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Sometimes something will happen in your life that changes the way you see the world and from that point forward, you can't go back. It's a jarring, unsettling experience, more so when it happens at home and everything you thought you knew is now just somehow... changed.
Currently, I'm finishing up my internship in order to achieve my bachelor's degree in social work. I'm at an agency that wears a lot of hats and keeps a lot of plates spinning at any given time. Not to put a point on it, but if you get hurt in the county in which this agency is located, you'll be dealing with them on some level at some time. We help people who have been raped. We help people fleeing abuse. We help children who are being abused and raped. We help people find resources. We offer counseling. We offer guidance through the court system.
We help.
The thing is though, that we help in the town where I was born and spent the first twenty-seven years of my life before moving off to the nearby "big" city. My family has been in my hometown for eight generations and counting. In the cemetery where my father is buried we can read our name on tombstones dating back to the 1770's. There is a street named after us. My point is that this was, and I suppose in some ways still is, my home. I walked these streets with my mother, holding her hand. She had business to attend to every week in the building where my agency is now housed, back when she was a single mother working sixteen-hour shifts at a paper mill to support herself and my brother. I can see some traces of the former use the building was constructed for in some rooms, and sometimes I expect to see the ghost of my mother back when she was young and determined, back when life was just only starting to grind her down.
Rambling again. My point is, I thought I understood this town. I thought I understood it when I was pestering Mom to take me downtown yet again so we could go look at the art galleries, or when I marched confidently into the mayor's office, plopped down in the chair and demanded he talk to me about the way the town was growing. I thought I understood it when I went to school here, grew up here, gathered my friends here, loved and lost and loved and lost and loved again here. I thought I understood it when I buried my pets... and eventually buried my father here. I thought I understood it when I attended my mother's third wedding and watched as, finally and at long, long last, that little old woman, now blind, now sick, now so tired, married a man who treats her like the queen she always was.
However, it turns out that I didn't understand it at all. Of course, like everyone else, I always caught that whiff of despair whenever I passed by the trailer parks in the county and the public housing complexes in town. I thought I discerned a certain silent and secret desperation in the big houses of the rich people, where daddy's money buries a multitude of sins.
Now I know where that scent and from where those silent screams are coming. I have seen things. I have witnessed things. It's rather like those video games in which your character starts off in some unimportant backwater, goes on some grand adventure to save the world, and circles back to discover that the greatest monster in the world, the one with the power to grasp the heart of the earth in its talon and squeeze until it bursts, was under the streets of his or her hometown all along. The difference is that in this case, there is no monster that can be killed to bring peace. The monster has been alive since the beginning of man, and will be here until the end of time. I've seen it and what it does. I saw it in so many things that I can't mention here. I've seen it in desperate faces and bruised bodies, broken bones, and sad stories. The other day, when I had occasion to watch my first bit of child pornography during a forensic interview, all of us in the room felt it sidle into the room and nuzzle against our necks. Perhaps it was the reason why we all turned a bit green and left the room feeling polluted. At the end of the day the monster followed me home. It was the reason I cried in the car, and why I took the shirt I was wearing at work that day and put it on a hanger apart from all the others in my closet, as though it had some sort of stench clinging to it that might infect everything else.
I can't look at my hometown the same way that I used to anymore. There is something nasty under those streets where I walked hand-in-hand with my mother. There's a miasma in the building that my mother visited every week, walking those same halls, going up and down those same stairs. I have seen what people were doing all along, and what they're doing still, and what they'll be doing tomorrow. I've seen the people to whom they do it, their wives and husbands and children. It's as though all these places I knew have grown up in briars and are now ensconced in a strange forest.
It's as though somewhere, a clock is striking the twenty-fifth hour of the day.
On the other hand, we all go in every day to do it all over again. There are smiling faces of former clients in the pictures on our walls. They've gone on to better things. The children play in the playroom and have a grand time, and I can watch them on the security cameras if ever I'm so inclined. We come and go and life goes on, and good people the county over, and some from far afield, open their wallets because they care, and we care, and when we care together things can change. There was a rather dramatic arrest of an offender the other day in which the arresting officer got in a really good, TV-cop-show worthy zinger: "Do you want to tell your bitchy little girlfriend about this or should I?" It was so wonderful, and so appropriate that you half-expected the appropriate musical accompaniment to start up and the credits to roll.
We all take our machetes and our swords and our clippers, and sometimes even just our scissors, and we set off into the briars cutting as we can.
In closing, I'll leave you with this song that was playing as I wrote this all up. It seems appropriate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHHLHGNpCSA
...Where there's a will, there's a way, kind of beautiful
And every night has its day, so magical
And if there's love in this life, there's no obstacle
That can't be defeated
For every tyrant a tear for the vulnerable
In every lost soul the bones of a miracle
For every dreamer a dream we're unstoppable
With something to believe in...
Currently, I'm finishing up my internship in order to achieve my bachelor's degree in social work. I'm at an agency that wears a lot of hats and keeps a lot of plates spinning at any given time. Not to put a point on it, but if you get hurt in the county in which this agency is located, you'll be dealing with them on some level at some time. We help people who have been raped. We help people fleeing abuse. We help children who are being abused and raped. We help people find resources. We offer counseling. We offer guidance through the court system.
We help.
The thing is though, that we help in the town where I was born and spent the first twenty-seven years of my life before moving off to the nearby "big" city. My family has been in my hometown for eight generations and counting. In the cemetery where my father is buried we can read our name on tombstones dating back to the 1770's. There is a street named after us. My point is that this was, and I suppose in some ways still is, my home. I walked these streets with my mother, holding her hand. She had business to attend to every week in the building where my agency is now housed, back when she was a single mother working sixteen-hour shifts at a paper mill to support herself and my brother. I can see some traces of the former use the building was constructed for in some rooms, and sometimes I expect to see the ghost of my mother back when she was young and determined, back when life was just only starting to grind her down.
Rambling again. My point is, I thought I understood this town. I thought I understood it when I was pestering Mom to take me downtown yet again so we could go look at the art galleries, or when I marched confidently into the mayor's office, plopped down in the chair and demanded he talk to me about the way the town was growing. I thought I understood it when I went to school here, grew up here, gathered my friends here, loved and lost and loved and lost and loved again here. I thought I understood it when I buried my pets... and eventually buried my father here. I thought I understood it when I attended my mother's third wedding and watched as, finally and at long, long last, that little old woman, now blind, now sick, now so tired, married a man who treats her like the queen she always was.
However, it turns out that I didn't understand it at all. Of course, like everyone else, I always caught that whiff of despair whenever I passed by the trailer parks in the county and the public housing complexes in town. I thought I discerned a certain silent and secret desperation in the big houses of the rich people, where daddy's money buries a multitude of sins.
Now I know where that scent and from where those silent screams are coming. I have seen things. I have witnessed things. It's rather like those video games in which your character starts off in some unimportant backwater, goes on some grand adventure to save the world, and circles back to discover that the greatest monster in the world, the one with the power to grasp the heart of the earth in its talon and squeeze until it bursts, was under the streets of his or her hometown all along. The difference is that in this case, there is no monster that can be killed to bring peace. The monster has been alive since the beginning of man, and will be here until the end of time. I've seen it and what it does. I saw it in so many things that I can't mention here. I've seen it in desperate faces and bruised bodies, broken bones, and sad stories. The other day, when I had occasion to watch my first bit of child pornography during a forensic interview, all of us in the room felt it sidle into the room and nuzzle against our necks. Perhaps it was the reason why we all turned a bit green and left the room feeling polluted. At the end of the day the monster followed me home. It was the reason I cried in the car, and why I took the shirt I was wearing at work that day and put it on a hanger apart from all the others in my closet, as though it had some sort of stench clinging to it that might infect everything else.
I can't look at my hometown the same way that I used to anymore. There is something nasty under those streets where I walked hand-in-hand with my mother. There's a miasma in the building that my mother visited every week, walking those same halls, going up and down those same stairs. I have seen what people were doing all along, and what they're doing still, and what they'll be doing tomorrow. I've seen the people to whom they do it, their wives and husbands and children. It's as though all these places I knew have grown up in briars and are now ensconced in a strange forest.
It's as though somewhere, a clock is striking the twenty-fifth hour of the day.
On the other hand, we all go in every day to do it all over again. There are smiling faces of former clients in the pictures on our walls. They've gone on to better things. The children play in the playroom and have a grand time, and I can watch them on the security cameras if ever I'm so inclined. We come and go and life goes on, and good people the county over, and some from far afield, open their wallets because they care, and we care, and when we care together things can change. There was a rather dramatic arrest of an offender the other day in which the arresting officer got in a really good, TV-cop-show worthy zinger: "Do you want to tell your bitchy little girlfriend about this or should I?" It was so wonderful, and so appropriate that you half-expected the appropriate musical accompaniment to start up and the credits to roll.
We all take our machetes and our swords and our clippers, and sometimes even just our scissors, and we set off into the briars cutting as we can.
In closing, I'll leave you with this song that was playing as I wrote this all up. It seems appropriate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHHLHGNpCSA
...Where there's a will, there's a way, kind of beautiful
And every night has its day, so magical
And if there's love in this life, there's no obstacle
That can't be defeated
For every tyrant a tear for the vulnerable
In every lost soul the bones of a miracle
For every dreamer a dream we're unstoppable
With something to believe in...
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