LORD, Do I have Stories!

Mmm!


I got back last night from two weeks in some podunk, all-White town in North Alabama, unaffected by natural disasters and poor race relations.
That's not true. I was in New Orleans.

Hania, a girl who I've been slyly referencing for about two years (especially when the story is about self-pity), hooked me up with a trip to The Big Easy.

Service Work.

It's a beautiful, muggy mess, man. Hurricane Katrina killed some serious employment foundations and continues to wink at the residents with abandoned homes and empty lots, five years down the road. The oil spill has brought some would-be rig workers to the Easy, too.
On top of those environmental catastrophes, alcohol there is like meth here: Plentiful. Half of the French Quarter is washouts with great stories and hungry hearts.
Bruce Springsteen lives in New Orleans.

Education in the city is horrid, also. I met too many people with illiterate leanings. Adults, middle-class. Too many. This is the West, isn't it?

No, Joel. This is where the "Global South" got its name.

The whole time, or at least the time when I wasn't reveling REALLY loathing my neighbor or looking lustfully at everything downtown or in a(as of yet) unspoiled gulf of Mexico,
I wondered, I refuted what the difference was.
Had I done anything of substance? Had I contributed to the rise of a once cosmopolity?

I packed boxes of books in Capdau Elementary, I painted baseboard in a church office, I handed and shook the homeless looking for a good camping spot, I dug a ditch, killed weeds, smiled, witnessed, Strove to make a difference,
but this city is shattered.

Not ruins, but perpetual shatter. There is much room for improvement.
And of the thousand, maybe tens of thousands of volunteers that come down, is my time drop in the water?

Am I faceless many? I must be, right? I have to be. I can't have an ego in this place, staring out the soul-crushing shattered windows of a charter school.
I can't.

I just can't.

That was until I was standing next to a VCR and Hania, talking with Miss Luvenia about faith and race. Our host, whose house we were painting "Winter Hedge," said, as if in a dream,
"You have no idea how much difference you're making.
"This means the world."

Or something.
I paraphrase because the moment passed like all others, and her sincerity struck me.

I hope I didn't get preachy.
I have cooler stories about getting stuck groggy in a what could have been a tropical storm at six in the morning, swimming with fish, falling in and out of perspective,

But what struck me about the trip, past the breast-beating and the evangelism, was the thing Miss Luvenia said to me. An old, black widow, hardly walking, telling me she'd rather be me.
And I told her that I'd rather be her.

That was the crux of it. I think. The crux of the whole trip, of my life so far. Or something.
Or nothing.

For those of us who lack faith, who struggle with the idea, or feel outside the club that already has meaning pre-attached because of the One Truth of their faith,

We have to find our own meaning. Miss Luvenia smiled and told me I'd be a good father.