On: Working Urban
Colleen Rogers
Tomorrow I quit working in a
blight town, a town with the gravitational pull of stuck. It is the third such town of my professional
life. It is a town with a nickname that
sounds like a prison moniker. It is a
sad boil of a place, a town that is stitch scarred down the middle with the
trains that bisect it, annoying any commuter wrapped in the extension cord of
its joylessness. The town’s billboards
are of Gentlemen’s Clubs, Earning Money by Recycling, and Social Service
Agencies.
It is a town of contrasts—State-of-the-Art
Municipal Buildings aligned with homes of elegant
bones in disrepair, like cancerous ballerinas.
The hues of the town are a contrast of government functionality
(grey-browns), with the primary colors of New Delhi Yellow, Cranial Lava Red,
and Electric Cobalt Blue. It is a
jarring mismatch and a hodgepodge.
Vacant places are moss stained and shredded wheat boarded. Cramped, unsanitary bodegas sell uninspected
food, as do unsavory food stops with cigar stained windows.
The people who live there are like
the “Walkers” in Zombie films—they travel about, loud in their crazy, dodging
singed potholes and the hazards of snow piles that City has left
unaddressed. They hold on to chain link fences,
struggling with the balance of sooty bags as they shuffle home.
I taught children there. They were hustlers, scrappy and savvy, and
somehow older than me. They knew how to
get the best deals on electronic equipment, and all the workarounds and scams
in life that I was devoid of requiring.
We gave them lots of freebies—free computers, free educational programs
and handouts, and free ride scholarships.
I fluxed between feeling grateful for the extra assists they received,
and angry that they got things handed to them in the first place.
The students I taught were
talented…every performance I saw them give was more of a “proving” than
something spotty-theatrical. I would
wonder why all the show they had was never exhibited daily in class with a
consistent, non-stopgap demonstration of progress.
I have given my life to such
places, and I am tired. When I was
young, I felt the heart-tug of world-changing efforts, as do my young
colleagues now. They do not understand
why, in mid-year, I can no longer stay with the children we serve. It is just that my tenacious tendons of hope
have finally and definitively tight rope snapped.
I can no longer be an enthusiastic
advocate, and I realize that what is here cannot be changed. The visible reality belies the denial of
promise, and I find it difficult to watch my colleagues’ earnestness, knowing
what assuredly lies ahead.
Many days now I wish I had had the
comfy office. Piped in music, carpeting
beneath my feet, and janitors whisking away each crumb from my desk while I lay
asleep at home beneath satin sheets. The
harshness of my professional life has gone largely unappreciated, with work
heartily critiqued by bosses who failed to provide minimal support or any bolstering
accolades for effort.
I recognize now that the gentility
of some souls is not always a match for an urban shore. Perhaps some of us were not really meant to
“change” things in other neighborhoods, or assimilate ourselves into places
from which we did not come. Perhaps we do
so with the faulty belief that our lives are somehow more “advanced” than other
ways. What if we feel an erroneous compulsion to “instruct” others to follow
our lead? What if this is not the path
for many communities to take? What if
the established culture of the homes therein is truly the best life option for
the residents? What if our efforts to
assist are in actuality a meddling and unappreciated act of gift giving?
I do not know the answer to these
questions. I only know that I am
overwhelmed now at the thought of a life of futile service. I pray for a sign tomorrow that there might
be one small claim of victory that I might observe. I will need to count this, for now, as a
speck of vindication and a solitary moment of joy.
