the journey inward

If you look for the truth outside yourself,

it gets farther and farther away.

Today, walking alone, I meet him everywhere I step.

He is the same as me, yet I am not him.

Only if you understand it in this way

Will you merge with the way things are. -Tung Shan

The Fringe #3

During my time in “The Fringe” in St. Louis, I was running my small internet business out of the house and staying home with my young children. In an attempt to save money Slim and I canceled everything: subscriptions, cable, and memberships. We decided less was best. We also could not afford to go to the gym until I discovered that as residents of University City we could go to the U-City community center and use the equipment for some ridiculously low amount like $1. Once I figured out the routine of where to park, show my ID, and pay the $1 (which wasn’t listed anywhere). I found myself in a small room with a bunch of really hilarious women. The entire room just stopped and stared at me for a moment. I don’t think they were expecting a white woman to come in there, ever. I tried to get one of the elliptical machines to work, but couldn’t figure out all the buttons. The conversation level in the room was loud. The laughter went up and down in between sets. These women were having a great time. Finally I got brave and interrupted the story-telling and asked if anyone knew how to work this machine I was on. Again they all stopped and stared at me, the expressions almost surprised that I was still in there. A woman started walking towards me with a blank look on her face. For a split second I thought she was going to throw me out of there. Maybe she didn’t want any skinny little cream in her coffee? As usually, as had happened over and over again in U-City, my fears were ridiculous. She came over and showed me how to use the equipment, and then she walked off and went back to her story. What was it about my culture that had brought me to a place where I was afraid of people simply because they had darker skin than mine? Yet it was the truth. And some of them decided they hated me the minute I walked into the room, just because I was a pasty little white chick. If you’ve been given everything, never went without, your college paid for, can you really be friends with someone who has had to work hard for every little last thing they ever owned or achieved?

I just kept showing up. My children were at pre-school and I drove over there to get in my workout. After a while the women just got used to me showing up. They didn’t really stare or take any notice. It was as if I wasn’t really there at all. The constant conversations, stories, and laughter filled the space in my head while I went up and down on the machine. I tried not to react too much, as I didn’t want to appear to be eavse dropping. This was difficult at times, as I just wanted to bust out laughing. One young man came in and started talking to his mother and her friends. He told a story about how he’d slept with this girl and then forgot to call her, and now she wouldn’t talk to him, and oh man, what should he do? All the women then started talking to him at the same time about how, “he should call that girl!” His mother waved her hands in the air with disgust, pointing at him, “you got ta call that girl!” They were all laughing really hard at him. “You can’t stay with her one night and then just forget to call!” He then tried to explain that he had been busy and just forgot. “What were you thinking?” the women said. To every female protest he would have a response about what he was thinking or doing and how it should be ok that he hadn’t called her. Laughing at him, the women kept trying to explain that needing to go and have some beers with his boys was not a good enough reason; that you always had to call a girl the next day after sleeping with her. Finally he left in a huge uproar with all the women calling out, “You should call that girl!”

The next day it happened again. The same guy came in and they had basically the same conversation. After awhile I began to realize that this whole thing was just banter, a way of interacting. It went on for weeks. I started to wonder if he really had ever slept with a girl and hadn’t called her, or if this was just his way of getting the women all wound up. Maybe he had done it once a long time ago and they had all yelled at him, and every now and then it would just “come back up.” I never did know. But everyday it was hilarious. It never ceased to be funny. One day, they were all at it again, and then one of the women looks over at me and says, “Well honey, what do you think?” Everybody stopped and looked at me. I felt like E.F. Hutton. I kept pumping my Stairmaster and looked at their faces. They were actually expecting a response. So I said quietly, sounding as white as I could, “I think he should call that girl.” You would have thought I’d said the funniest damn thing spoken all morning. The place just erupted. Finally the white girl got the gag. I began to see this guy around town, and one day while driving by I leaned out my window and hollered, “you have to call that girl!” He and his mother looked up and recognized me as that weird little white girl from the gym. I watched them cracking up in my rear view mirror as I drove away.

Don't mess with Texas

On my way to Dallas this weekend, I had a funny 10 minutes or so as I crossed into Texas. When driving alone, I get spaced out, listening to music. Time just stops, as I get into the rhythm of driving. I rousted a bit when I saw the sign “Welcome to Texas, Drive Friendly the Texas Way.” All of a sudden the road went from the disaster of pot holes and bumps, to this slick blacktop highway with new brightly painted white and yellow lines. My car suddenly felt like a well built speedboat gliding on calm waters. Welcome to Texas.

Anyone that lives around these parts knows that Texans like to show off and brag about their great state. My mother, a Texan from her youth, used to roll down the windows every time we crossed the border and exclaim, “the air is just better down here!” I wondered as I crossed over onto the super glass highway if those Texans were just showing off at the border. This image of big dudes with Stetsons at a state meeting came into my mind. A bunch of good ole boys laughing about how they could really make Oklahoma look bad by highway improvements at the border. Don’t mess with Texas!

As I glided along the blacktop laughing, my radio suddenly goes all static. I start pushing the scan button and all I can find is Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Saturday Night Special. OK, so those Skynyrd boys were from Florida, and the song is about gun control, but I still thought it was funny that this was the only song on the radio as I was driving into Texas. I blasted it and rolled down the windows. Rolling down the windows probably cost me $15 in gas. But hey, you gotta enter Texas in style. I was thirsty and I had to pee, so I started watching for a place, and all I could find was Western-wear outlet stores. My luck soon changed, when in the distance I could see a Cracker Barrel! Do people actually buy all that rick-rack in those Cracker Barrel stores? I ordered some tea to go, and the waitress sent me over to the register to pay. A good ole boy with a big smile says, “Baby, you don’t need to pay for that tea, have a great day, and welcome to Texas!”

New York City

Last night, a big guy from NYC showed up to take my yoga class. When I say big, I don’t mean fat. I mean big and wide-shouldered with thick legs and feet, like he might have played football in high school. He was traveling for his job and wanted to drop in. After being asked where he was from, he announced loudly and proudly, “I’m from New York City.” I couldn’t resist the temptation. I blurted out, “NEW YORK CITY?!” You know, like that old salsa commercial for Olde El Paso? I thought to myself, that boy sounds like he’s from Illinois. People in their 20s always do this. They grow up in the Midwest and then move to the coast and then come back and announce that they live in some very important-sounding place. Everybody stared at him, wondering why he wasn’t doing hot yoga somewhere, and then we started practicing. In Oklahoma, we’ve all learned to be comfortable living in a fly-over zone. We know that where you live doesn’t have anything to do with who we really are inside, and we are amused by people that haven’t figured this out yet. His big NYC entrance was no match for my yoga pranayama voice, and he fell fast asleep in Shavasana. He was snoring so loudly it was echoing around the room. It was hilarious watching this big dude go down so fast and so hard. It’s tiring being from NYC. Afterwards he hung around and talked to everyone and charmed all the women. With a sweet smile he says earnestly, “I feel so much better, you are a great teacher!” It’s a funny job, putting people to sleep, and then when they wake up they sometimes show me their true spirits.

The Fringe - #2

I used to shop in this department store on Olivette Street called Grampa’s. It was on the edge of the Fringe nearer to the black working class neighborhood. One day, shopping with my baby, I overheard two black kids talking while stocking the shelves. They were making fun of one of their parents who liked to complain about the white people coming up to eat at his favorite fish fry place.

“My Dad always says, I don’t want no cream in my coffee. It's hilarious,” I heard the girl explain.

I stopped and listened to them, and let the words “no cream in my coffee” swim around in my head. Then it hit me what they were talking about. His dad always stayed on the north side and shopped up there too, so he never had to see any white people. The two teenagers were both loudly recanting, “no cream in my coffee!” and then giving into fits of giggles.

For a white person, it was like a window into black culture that we often don’t see. I started thinking about all the white people I knew that wouldn’t shop at the Schnucks on Olivette after 8pm, as by then it would be full of black people. If you went during the day it would be about 70 to 30. Once it gets under that 30%, even the seemingly accepting white people get nervous. I decided to call bullshit on this and go over there at night, as it was just around the corner from my apartment. Every white person should force themselves to go into an area in a city where they are the minority in order to experience what that feels like. At first I was nervous, wondering if someone would take issue with me being in there. Maybe they would stare at me or yell out an insult or intimidate me in some way. Before long, I just got used it, and of course no one ever bothered me. In fact, they were helpful. Why did I think I was so important that anybody would really care I was in there? Women helped me find items in the store, and the men teased me about my big pregnant belly. The bigger my belly got, the more attention I got. All the men would open doors for me.

At one point I was in Clayton, one of the wealthiest areas of St. Louis, taking some packages to the post office. My pregnant stomach looked like I’d swallowed a bowling ball, as the rest of me was so skinny. It was blisteringly hot in St. Louis so I liked to wear loose fitting sundresses, but since my back was killing me I also needed some decent shoes. So I wore light hiking boots. Looking back now, I’m not sure what the heck I was thinking. To make matters worse, the hormones made my spacey nature even worse, and I kept losing my keys. The outfit was accessorized by a long shoe string around my neck that held my keys. So there I was making a fashion statement in the business district of Clayton while trying to carry in a large plastic tub of packages. The white guys in suits walked by me one after another as I carried the tub about 5 feet at a time and rested. I wasn’t really looking for any help, I figured I’d eventually make it in and get into the line. About half way there I hear a man say, “what are you thinkin' girl?” and a little laugh. Before I knew it, an African American man wearing overalls was carrying the tub towards the front door of the post office at a quick clip. I had to jog a bit to keep up with him. He dumped the tub at the end of the line and went to put an envelope in the drop box. I called out thanks, but he didn’t turn around. He climbed back into a truck that was full of yard equipment and took off.

The Fringe

University City, the first suburb outside of St. Louis proper, was half white and half black. Some of the white people in U-City were really wealthy, but most of us were not. Huge brick homes ran down Delmar and the adjacent streets. Over the time we lived there, the houses had increased in value at a rapid rate. U-City was becoming a “shi-shi” place to live. The realtors were calling it, “urban-suburban.” We lived in what we liked to call “the fringe.” The fringe was the 10 blocks or so where the white and black people really lived together. It was the division line of two distinct cultures. Just south of us were huge brick homes starting at 3000 square feet and ranging to million dollar mansions. Just north of us was a working class black neighborhood. We were in the fringe, the line between black and white, the alley between the haves and the have not’s. Our block was a microcosm of the American melting pot. It consisted of Africa American home owners, white law students, Asian graduate students, and young orthodox Jewish couples. To top it all off, at the end of the block was a run-down rental that people were selling drugs out of for awhile.

Although the children would play together, which was wonderful to see, the adults led mostly separate lives. I saw the face of hope when I saw all these kids playing together. Some of the teenagers, even, were running in mixed social groups. By the teen years, not everybody mixed, but some of them still did. My neighbor Nina May owned the duplex across the street. When she told me her name, she said, “I was the ninth child, and I was born in May, so they called me Nina May. Nina had been a cook her whole life She and her husband had saved money and bought this duplex that they shared with their children and grandchildren. She told me it was the first thing anyone in her family had ever owned. I learned a lot from my conversations with Nina. I had never met anyone quite like her before. We talked frequently, standing out in the street, usually about what was going on in the neighborhood. She ran her household with strict rules and kept tight track of the teenagers' comings and goings. What confused me was that every time I would see her out shopping somewhere on Olivette or down in the Loop, she didn’t recognize me. I would wave, and she would just stare at me and then walk off. I wondered if maybe she didn’t want to be seen talking to me in front of her friends. One day at the post office, I decided to just take her head-on and walked right up to her. Again she stared at me. So I said, “Nina, it's me, your neighbor.” She then lights up and says, “Oh hi, I didn’t recognize you!” We then had a big conversation in the post office. It occurred to me later that Nina, having been raised in north St. Louis probably had trouble telling white people that she didn’t see regularly apart from others. She didn’t expect to see me away from the neighborhood, so when I would say hi, she’d think, "who is that crazy white girl talking to me?" I thought this was awesome. Over time, Nina got to know me better, and we had big conversations all over U-City.

One day she came over to talk to me with great concern about these misfit rowdy boys she didn’t know who were hanging around our block. It turned out that the boys scaring her were a bunch of white boys who lived on the rich side. Their daddies were lawyers and bankers. Only, the thing was they "was dressing ghetto, and actin' all cool, thinkin' they was hot stuff walking in “the fringe.”" I told her, “don’t worry about those boys, they go to private school and have rich parents. They just think it’s cool to dress in the ghetto look.” She laughed and said, “Well this ain’t the ghetto, I’ve been there.”