Email Link
Facebook
Twitter
DiggYoutica
By Heidi Shott
When the school year ends, my family and I travel to my tiny hometown outside Utica to visit my mother and brother and to tend the flower beds at the cemetery where my father, aunts, uncles and grandparents are buried. On a sweltering June afternoon in New York a few years ago, after a colleague’s retirement party, I made my way to Penn Station to catch a train to Utica. By the time I boarded the train, my husband and sons had already been on the road for hours, driving from our home in Maine to meet me at the station.
With a good book, a couple of magazines, a bottle of water and snacks, I was fortified for the four-hour ride and whatever it might bring. But what I couldn’t have anticipated was myseatmate, Alesha, a thirty-year-old medical receptionist from Queens.
Before the train left the station I discovered that she was traveling to Rochester to visit her elderly great-aunt whom she hadn’t seen since she was small. Half an hour up the Hudson, she told me about growing up with a teen-aged mother — a woman my own age. She talked about how hard it had been living in apartments with no heat, of leaving with all their belongings in the middle of the night because they hadn’t paid the rent. Alesha talked about going to school for her nursing degree and the good man from Jamaica she had found. I admired the photos she was taking to Rochester to show her great-aunt and showed her my own. “My mother has had a stressful life, and I don’t want that,” she said. “I want to be happy and settled and I’ll do whatever it takes to get there. And that’s the truth!”
Finally, as we cruised along the Mohawk River trading recipe ideas, the Utica station came in sight and I spotted my husband and sons on the platform. With them, I was touched to see, was my sixteen-year-old nephew, Bradley. Despite family, school, and legal intervention this bright, talented boy had dropped out of high school earlier in the year. I knew of his struggles only through the filter of my mother’s optimism and my brother’s resignation. At various times I’d thought of offering him a home with us in Maine, but never felt I knew him well enough to ask.
Alesha and I hugged and parted. I greeted my family with kisses and handed off my bags. “Well, that was quite a ride,” I said looking up to the train window for a last wave to Alesha.
There is a dangerous aspect to learning the details about any one human being’s life. Once truly known, a person becomes the “you” of the story. Being the “you” sets an individual apart from the group and transforms her into someone singular, complex, and possibly beloved. Once I know someone, how can I un-know her?
Several years ago, I stood with my son Colin before a subway map at a Washington, D.C., Metro station. The “You Are Here” banner was featured prominently on the sign.
He turned his sweet, puzzled face to me and asked, “How do they know?”
For a boy of seven who was known and recognized wherever he went in our small, close-knit coastal town, it was not a huge jump to imagine that the Washington Transit Authority knew that Colin Shott of Newcastle, Maine, was standing at the Crystal City Metro station at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. It said “you” after all.
Imagine that “you,” in the familiar form of a universal God-language that we can’t yet comprehend, is how God regards each of us: fully known and fully loved. I am the one and only “you” to God, and so is Alesha, and so is Colin, and so are each of the six billion human beings on the planet. If only we had four hours in close quarters to learn the story of every person in the world, how different our world might look. How much more might God’s Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.
If I had the chance to relive that June day, how differently I would arrange what happened as we wedged ourselves into the car. I would drop my husband and sons — those most beloved of all my “yous” — at my mother’s house and wave goodbye. Then I would haul my adrift and uncertain nephew into the front seat, put my foot on the gas, and just drive drive drive.
Heidi Shott is canon for communications and social justice for the Diocese of Maine.
Comments
Share Your Comments Below: