In a recent trip, a journey that I take every six to eight weeks, a woman about my age was sitting in the seat next to me. There was a vibe that she gave off, or maybe it was me in a heightened state of receptivity, that made me take the great leap and say something to her. You know exactly that hesitancy, hyper-aware that you are stuck next to this person for the next five hours, and it could go a lot of different ways. The safest path is silence, or immersion in a screen or page. The device was in my hand as I opened my mouth, so another person texting could easily be feigned, but here’s the thing; I’m generally a pretty friendly and open person, and I am continuously fascinated by how people live their lives. And my batting average for meeting good / interesting / kind people, often as not a combination of all three qualities, is damn close to 100%. So I made a soft comment of displeasure with our current administration. She looked at me, our eyes met, the spark ignited and we took off. We talked politics and feminism for the first two hours straight, then veered off into life adventures. At the three hour mark, during a 3 second pause, we asked each other her name. When we arrived at our destination, mine before hers, we parted with a long, deep hug, knowing we’d each met a sister.
“My name is Charlene, but some close friends call me Char.”
Char grew up in one of the poorest, most crime ridden communities in California, East Oakland. The housing project she grew up in was a center for drugs and gangs, and unemployment and poverty was rampant. Even today, Oakland is the most crime-ridden city in California, and ranks as the second most dangerous city in America, after Detroit. Although she has a sharp and inquisitive mind, school was spotty, and only her sister got to go to college, UC Berkeley at that. She’s been married a number of times, twice to drug addicts, and one of those was a heroin junkie. At one point, she got out of Oakland by marrying a ‘tiny little Puerto Rican dude, so handsome and so short’, and found herself outside of Anchorage living in a room with him. She got a job at a fish processing plant, and learned how to process (freeze) and grade salmon. Despite the backbreaking, numbing work and the constant smell of fish, she still really likes to eat salmon. That says so much about Char. She is a person who blooms where she’s planted. I asked her to tell me at least one of her life moments, those moments you carry around like a little sparkling gem hidden in your pocket, to take out and gaze in when you need that feeling of beauty and grace, and she described standing in the backyard of her building in Alaska wearing layers of coats, gloves, scarves and hats, gazing at the Northern Lights for three solid hours. At the three hour mark, the neighbors yelled at her to see if she’d frozen.
At one point, she found a copy of a book on astrophysics and time theory at the thrift store, and it is a subject that still consumes her. She asked me, ‘what was before the Big Bang?’ She has lived a lot of her life perilously close to the edge of existence, so the void both terrifies and captivates her. When she left Alaska and returned to the Bay Area, she worked in a variety of jobs including construction and now has her second job doing reception work at a community college. Of course that’s where she’d end up, she was eventually headed to college, and now she is teaching herself Chinese so she can talk with some of the international students. I speak some Chinese myself, so we threw around some conversational phrases. The Pakistani grandmother, mom, dad and son sitting in front of us all turned around at that point and openly stared and grinned, at the white lady and the black lady laughing and talking crazy, while a young Asian woman three rows back, likely a tech employee, said ‘crazy old American ladies’ in Chinese. If this hadn’t happened to me and had crossed my desk in a script, I’d strike it as too cute and fabricated. Real life, right?
There was one thing Char wanted to tell me very much, she wanted to tell me her great fear.
She is afraid of dying, she is afraid to no longer exist. She’s lived most of her life close to being wiped out, by violence, drugs or one of the fatal traits of poverty, and so this is a very real and immediate concern.
I told her my own belief, that we physically break down into our component parts at some point, but our soul or essence of life force goes on as long as we are in the thoughts of anyone. And she had touched so many lives, with so many yet to come, she would exist for a very long time.
But there is another way of looking at that, too. She’s already died a number of times. The part of her curled up next to a junkie with a needle hanging out of his arm, that Char is gone. The Char that the education system bypassed is gone. She had already gone on to live multiple lives, and she was on her way to a professional seminar to start the next one.
Women are biologically designed to transform. We change into being capable of bearing children, then we change back. Our bodies, our hormones, our brains and our emotions transform, not just once, but a number of times. From growing boobs and getting a period to hauling those boobs up from our waist and kicking the tampon box to the curb, there’s so much reinvention happening throughout. It is a remarkable capacity we have, and may be our finest asset. We change, and we just keep rising. p.s.
Char, if you’re listening and I think you are, thank you and I love you. ~Cleo