Heather was a one-legged woman I met while picking up rolling papers at the gas station. She spotted me trying to discern which pump I was at. “Pump five!” She exclaimed from the sidewalk next to the entrance.
“You’re next to pump five. Pump your gas for you?”
As I walked towards the gas station she wheeled over in her chair to head me off. I told her I didn’t have much to offer but maybe five bucks. She said she was only trying to get money for some smokes and little food. Given what I was going in the store to get and the feeling in my stomach after working all day in the sun, I could relate, man.
I went in and paid for my fuel and warez and met Heather back at the pumps. There, she went on to tell me what SHE did for work. She pumped people’s gas for spare change. Perhaps not what you were expecting. Real life is often less glamorous than the adjectives we use to describe it. But it is real.
Heather was in a terrible car accident several years before, losing her leg and landing her in that chair. What’s more and what brought tears to her weathered eyes was this: She told me that her fiance died in that accident. She lost him as well, you see.
Heather told me she received a disability check, adding that it barely made ends meet, trailing off at the end of her sentence. I know from my own bills that she was likely being kind and didn’t want to burden me with her financial troubles. It was pretty clear that she was not making ends meet. We went back and forth while she pumped the fuel, sharing more about one another’s lives. Her father was a diesel mechanic and said he taught her how to work. Heather’s voice began to tremble as she said
I hope he’s proud of me…
Thinking of my own daughter, I could intuit by the tense in her sentence and the tone of her voice that he was gone too.
As I left the gas station, I wanted to circle around and wave goodbye to my new friend. Timing as it was brought a large delivery truck between the two of us with two younger guys at the helm. They pulled up next to her and looked in her direction. After a very brief interchange, the two guys sped off, blowing diesel exhaust on her and her wheelchair. I saw them laughing. I saw her crying. I honked my horn and waved to her because it was the only thing that kept me from driving my truck into them.
Is this the Christ function? Is this to turn the tables over at the market? Divine justice to right a great moral wrong? Maybe the guy who drove into the gay pride parade felt the same way in his moral convictions. What differentiates the two? How much of how we react/respond is based upon convictions, and how many of those convictions are built upon our collective and individual conditioning? What makes us so right and them so wrong?
Imitatio Christi: The compulsion to align with the biblical story of Jesus - the man rather than Christ - the function.
The function is not the moral conquest of opposites, but rather the unity of opposites. Not for the faint of heart.
When I was in the fire department, one of the initiatory rituals with the new people - “probies” was the official jargon - was to honk the air horn in the back of the county jail. Our fuel pumps were directly across from the inmate’s cells, and all of the tiny heads would shoot up in their tiny cell windows like silhouettes when we would lay into it at 2 am. We could never see their faces, just the caricatures we would point and laugh at. Shared culpability. In times of old, they make the probies drink a beer with them at work to achieve the same ends. The good ol’ days, as I heard it said. Same Same.
It was done to me.
I did it to others.
And it cuts both directions every time.
Forgive them, for they know not what they do…
Yeah, not for the faint of heart…
I couldn’t see those faces because I hadn’t met them yet. Now those old ghosts return in the faces of those I break bread with and commune in good company, the doublebinds of my opposites returned in spades. Some good, some bad. A mixed bag for sure. No, the integration of opposites is not for the faint of heart. But if my opinion on the matter merits any attention, it is my belief that they are returned to all of us... eventually…. Throughout the course of life, or at its terminal end. The bill comes due, no?