me, but wouldn’t be able to see well in the hallway where the phone was, or he wouldn’t be able to find his list, or he could only find the lists from two months ago, or he didn’t think he would need milk until the middle of the week, but that would be between visits, or he might need batteries but would need me to double check the sizes on his (insert only partially-working electronic gadget here:  see also: tinkering with shit) before I went to the store.  That list, as I have previously mentioned, ALMOST NEVER VARIED.  Like ever.  Except that I refused to buy him prune juice and Fiber One Bars on the same bill of groceries.  We had to have a very candid conversation about constipation, and I made Ted promise me that he’d never have a prune juice cocktail with a fiber bar chaser.  I told him there was not enough toilet paper in the world to deal with that issue, and he even laughed a little bit. 

If I had stayed where I was, I probably would still be doing the grocery run for Ted, once a week.  I couldn’t and can’t do anything to fix any of Ted’s brokenness, and he couldn’t and can’t fix mine.  But for a chunk of time, I like to think we didn’t further any breakages.  I can’t fix his eyes, or his mind.  Ted couldn’t fix the brokenness at my office, or the sadness I felt at leaving a life I’d spent years building.  But I could buy his groceries, and he could help me put them away.  An exchange like that—kindness and cooperation—goes a long way to roughing down some of those jagged places.  I’m not saying that Ted was broken for my benefit, that somehow his otherness were some kind of boon to me.  And I’m not saying that my brokenness was for Ted’s benefit, either.  What I am saying is that we were broken in corresponding ways—ways that for a season in our lives intersected in a powerful way, that our brokenness fit together, and made a whole space. 

That’s amazing to me.  

mil besos,

rmj