|
"The Guest House"
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
Still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
-- Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)
Bob Smith‘s "Hamlet's Dresser" is the memoir of a man who, despite growing up in an extremely dysfunctional family with a brain-damaged sister, managed to develop an affection for Shakespeare and become a teacher and director of Shakespeare. This excerpt ends a chapter in which a sublime period of acceptance during high school ends forever when a rumor that he is queer spreads throughout the school. The event is in the present with a reference to his high school days.
When I first started working with the old people at the Stein Center on Friday afternoons, there was a beautiful woman with missing teeth. Humiliated, she'd hold her hand in front of her mouth to apologize. "You wouldn't believe how pretty I used to be," she'd say. "Men followed me on the street. My mother was sure I'd accept the first one.... Look at me now! You'd never even be able to tell." From behind the veil of her hand she'd lament, "I try to look good. This is a nice dress, isn't it? Do you like it? I'm waiting for my teeth, and I'm so ashamed."
She said that I was handsome and she'd ask if I could see any beauty still in her, was any of it left?
One Friday she told me that she had to leave early. "I don't want to, I wait all week for the Shakespeare. But they want to see me about my teeth. I have to leave before you finish."
Twenty minutes before the class ended she walked up to me. "I have to go now to see about my teeth."
"It's okay. You told me. I'll see you next week." She seemed so frail. I bent down and kissed her on the cheek. "See ya next Friday."
The old lady walked to the door, but instead of leaving, she circled right back to me.
"Once more," she said, "just once more. It's been so long since anyone's kissed me. Please just one more." As I bent down, her voice was so faint that you could almost mistake it for breath. "I'm so afraid," she whispered. "I never thought I'd be alone. My health isn't good, but much worse is how afraid I feel."
"I think we're all afraid," I said. "Maybe it's why there're so many people here on Friday afternoons." She looked so vulnerable and decent, so pathetically isolated to have outlived everyone who'd loved her.
"Why don't you come up and stand by me when you get frightened," I said. "Don't talk or interrupt, just stand with me till you're not so afraid." For almost the whole year before she died, every Friday she'd quietly stand right next to me for a few minutes. Suddenly she'd be there, like an altar boy with the priest when I was a kid at Holy Rosary. And I always thought about high school all those years ago and how much I needed someone who was okay to think I was okay and just let me stand next to them.
-- Bob Smith, Hamlet's Dresser
|
