Far from Home


Dear Eugene,

"Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home," so said Chesterton.

I think it also works the other way, for those who have finally managed to come in from the cold, that Christmas celebration in every home overheat, for every body overstuffed, and with every sight and sound of yuletide promise oversold, is built upon a most tragic and intentional paradox that we are perpetually far from home and no ugly Christmas sweater can make the sick joke less sick just because we see virtue in self-deprecating humor.

Yesterday I was in Richmond and took my in-laws to a new Chinese supermarket in a mall that's pretty much dead if not for that new corner.  It is a carved-out paradise: bubble tea, bubbling food, bubble jackets.  All safe to feel safe.  A man of a different race guarded the door but I didn't know what he was guarding against and he looked like neither did he.  I nodded and said Hi and he raised his lethargic right brow.

Then I drove to a gas station and a man of the same different race filled for me (for that's how Richmond is, no self-serve).  I waited beside him and tried to joke, I am from Burnaby and not used to this, being served, but I appreciate this...how are you? and he smiled a little.  He went between my car and a huge newly washed SUV gulping down premium grade.  When I was leaving the station the same SUV was in front of me.  I waited for it to turn right and exit but it just wouldn't.  I assumed the driver saw a reason not to and respected that vision.  But then the wait got longer and I needed to try harder to trust what I couldn't see.  Then my rightmost vision caught the gesturing of another station attendant, again of the same different race, trying to tell me the big car was not moving because the driver was using a phone.  I thanked the attendant with my own gesturing and found a different exit to leave the whole sorry sadness behind me.

No, I wasn't sad because someone was rude; someone is always rude and I have not enough sadness to address the many rudeness.  The kind face of the second attendant reminded me of the first and the one before guarding the door and suddenly I saw my in-laws years ago attending to janitorial duty in a Zellers that once sat where the new bubbling Chinese supermarket is now.  My people, my friends and family, have finally made a turn for good, for the better shopping experience, for the best SUV, came in from the cold, into warmer than very warm homes, and now some other "people" are making the world spin to our easy rhythm of a good life well lived.  Good for us, fit to survive and thrive, leaving the whole sorry sadness behind us...

"Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him."  Yeah, seriously, look for that homeless family, so that we can learn a thing or two from them too...

 (So that we can join to kill them for good for reminding us of our homelessness.)

Yours, Alex

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One World, This

Image
Dear Eugene, I am sure some would object to what I said yesterday .  Based on the kind of education we are getting, maybe we should all object. Well, science can explain a lover's kiss , one says, We must know this by now.   Things that go on in a lover's head, bring to bear a series of trigger working together and crossing paths to conjure up what finally a poet would pick up the slack to call "romance."  It's simply a release of chemical cocktail that heroin and cocaine too can effectively concoct, just as "obsessive compulsive" in its serotonin-ian nature to give us a long good memory, just as culturally conditioned, almost like a basic human instinct. Who are we (to answer yesterday's question again) to say what actually  "shapes" us?  Science can explain ourselves to us, and does a better job every next morning.  The rest are just tassels on the fringe, perfunctory footnotes to scientific facts--the only truthful account of actua
Keep reading

He Walks Our Line

Image
Dear Eugene, The sun is brilliant today, best time of year, not too hot, not too cold, not too anything , a good life hangs finely in the balance of a myriad of capricious elements, mostly hidden, many I won't even come to identify let alone make sense of before my little life ends. Two mornings ago I read in the news that a suicide bomber attacked a voter registration center in Afghanistan, killing 31 people.  Yesterday morning the headline was gone, and I had to search online to see the casualty was then more than doubled. If I didn't quickly scan the headlines Sunday morning I would not even know something like this had happened, like the registering voters knew not a bomb was in their midst, and by the time they knew for sure there would be no point in knowing, let alone trying to make sense of the blast or piecing smithereens back together.  A line was drawn to divide before and after, life and death, hope and despair; a line that gives and takes away the meaning of
Keep reading

A Word for the Caveman

Image
Dear Eugene, We could imagine when a caveman was chased by a T-Rex, the nature man would naturally cry for help. His shriek would have been a plead no less earnest than ours when we lost control of our vehicle to an evil sheet of ice.  If after years of high education we could in our final moment at least wrap our spinning head around the physics of skating in a ball of metal into our death, the caveman wouldn't have the luxury of comparable enlightenment to come to terms with his demise under the chicken-feet of a leviathan. Who was the caveman crying to?  In whose name was his prayer going to be answered, if at all?  And if he could not even utter an intelligible syllable comprehensible to himself, who was going to speak on his behalf when he was most in need to be spoken for? Now these are the questions I would ask a Christian if I am not one. Not too long ago a pastor tried to warn me about N. T. Wright by saying he's cool with the dude and all, but make sure I
Keep reading