There are a lot of ways I could spin this post. As a
journalist, I know all about bias. My previous posts have all been written with
a positive filter. Today, I’m gonna try to go with honesty.
My life in Ohio looks something like this: Monday through
Friday, work til 5, when I’m bursting out the door ready for a nice evening.
Ride home from work jamming to a mix CD from one of my friends from home,
getting a little nostalgic, then pull up to my house, and get the sinking
feeling as I realize no one is home, and
I.
Am.
Alone.
Quick, turn up some
music, I think. I can’t handle the silence. Get out of the house; find a
source of human interaction, even if it’s just to sit on the porch watching the
cars roar by in their constant muffler-removed stream. I’m a textbook
definition extrovert – being alone is only OK in small doses, otherwise it is
exhausting and I arrive at work the next day starved of community.
One weekend, the urge to share my life with people -- not
sofas and TVs and that torture device they call Facebook, always reminding you
of the life you’re missing out on somewhere – led to some rather entertaining
adventures.
One Friday afternoon was one such evening. I got off work early,
as I often do on Fridays, and came home to my enemy – the empty house. I had
plans later in the evening, but would have felt cheated if I didn’t find
something to do with my early start to the weekend.
“I’m gonna try to find some hooligans at the park to hang
out with lol. Literally.” – a text I sent my friend Ashley, five minutes before
I packed up my Frisbee and a water bottle and biked the quarter mile over to
the nearby middle school athletic fields and neighborhood park. As I locked up
my bike to the rail of the picnic shelter, I drew a considerable amount of
attention from a gaggle of middle schoolers sitting at the tables.
“Hey guys … do any of you guys like to throw Frisbee?” I
asked, hesitantly, suddenly extremely aware of how out of my element I was. I
got a murmur of no’s and not really’s in response, as the six kids in various
stages of metamorphoses into quasi-adulthood a.k.a. puberty gave me the look-over.
“Well uh, I’m new in the neighborhood and I don’t really
know anyone, so I was looking for someone to throw a Frisbee around with,” I
said, trying again. Noncommittal nods. I started to turn away, surveying the
rest of the park, looking for more willing friends-to-be.
“You seem really cool,” said a girl with sloppy washable
marker designs all over her face and arms. Ah middle school, how I don’t miss
you.
I laughed. “Well thanks.”
“I knew how to throw a Frisbee once, but I forgot,” she
said.
“Yeah Maddie played some – this is Maddie. And he’s Kiefer…”
they introduced everyone to me and I said my name.
“My brother plays Frisbee, but he’s an asshole,” one girl
said, with a laugh. I tried not to wince.
“Where’d you come from?” Kiefer asked.
“North Carolina.”
“Did you move here with your parents? Did they get work
here?” he asked.
I squirmed a little, afraid I was about to lose all
credibility with these kids.
“I’m … probably a little older than … I look,” I said, not
entirely sure why I was embarrassed. And yes, they were shocked when I told
them I was 21.
“Man, you look about 16,” Kiefer said. I shrugged. What can
you do.
“Well, if you want to throw…just let me know. I’m gonna see
if those kids over there want to play,” I said, noticing a group of younger
kids playing basketball.
I walked over and dropped my Frisbee and bag on the
side of the court, next to the jumble of bikes dropped haphazardly at the start
of the game. I asked if I could play.
“Yeah, you be on his team,” said a 12-year-old girl,
pointing to an 8th grade boy. We played my favorite style of
basketball – no bounds, no fouls – for a half an hour before a) I scored
a point and b) someone got hurt. I offered some water, and then shot some
baskets while the kids sat in the glass-shard-littered dirt.
“How old do you think he is?” Cassie, the 12-year-old, asked out
of the blue.
I nailed everyone’s ages (surprise, surprise … my track
record on the age guessing thing hasn’t been so good).
“Are you 20?”
“Pretty close – 21,” I said.
“Aw man, 21 is the perfect age!” She said.
…Not sure what she knows about it, but I laughed and agreed.
I soon got two of the boys interested in my Frisbee, and we
threw for an hour. The younger of the two improved his throw significantly, and
made fun of the way I apologized for every errant throw.
As much fun as I had throwing with the youngsters, my heart
was breaking from the conversations I overheard between girls who couldn’t have
been more than 14, bragging about who and where they’d done it.
Sweaty and hungry, I realized I’d whiled away two hours
doing hoodrat stuff with my new friends. The boys had lost interest in tossing
the disc, so I packed up and started to unlock my bike.
The middle schoolers from the shelter, scattered around the
swings and the water fountain, all looked over and waved, or hollered, “You
leaving?”
Despite their rough backgrounds, these kids brightened my
day, and I hope to run into them at the park again.
--
That same weekend the socialite bug struck again. I mustered
up the courage to knock on Lois’s door and invite her to get lunch with me.
“I just ate,” she said, her face falling. Then she perked
up. “How about supper?”
I swallowed hard, because dinner somehow seemed like more of
a commitment than lunch, but I said yes, unsure that I would still be in the
right frame of mind to engage Lois on that level in four hours.
Five o’clock came and I knocked on Lois’s door again. After
double and triple checking all the locks in her house, Lois followed me to my
car.
“Where we going?” she asked.
“Do you like pasta?” I asked.
“Oh no. I just like real simple food. Like … Captain D, or
pork tenderloin.”
I went a little white at the thought of pork tenderloin and
the bill afterward. “Captain D’s it is then!”
On the way to the fried-instant-reconstituted-frozen-fish-substitute emporium, Lois told me the first of many of her heartbreaking
stories, all in her unfazed yet slightly paranoid stuttering manner.
“My mom and I used to go to Captain D every Friday. Are you
Catholic? We’re Catholic. We had fish on Fridays, so we’d go to Captain D. That
was before Mom died. Now I haven’t been there in three years. And then we
used to go to – what’s it called – oh Frisch’s, every Saturday. Mom and me. Now
I hardly get out.”
My heart was melting. As was the rest of me, since Lois had
mentioned on the way out she gets cold faster than anyone on the planet, and
always brings a sweater, even in 80 degree weather, so the AC stayed off.
“But I can’t stand the hum-midity,” she’d say.
We came up to the counter at Captain D’s and Lois ordered
from memory the exact meal she’d last had with her mom in 2009, with no regard
for whether any of those items were actually on the menu.
“I know what I want; you just tell me what it costs,” she
said. “And I’m getting hers too” -- pointing at me. This she repeated emphatically as I reached
for my wallet.
“Aw thanks Lois,” I finally conceded.
“Well it’s just that I don’t get out much and I really ‘preciate
you taking me to dinner since I don’t drive.”
I aimed for a booth by a window, but Lois stopped and
surveyed the ceiling.
“Better sit in the next one,” she said, pointing to the
corner. I noted the A/C vent in the ceiling and agreed, already wishing I’d
brought a sweater.
We tucked in to our meals. Well, I did. Lois talked into her
meal.
Through a light mist of flecks of battered fish and fries spewing
from across the table I learned that a) Captain D’s is just as unappetizing as
I remembered, b) Lois’s mouth works a little like the levies in New Orleans …
when a hurricane-force storm of thoughts comes, the dam bursts and an unstoppable
surge of words pours forth, and c) Lois is lonely, but not a complainer.
This last part I want to emulate.
Lois is alone. And she misses her mom and her dad. And she’s
downright paranoid about drug trafficking in our neighborhood and her neighbor breaking into her
house and stealing all her belongings. And don’t start her on that one or she’ll
run out of air before she stops. But she doesn’t complain. And she was so thankful
for my tiny gesture of saying hello and going to dinner.
“Am I talking too much?” she said, grabbing a breath.
“No, Lois you’re fine. I want to know about you and your
life.”
“Oh good. But just let me know if I talk too much. I don’t
want to bore you. I just so appreciate you getting me out of the house. Cuz I don't get out much.”
We finished up and headed home. I was a little exhausted
from the effort of understanding Lois through her stutter, but what she said on
her way home about took the wind out of me.
“Since 2009 to now, since my mom died, so 2009 to 2012, you’re
about the only person I’ve had to talk to,” she said.
Wow.
I cry myself to sleep every night because I can’t get over
my loneliness and missing home, and I feel alone, but I do have some friends
and I have hope that I will eventually have friends who know my soul. I can’t
even put myself in Lois’s shoes, but I ache for her, and I’m thankful for the
time I get to spend with her as her neighbor.
