From the Idea Notebook

I was surfing through my idea notebook this morning, and stumbled across a description I had written back in the winter. My daughter Faith is in the choir, and this was the Christmas concert. I wrote this to pass the time, and to get the description down, in case I needed it later.

What I wrote... well, it moved me. I ... Well, you read it, tell me what you think.

Description: audience at a school assembly

It's a working class community, which means it's a working class crowd. Practically everybody is wearing jeans, sweaters, t-shirts, and either letterman jackets (Marshall, UK or Boyd County) or slickers. Most are in subdued colors, even now at Christmas: blacks, blues, browns, and only the occasional spot of red. Fully 1/4 of the men are wearing baseball caps. Another 1/4 have remembered childhood training, and are holding their caps in their hands.

Faces of the women tend to be heavily made up, but that can't hide the hard, tired faces underneath. These women were raised poor, married young, birthed early, lived hard lives, and will die young. Many are smokers, like their men, and a gynocologist is a doctor you see when you're pregnant, and at NO other time. Most will die of ovarian or breast cancer, or heart attack.

But, for all that, most faces are relaxed, with open expressions and a willingness to smile, talk, even to strangers. Laughter rings out over and over in the echoey hall. These people are comfortable with their lives. Their lot isn't much, but it's theirs, and they are content.

I am the interloper here. I am the strange one, not them. I am the discontent one. Church and family and hard work and an early death are God's plan for people like us. To resist that is to be forever set apart.

The parents grin proudly as their sons and daughters sing in the choir. They never hear the sour notes, the clunky tempoes. Mom and Dad beam as their children sing a song in Latin; on their faces are written a pride that is almost painful to see. They know that their child is clever, is gifted, that she'll do better than her upbringing, that she'll get up, get out, succeed.

But they're wrong. The pattern has already been impressed upont these young lives. "City ways are not our ways." Even if the child moves away, the pattern remains. Move to the city and forever be on the lowest rung, the least valued, the unwanted? Or stay here, where life is hard and short, but their place is assured?

Not that hard a choice.

The student teacher stands in front of the choir, sketching the tempo with his hands. He's different from the older teachers. But it's not the age, or the whiskers, or the little gold button glimmering in his earlobe. It is the eagerness, and the innocence; you can see it in his eyes.

He doesn't know yet: the job will wear him down, grind him away like water dripping on a stone. How long can he watch the passion play of academia, the petty cruelties, the unfairnesses, the accidents and errors, the slow breaking of thousands of lives? Even if HIS life is easy and no troubles are directly his? How long can he watch this pageant play out, hundreds of times each year, for thirty years, before it exhausts him?