sam under the tree

During a small group discussion in class tonight, Fred was talking about the values of our class and how in some ways our class experience embraces the principals of Bob Moses in community organizing theory and praxis during the civil rights movement, specifically a lifting up of the importance of personal connections. While I am both convinced of and moved by the intimate exchanges and encounters in class, I challenged Fred’s claim. I told the group that I have an imagination about what their lives are like on a daily basis. I said that I listen to and think on the information about their lives that they graciously share with me, but really I can’t know what it is like to live at Riverbend. I mentioned what I wrote in my post yesterday about comfort, and also of how my faith is weaker than theirs for a variety of reasons, one reason being that I am allowed to comfort myself with all sorts of things in order to survive the day. Sam (a calm and centered man around my father’s age, with whom I have been in regular conversation since August), piped right up, saying with a very excited look on his face, “you mean like take a bath?” This really caught me off guard. He knew right away what he wanted to do for comfort.

Sitting with Sam after class, I asked him if he wanted to take a bath when he gets out of prison. He said, “I am going to. It is going to be one of the first things I do.” I asked Sam what else he would like to do. He calmly said to me: It’s the little things that you don’t realize you can do until you aren’t able to do them any longer. Like sitting on the porch after dark. I’m gonna do that too. Or walking down to the store to buy a pint of ice cream. Any flavor. Here we get ice cream about once ever couple of months, and it’s just a tiny scoop thing of vanilla. Before they moved me out here to Riverbend, I went ten years without seeing a tree. Here, they have two trees. People must have thought I was crazy, but when I got here, I walked right up to that tree and I just stared at it. And I touched it. I hadn’t been able to see a tree is so long, and sitting under trees was something I used to do a lot. I’m going to do that again too, when I leave here.

I told Sam about the time when I was in Haiti and I was really sick, all I could think of were baby carrots. I told him that I was lying under my mosquito net feeling stuck, hungry, and sick just dreaming about baby carrots. I told him that I had numerous fantasies about eating the carrots. I had running visualizations about going to buy the carrots and about how I would eat them, and about how I would surprise myself by remembering later that I had left over carrots in the fridge. Sam said that’s like his life.

I want to treat Sam as if the change has already happened, so to impact his visions and hope in a positive way. As I drink my glass of wine, in my comfy pajamas, surrounded by books about all the things I love, I’ve decided to start thinking of Sam as that guy over there, under the tree, with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s in his hand, hearing the faint sound of running bath water.