“The longest and most important journey we can take is from our head to our heart.” Anonymous. (Sage #1)
Christmas is the season of journeys.
It all started with that epic donkey ride by Mary and Joseph going home to Bethlehem. A very ignoble beginning. Since then we have all gone considerably upscale with Expedia-orchestrated flights to Palm Springs, Hawaii, Jasper, Vancouver. All the places we can only dream about this year. Sure, home for the holidays sounds romantic but only if you are coming from away.
The truth of it is that, for this year, the journeying is all in our heads – or hearts, as the case may be. In any other year, the journey on the #5 bus up 95 and 96 Street, December 17, 2020, would go unnoticed and unchronicled. But, in a year of little things, it turns out to be a big deal, not just a bus ride, but according to Anon, (Sage#1) the biggest journey of all.
Nothing like a bus ride to give you time to think, reflect, collect your thoughts, gain perspective on life. And no bus ride quite like the #5 to really adjust your perspective. This bus goes directly from my work to almost our doorstep and so it is very convenient. Nonetheless, I typically try to avoid it. Concern about public transport and the Virus but that is really only an excuse. I really try to avoid the #5.
You do not know Edmonton until you ride the 5. It is a university-level course into the socio-economic bedrock of this city for only $3.25 and ½ hour well spent. This will educate you on how the other side lives, what life is really like at street level.
On the way home the #5 passes at least a dozen homeless shelters and staffed residences for the homeless, the mentally ill, the drug and alcohol addicted, and subsidized accommodation for thread-bare artists and burnt-out social workers. Along the way are complimentary supports such as the courthouse, the police station, public trustee office, health centre, meals-on-wheels, free lunch, bottle depots, flophouses, safe injection sites, liquor stores, pawnshops, and pharmacies on every street corner – literally.
Then there is all the supplementary commerce, evidenced by the dumpster-diver pushing a cart through the ruts down the back lane scavenging for discarded treasures, or a bicycle mechanic madly peddling to the chop shop with a stolen bike slung over his shoulder, or the prostitute on the street corner, laced up, decked out and strung out.
The list goes on. You get the drift. We are not talking high-rent district. This is Edmonton’s inner-city reality. There is no sugar coating here. There is no counting on happy endings or last-minute miracles. Maybe a hamper from the food bank but that would be an optimum outcome. “No shit,” my buddy Scott would say (Sage #2, R.I.P. 2020). He had a proclivity for affirming bare-bones, unpretentious, down-to-earth reality.
Today, I try not to notice any of it. I am stuck in my head. I have got some figuring to do. Trying to make some sense of this craziness which just seems to get amped up every day. Today, for example, our great-grandson is going in for surgery.
How do you make sense of that?
A three-year-old boy, the cutest kid and loving parents but born with a cancerous tumour that permeates much of his abdominal cavity. Today is the day of reckoning. Exploratory surgery. It stays or it goes. He gets a new lease on life or they say their goodbyes.
My head isn’t up to the task. My well-wishing, caring, supportive colleagues sent me home with hopes and dreams but I left them all behind when I stepped on the bus. From where I am sitting, (3rd row back, driver’s side), I can’t see a positive outcome. My head is mired in despair and terror. Yes, it is Christmas and I am supposed to believe in miracles. But I am struck by how non-miraculous this all looks. No last-minute interventions or deliverances promised or even hoped for.
As our son, Kevin (sage #3), said as he dissuaded me from upscaling my Trailblazer: “It is what it is. A truck is a truck.” That is the kind of wisdom that would go over in this neighbourhood. And believe me, a lot of these people look like they have met a truck head-on at some point.
Third stop, the Shaw Conference Centre, now respite lodging for the hundreds who a few weeks ago occupied Pekiwewin, the Rossdale field tent city. Currently under COVID outbreak. No surprise.
Fifth stop, the Bissell Centre. Closed now of course. Patrons who used to go there daily for coffee and laundry services and free lunch, manage to scrounge coffee and lunch elsewhere and forgo laundry services. The smell tells it all as the latest passenger wafts by. I am thankful that there is a single-seating COVID rule at the moment.
Next stop, the bottle depot. The bus lowers the front steps and waits for the lady with matted grey hair and bags tied to the front of her walker to lurch out the doorway into the snowbank. On her way to cash in her day’s efforts, she pushes her booty through the snow – $20 – enough to settle her stomach with a liquid lunch and afford some opportunistic friends.
Next stop, Boyle McCauley Health Centre. A dishevelled, ashen-skinned man with a large stained dressing on the side of his face steps off to get some nursing attention. I have often been inside the BMHC for client-related matters. What an astounding coalescence of misfortune and goodwill! The lobby is filled with street people of all sorts of ailments, others just looking for a warm dry place to sleep on a couch or in the middle of the floor. There are condoms, masks, and free coffee on the counter. There is a safe injection site in the basement. Counselling services on the second floor are paid for through fund-raising. Sample medications donated by pharmaceutical reps and second-hand loaner wheelchairs and walking assists are held behind the counter.
The criteria for service at the BMHC is that one cannot access health care from anywhere else. In other words, those who need help the most get it least and last.
The next two stops pass a string of churches. Unlike the BMHC these are silent and empty mid-week, except for the Mustard Seed which always has a continual line-up for its free lunches and haircuts. The First Nations Church of the Sacred Heart, normally busy, is currently closed due to fire damage from a smudging ceremony that over-heated.
Fun fact. This section of 96 Street holds a Guinness world record for having the highest density of churches – 16- crammed into four city blocks! A testament to times gone by when this was an upscale neighbourhood when people expected miracles wrapped up with a fancy bow and placed under the tree, where Hallmark Christmasses were the norm. Now pharmacies fill in behind, our new religion. These days, miracles come in the shape of a pill bottle.
No shit. It is what it is. Try to make sense of any of this, my beat, on a normal workday. And this is not a normal workday. My gut is barnacled with worry and heartache.
I dig down deep for more home-grown proverbial wisdom. My daughter, Sara, and I are sitting at an outdoor patio cafe when two young bucks begin spewing mouthfuls of sexist slurs. My daughter (Sage #4), calls them on it. “Sorry,” they respond, appropriately embarrassed. “We didn’t intend anything by it.” Sara responds, “That is just the thing. It means what it means whether you intend it or not.” End of story.
It means what it means.
Finding meaning: this is heart territory. It is the journey that Sage #1 prescribes as the longest and the most important: the journey from the head to the heart, seeing a deeper purpose, trusting in love or providence, or some such redemptive thing. Maybe it sounds a little spongy but not the way Sara says it, strong and clear, sticking the tail right to the donkey’s ass.
The bell rings and the fellow with the ratty red Nike’s and pants below his butt – supposedly a fashion statement (gotta love those boxers) – steps off, perhaps attracted to the street worker leaning against the light post. Boots up to her thighs and then borderline covering all the way up to her frozen smile.
So what does that mean? What does it mean that someone has to sell herself on the corner to make a subsistence wage. Or that a grey-haired lady has to push her walker and bags of bottles through the snow to supplement the free meal and lodging that she will get later that day? Or that a young boy is born with a cancerous tumour too big to operate on?
What does any of this mean?
Almost home. I have got to get out of my head. Trying to think this through is not helping. I have got to settle into in my heart before I confront the news on the surgery.
My stop is at the Norwood Gospel Chapel, noted for its cryptic message on the signboard, changed weekly to entice curiosity in Sunday’s sermon. Patricia and I, both students of the Good Book, often have no idea where the quotes come from or what they mean. But this week’s posting hits home: “Jesus’ mother Mary, engaged to Joseph, was found to be pregnant before they came together.”
OK… That sounds real. “No shit,” my buddy would say. We’ve got a real soap-opera happening here. This certainly must have had the Bethlehem Chapter of the Women’s Auxiliary buzzing.
I wonder how the preacher will talk his way through this? No doubt sugarcoat the scandal with choirs of angels and virgin births and cattle lowing and shepherds herding.
Those syrupy, romantic notions might go over in other neighborhoods but on 95 Street they know the facts of life. They live them. A truck is a truck. If one of the girls on the corner does unprotected favours for 20 bucks extra there are consequences. Everyone knows this. No shit.
But what does it mean?
What does it mean that an entire busload of people stagger on and off with an endless litany of injustices, day in and day out. What does it mean that another illegitimate child is born out behind the barn without health care or a properly sanitized feeding trough? Who is in charge of this No Shit show? This is the first Christmas, for God’s sake! Get it right!
I shift from head-gear to heart-gear, feeling for the meaning. My best hunch? That love is to be found in all the wrong places. That love is a bigger story than the deprivation or the illness or the seeming unfairness of it all. Love is the meaning and love gathers up all the tragedies and injustices and swaddles them in a blanket and rocks them gently.
Christmas is the day God gets down and dirty, mixes it up with the cattle and sheep, and stands in the shadows as another young woman puts her life on the line to bring a child into this world.
I pull the cord to get off. The bus stops and I thank the bus driver and wish him a Merry Christmas. I head down the sidewalk and up our steps. Patricia greets me as I open our front door. She is crying but they are tears of joy and relief. The operation was successful.
Another day, another miracle, 95 Street style. No guarantees. No promises of forever. Just another opportunity to love, to tenderly cradle life’s graces in one’s arms. Another invitation to take that longest and most important journey: from the head to the heart.
ADV, Christmas 2020