This is gonna be more off the cuff than usual. I’m writing on my phone and I want to get it out, not go back and edit and fact-check.
Three things happened yesterday that all had me thinking about St. Thérèse, the Little Way, and what it means.
• A neighbor from a couple blocks over, whose name I know, whom I ran into yesterday on the street, sent me an appreciation text yesterday. I see how much you are showing up… Thank you so much for keeping our neighbors safe.
…And I thought, and expressed this clumsily in a reply, about the very firm boundaries I have set around my “showing up.” I picked one thing to do regularly, largely because it felt like a safe and easy thing: joining the foot patrol at the elementary school, just during morning arrival and afternoon dropoff, three days a week. I don’t turn my phone on till I have had my coffee in the morning, about eight, and when I do I’m aware that some folks have been out watching the morning commute since 5 am. I know there is so much more that needs doing.
• “How do you keep going out there? Are you not worried about your safety?” The VIP wanted, sincerely, to hear from some of us who were on the ground, and through random geography and time and self-selection, I was part of a group of maybe ten people, school patrollers and school parents, who showed up in a small conference room to answer those questions.
One mother, weeping, described the children’s fears, and the much larger fear of other school parents whose families were at greater risk. Another man, a tall and imposing guy in a hi-vis vest who’s always posted at the parking lot entrance, described being simply focused on the work of his shift of a few hours.
“…You just do your one job,” is what I said. I was thinking about earlier, when
• I was standing on the corner doing the thing that I do because it helps occupy my mind and it’s not useless: watching the cars arriving from the east, looking at each license plate in turn. I read the license plate aloud to myself to put it in a short-term memory slot, I scan the car for red flags. Is it an out of state plate? Are there two men in the front seat and are their faces covered? Is it a big dark SUV with black-tinted windows so I can’t see in? Does it even have a license plate? (The day before, two vehicles that passed me had none, front or rear). If the car looks normal, I forget the license plate and go on to the one on next car. And I do that three-second scan over and over again for 45 minutes while lone drivers, especially sheepish ones in big dark SUVs, give me friendly waves and polite honks.
…And while I was standing there, I became suddenly aware of the focus, of the flow state. I was fully focused on reading license plates and being aware of my surroundings: the other patrollers in their hi-vis vests on the opposite corner, the parents arriving on foot with children (here is one white parent escorting one white child and two nonwhite children the same age) to deliver them to school, the line of school buses stacking up across the street and the teachers coming out to escort the children in. A thing to do, strings of letters and numbers, maybe check my watch to see how long I have left.
…I wasn’t thinking, all that time, about the reason I had chosen to walk over here most mornings. I wasn’t thinking of the kids, how we are there to deflect incidents from affecting them on a school day. (The day before, before my shift, other patrollers, the tall man in the hi-vis vest, de-escalated a serious situation: Get out of here with your guns and your tasers, this is a school zone, the kids are going to be dismissed soon, just leave, you’re in front of a school.) And here I was, not thinking about the kids at all. Just thinking about license plates. Not feeling anything except cold fingers and toes: not fear, not compassion, not affection, not anger, just feeling like you do when you’re busy solving an algebra problem or writing code.
And I thought about this one small thing I am doing—it is a small, tedious thing—and asked myself: Can this possibly be “a small thing done in love?” Little-Way-style. It doesn’t feel like it. I feel kind of numb, actually. I smile and say hi to the occasional small child who walks by hand in hand with an adult, who presses the button and waits at the corner. I send texts, utilitarian ones, to the other patrollers. I am busy doing a job and my job is looking at each of these cars, maybe to mention a few to other patrollers.
Anyway. I don’t have a good answer. Where is the love? My mind is too busy to worry about it.
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