And the spirit said, "Crash!"

Ties gag me. Always have. You'd think, at 24, I would have learned to buy the correct size dress shirt, so that when I button the top button and put on a necktie, I could avoid gradually slipping into a coma of claustrophobic asphyxiation. But since I only go clothes shopping about once a year, on December 25th, under the Christmas tree, (and my mom thinks I'm skinner than I actually am) I opt to avoid buttoning my top button as often as humanly possible. In fact, if I could wear sweatpants and a t-shirt every day of my life, I would be a most happy fella, thank you very much.

But there's something about this place that requires a necktie. I moved to New York City just a few months ago, with big dreams of bright lights and Broadway openings. I knew it was going to take a little time and patience to book my first acting gig, (two or three months, maybe), so I looked for a job to pay the rent in the meantime. After a series of rejected restaurant applications, I finally stumbled upon a rather unusual, and seemingly glamorous job as a personal assistant and chauffeur to both celebrities and corporate clients.

When I took the job, I didn't consider how much time I'd be spending with my top button buttoned. Between auditions and work, I spend at least 90% of my week trying to look fancier than I feel. And with such a limited supply of oxygen to my brain, I get easily confused and disoriented, and sometimes think this buttoned-up version of myself is the real me.

One Sunday morning several weeks ago, I slipped into a pew at Trinity Church down on Wall Street, wearing one of my favorite neck-tourniquets. I had been church-shopping for months, never quite finding a parish with the right blend of respect for ancient traditions and progressive thinking that I try to hold in balance in my own life. (I usually test the waters during the Lord's Prayer, praying, "Our Mother, who art in heaven..." and see how the people around me respond.)

At first glance, Trinity is a pretty buttoned-up place. Lots of neckties, patent leather, and frilly hats. I was glad I had dressed the part that day. When the service started, the organ crescendo-ed, the choir filed in, with incense swirling, and the music washed over me.

The choir was divine. No one bristled at my version of the Lord's Prayer. And the sermon was focused on social and economic justice. Huh.

But my necktie was choking me. I was trying so hard to look put-together and professional, like I belonged in a centuries-old church where presidents and Rockefellers had once attended. As the organ crested over top the climactic final hymn, I sang half-heartedly, wondering if I could ever find a niche for myself in this mass of polished parishioners.

As the organ got louder and my tie got tighter, a crash right behind me shattered my self-concerned daydream. Spinning around, I saw a man I hadn't noticed when I entered: He was probably in his later fifties, stout, bald, and grinning so widely his eyes pinched shut. The crash had been his imitation of a pair of cymbals. He held his arms high and wide over his head, letting their "sound" resonate throughout the church, as a bit of spittle fell from his lips. Every four bars or so, or whenever it was musically appropriate, he crashed his imaginary cymbals, wind rushing through his lips, unabashedly contributing in his own simple way to the beauty of the music.

His joy was infectious: I unbuttoned my top button, took my first full, deep breath in hours, and sang the alto line (my favorite in old hymnals) a little louder than I should have. For the first time, I thought, "Maybe there is a place here for a guy like me."

The next day, as I sat in a fancy car outside a fancy restaurant, waiting on a fancy client to finish his fancy champagne, I couldn't stop thinking about the cymbal guy. In the midst of all those poised and proper church-goers, this man was true to himself, unashamed, and uninhibited. His spirit said, "Crash!" and he crashed.

It is so rare to see someone be true to their spirit in public. So often we fixate on what the world expects of us, enslaving ourselves to the neckties, or bank account balances, or job titles that we think give us value. At what age do we suddenly become so self-aware, and begin trying to mutate into something "acceptable" to the culture at large?

We certainly aren't born thinking this way. When I'm not driving, I babysit two four-year-old boys, from two different families. The hours I spend with Silas and William are the few in which I don't try to look any fancier than I really am.

Silas and I live in a fantastical world. When we're together, he becomes Super Kitty, I become Cornelius the Dinosaur, and as a duo we fight off all kinds of terrible and frightening monsters---Wollypogs and Amarats, and the like. Strumming a ukulele, we improvise protective incantations, and then evaporate the most wretched creatures with Super Kitty's pungent "Booty Burps." Trust me, they're powerful.

William's fantasy world is full of trains, boats, and big machines. On our walks to the park, he becomes a "Bacela Train," often stopping right in the middle of a crosswalk to invite new passengers aboard. I'm his faithful conductor, "punching the tickets" of any travelers, be they imaginary, or kindly strangers willing to play along.

Silas, William, and the Cymbal Guy couldn't care less what the world expects of them. Their worlds aren't make-believe: Silas is his Truest Self when he is Super Kitty, William was born to be a train, and when the guy at church crashes his cymbals, it's as if his whole soul is leaping for joy.

Each of us has a truest self---an essence, if you will, that probably has nothing to do with what the world expects of us. Suffocating under the pressure of our neckties, we stumble along in jobs that don't satisfy us, in relationships that inhibit us, and in church pews that intimidate us, all in the name of becoming "acceptable" to the world.

Unlike my role-models, Silas, William, and the Cymbal Guy, I lost touch with my truest self a while ago---long before I moved to New York. I don't know exactly who he is anymore, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't want to spend his life catering to every whim of the rich and famous. And he certainly never wears a necktie.

I catch glimpses of him every now and then. Usually after I've had a beer or two. He dances on the subway platform when "White Boys" from HAIR comes on his iPod. He hugs strangers on the street who look like they need it. And once a week, he teaches a class for teens who love to sing and dance.

I'm finding him again, slowly but surely. And I know that I can only live my fullest life if I earnestly seek him.

After my first encounter with the Cymbal Guy at Trinity, I kept attending services there. This Easter, the church was filled to overflowing, with over a thousand people cramming the aisles. As the congregation stood to join the brass choir and timpani in Handel's Halleluiah chorus, a bald, smiling head poked out above the top row of the choir. He looked so out of place in his tweed, too-tight suitcoat, amongst all the robes and flowers. As his head bobbed in time with the music, he looked like a lost chick looking for his mother hen.

But he wasn't lost; he was counting. As we approached the final chorus, the conductor gave a grand gesture, and with a flash of light, two REAL cymbals flew up over his head, and came together in the most rapturous flourish I have ever heard.

He held the cymbals over the whole congregation, as triumphant as any image of the Risen Christ, beaming his beatic blessing on us all. The cymbals chrashed thrice more, in perfect synchronicity with the escalating joy of everyone present, culminating in a tearful ovation as the Cymbal Guy, as his truest self, took a solo bow.


- Posted on the go, from my iPod!

Roam-sick

Saturday, January 23, 2010

They all said it would happen at some point. And I guess they were right.

For no particular reason, I found it damn near impossible to peel myself out of bed this morning. My eyelids were so heavy. The morning sun was too strong. The covers were pinning me down. I was trapped in my own inexplicable heaviness; too anxious about what the day would bring on the other side of the blankets to push them off.

There was no good reason for my state of mind. I hadn't partied the night before. No one had wronged me. I haven't even gained weight! In fact, I had every reason to be optimistic about certain new possibilities wiggling their way into my life.

It was my complaining bladder than forced me out of bed eventually. Like a newborn wailing to guarantee that first instinctual intake of air, my body took over, saving me from the smothering amniotic blankets.

I went through the motions of my Saturday morning routine. Coffee and NPR with a side of oatmeal. Shower, alternately ice cold and scalding hot without warning. Brush teeth. Jeans and a sweater. Make bed. Grab lesson plan. Out the door.

About to walk out of the building, I stopped short at the mailboxes, finding a pink slip of paper sitting inside. A package awaited at the post office.

Everyone loves a package, especially an unexpected one. Sunshine and speculation carried me the extra mile out of my way to the post office.

The package, which took the perplexed employees about 10 minutes to locate, was from my Aunt Gobie. She was thanking me for the time we spent together when she was in the hospital earlier this month. In the box was a beautiful sweater that hadn't fit my uncle, two bags of rice and beans mix, and six Reese's peanut butter hearts. And the sweetest card, with a neatly folded, crisp bill, which I knew was only a representative mite of what she wished she could give.

And so it began.

My heart ached. I'm sure that outcome was the very last thing Gobie had in mind when she put the package together. But I missed her. I missed Uncle Brad. I missed a hundred people at once; some scattered across the globe, and others in this very city.

It didn't help to hear the excitement in her voice when I called to thank her. The thoughtfulness with which she had assembled the simplest items ("Don't vegetarians eat a lot of rice and beans?") killed me. I sat on a bench at 46th and 6th while we talked, under the bland towers of midtown. The streets were emptier than they should have been, and all I wanted was to fill them with the faces of people I loved.

After talking with Gobie and Brad, I had to go teach my weekly Musical Theatre Workshop. I volunteer with a group called Artists Striving to End Poverty, and every Saturday, a few of us teach a class for the International Rescue Committee. I have about 15 high-schoolers in my class who love to sing and dance, even if they can't speak English well enough to really understand what they're singing.

Walking into the building, already dripping in my own melancholy, I was greeted by a group of student leaders trying to come up with ideas of how they could help in Haiti. Several of them wanted to go there immediately.

To put this in perspective, all of the students in my class are either refugees or political asylees: They all come from parts of the world rife with unrest. I have students from The Sudan, Guinea, Nepal, Tibet, Myanmar, and the list goes on. They know far more than their fair share of grief, and yet they wanted to go help out their Haitian brothers and sisters. I was speechless.

Throughout the rest of the day, I couldn't stop thinking about the collective sacrificing spirit of my students. Every week, I learn more of their personal stories (courage and fortitude are inadequate words by a long shot). Though the faces are different, these students remind me so much of the young people that I taught when I lived in Nicaragua. My soul got heavier as I ran through the names and faces of those students, wondering how they are doing. Some are still in prison. Others, the more transient ones, disappeared long ago, and I will likely never have contact with them again.

When I get an a mood like this, I can really start spiraling fast. Walking down the street after class, I started projecting faces of people I haven't heard from in ages onto strangers' bodies as they passed. It didn't take much: If I saw a curly head of hair, I was suddenly convinced that it was my dear friend Natali, the holistic healer and best barista in all of Nicaragua. A blonde jogger wearing a camelback zipped by, and I was sure it was my cousin Rachel, whose birthday was today, and with whom I had shared some of the most spectacular weeks of my life on the bike trip this summer. Walking by a cafe, I almost tripped over myself, convinced that I saw TK and Judy dining inside---an couple who had adopted our motley crew of cross country cyclists out in Colorado.

At first, I was somewhat aware that my mind was playing tricks on me. But after a while, my brain got out of the equation, and just let my heart wallow in its own puddle of self-pitying nostalgia. For several minutes, I associated every stranger's face with someone I loved.

Some people might call it homesickness, what I was experiencing all day. But that word doesn't fit right for me. The people I love are not all concentrated in the same little town, where I can hop on a bus home from the big city and see them all at once. I have made and loved many "homes" in the past few years, most of which have only lasted a few weeks or months at a time. For four months this year, I made my home in a new place every night, as I made my way across the continent by bicycle. And in each "home," there are people and places that I learned to love, fast and furiously, and then learned to leave, just as quickly.

And so a better word for my particular brand of melancholy today would be, "Roam-sick." I don't know what brought it on, but it hit me hard today, and I was rubbing it all over myself like a one-year-old playing in his own poo. I wanted to reek of roamsickness, so everyone would know just how blue I was. At one point, I'm almost too embarrassed to admit, the following thought ran through my head:

"It's like I feel all of the sadness of all the people missing in my life concentrated in a single point in the center of my chest. If I feel this way, how must God feel to have the weight of the entire world concentrated in God's chest?"

Okay Hamlet, calm yourself.

Again, it was my bladder that saved me from myself. Suddenly, I had to pee so badly that I ran through the first open door I saw, which was the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, just off Times Square. Once my bladder was empty, I realized that I had stumbled into a dress rehearsal of a Madrigal ensemble that would be performing in the church that evening.

The haunting chords of the ancient instruments and pure voices stilled my self-pitying heart. Something stopped me dead in my tracks, and plopped me down in the third pew from the back, just a few rows behind a homeless man curled up and snoring on the bench.

I sat for about an hour, not thinking of much. Sometimes, when you start to spiral into self-pity, not thinking of much is the best you can do. At least it puts on the brakes long enough to help you change directions.

As the ensemble played, I felt a growing need to pray, but I was still a little to smeared with roamsick-tastic baby poo to come up with the right words.

I remembered something my college chaplain used to say: "When you don't have the words, remember: Prayer is Breathing. Breathing is Prayer."

And so I just breathed. I breathed in openness, and I breathed out roamsickness. I breathed my prayer over and over, deeper and fuller, to the sounds of harpsichord and the theorbo, the lirone, the tiorbino and the arpa tripla.

And after several minutes, I mustered a smile. They had all told me this would happen. All of my friends who had moved to New York before me said that at some point in the first year, you hit a wall, when not much makes sense, and you don't really know why you're here, and you really just want to go home...or go roam, as the case may be.

Sometimes, when I pull myself out of one of these self-destructive wallowings, I can go too far in the other direction. I get mad at myself for wasting so much energy on a stupid problem. "How adolecent, to mope around like a child because you've had too many wonderful adventures and met too many wonderful people, and you miss them. How many people in this world would kill to have seen what you've seen? There are too many real problems in this world for you to spend energy on that! Look at HAITI!"

But this time, I was a little gentler with myself. I went to my favorite Chinese restaurant and got some Chow Fun. (Mostly, I ordered it because of the name.) And then I had a donut. A delicious, chocolated drenched, pink sprinkled donut.

And now, sitting in my bed with my geriatric laptop and a cup of tea, this morning's blankets don't feel nearly as heavy.

On the road again...

I'm on my way back to New York, after quite a long visit home to DC. Originally, I only planned to spend a few days at my parents' around the holidays. But we make plans, and God laughs.

Traditionally, my mom's sister Lori and her husband Brad always spend Christmas at our house. Lori is practically a second mother to me, having lived with our family through the first decade of my life. In fact, her nickname, "Gobie", originates from the early 80s, when my older sister struggled to pronounce Lori's name.

The day before New Year's Eve, Aunt Gobie got seriously sick. Her stomach cramped so fiercely, we found her banging the wall with her fist and mumbling incoherently in the bathroom. We debated back and forth about whether her condition warranted an ER visit, but were too afraid of how high those medical bills might be.

Gobie and Brad both work more than 40 hours a week, and work hard. Brad is a master of concrete pouring, and Gobie a dental assistant. Both work for small companies that are unable to provide health coverage to their employees, and yet they can't really afford private insurance on their own.

And so, crippled with pain, but with nowhere to turn, Gobie went to bed to try and sleep it off.

The next day, we had no choice but to rush her to the ER. She was bleeding internally, and extremely weak. Hours later, the doctors explained that a blood clot had formed near Gobie's colon, depriving about 40cm of her large intestines of oxygen and nearly killing that tissue.

She was lucky to be alive.

The care we received at Washington Hospital Center was outstanding. We imagined that spending New Year's Eve in the ER would be hell---with all the drunks and party-going-accidents streaming in. But they put us in a private room with a real door that blocked out the madness outside, even knowing that Gobie was uninsured.

The teams of doctors that treated her over the next nine days were unparalleled in their attention to detail and concern for the wellbeing of the entire family. We found out that our doctors were each nationally recognized leaders in their respective fields, and yet took the time to explain every minute detail until Gobie understood completely.

I went back to New York for two days to take care of some work responsibilities, but came back as soon as I could to keep Gobie company and interpret hospital lingo as best as I could.

When she was finally released, we were so very grateful for the care she had received and the speed of her recovery. And yet, I couldn't help but be a little angry.

I was angry that we had waited to take her to the hospital because we didn't have insurance. How pathetic, that in the wealthiest nation on earth people make medical decisions based on financial concerns, and not their actual medical needs!

How unfair, that a couple of hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, blue-blooded Americans, should have to suffer the overwhelming stress of being one serious illness away from financial ruin.

During the last several days that Gobie was in the hospital, we plowed through the process of setting up a payment plan, and began to apply for insurance. The dollars and cents of it would be overwhelming to even the most financially successful among us.

A year ago, I was so optimistic about the promises of healthcare reform. The campaign rhetoric tugged on my heartstrings in a way that often evoked tears. And now, as the gap between rhetoric and reality becomes more apparent, it is hard to not be discouraged. Even if the current bill passes, I fear that we are too far gone to ever realistically live in a country where people need not worry about their health care coverage. The current bill is far too short-sighted in scope: It is the victim of partisan bickering and the fear of electoral reprimand.

And yet, to do nothing would be succumbing to despair. I don't expect my government to take care of my heath care needs, but I can't stop hoping that government action might bring some equity tothe playing field. We shall see.

For now, I am so grateful that Gobie was healthy enough to leave the hospital and drive me to the bus stop this afternoon. Hugging her ever more tightly, I realize that our family is one of the blessed ones. Every day, there are thousands of other stories like ours, and not all of them end positively.

As I head back to New York, I can't stop wondering what I can do to improve the situation. I've written and called my representatives in congress. What else can I do?

- Posted on the go, from my iPod!