Tag Archives: safety

I’d Rather Mop My Church Than Go Home

Posted on by under Mess & Place

Every Saturday afternoon our church gymnasium transformed from a basketball court or hockey “rink” into a sanctuary. In fact, our church was little more than a gymnasium with a maroon floor and a few offices with thin carpets around it. If our church youth group was in charge of church set up in the afternoon, we’d sometimes play hockey in the morning, go out for lunch (Wawa hoagies were my personal favorite), and return to help with the set up.

However, some Saturday afternoons I joined adult home groups and Sunday school groups at church as they hauled out racks of chairs manhandled the wooden platform into place. I gravitated to the large wet mops that followed the dust mops along the floor, leaving a smooth, shining surface before we did the heavy lifting with the chairs and section dividers.

church seats-yahI’d also tag along with the church janitor if he ever needed a hand. I’d become so accustomed to helping out that when he went away on vacation, he hired me to take over for him. I brought along two friends who split the pay but made the work go much faster. This earned me a key to the church while still in high school.

There’s no denying that I like a tidy space. I like things in their place. I’m that person who rearranges the dishwasher with the big plates in the back, small plates in the front, bowls in the top center, and glasses on top sides. I’m the sweeper and the arranger of stuff in our home for sure, and I embrace that role. That isn’t all of it.

My high school years were tumultuous and divisive. Life at home was full of highs and lows. I didn’t just find friends or community at this Baptist church down the road from our house. I found a peaceful sanctuary. I wonder if I instinctively knew that I could relax in my church. It didn’t matter if I was listening to a sermon, playing hockey, or mopping the floor.

Looking back, I can see that I needed a place to be at rest, and when it feels like a divorce is tearing everything at home to pieces, it can be quite restful to set up a gym with 400 chairs in a semi-circle with a group of friends—or strangers. It doesn’t really matter. For some reason there’s nothing like walking into a dusty, chaotic gym and turning it into a clean, orderly space with carefully arranged rows of chairs and a backdrop of fake plants.

Mind you, I wouldn’t have complained if my church had sped up its transition into more contemporary music. In retrospect, the most relevant and relatable aspect of my church was the way I always felt welcome and at home. I’m sure our janitor could have worked a little faster without me tagging along, and I’m sure those set up crews didn’t need me to mop or set up chairs.

They didn’t need me, but they always welcomed me.

I just had to show up ready to use a mop or a move a few chairs.

I’ve read a lot about children who have parents go through a divorce and how they need an anchor. They need a stable place or relationships where they can feel a sense of peace and stability. For me, it was my church. My church was far from perfect, but for a season when I needed an anchor, it provided one when I needed it the most.

*****

Ed bio YAH

Big City Sidewalk

Posted on by under Guest, Memory & Place

In my forty-seven years, I’ve been all over the world, but all it takes are a few cues to haul me back to my childhood.

A certain sharp and damp and lumber-ish smell brings me to my grandparents’ farmhouse in Michigan (a smell it retains years after their deaths and despite my cousin’s attempts to eradicate it). Outcrops of red, grey, and black veins of Great Canadian Shield rock bring me back to camping trips and weeks at the cottage.

But the capital-P Place where I feel the instant settling of my spirit that says “home” is the big city sidewalk.

Settling the spirit might be an odd response to a place that’s loud and busy and can be crowded and chaotic, but that’s where I grew up: in the middle of the great city of Toronto, Canada. Truly in the middle: one block from the main north-south thoroughfare of Yonge Street, and two-thirds of the way up our subway line.Natalie sidewalk Toronto (1)

I was taking the subway by myself to school, walking ten minutes to church and seven minutes to the library, and biking three minutes to my choice of neighborhood parks by the age of nine. Despite my directional impairment (not a real disability, just a foible), I could get everywhere, because most streets were arrayed in an easy-to-understand grid. City sidewalks meant freedom.

They also meant relative safety, because there were always other people walking around, going about their business. I say relative because I was ten the first time an adult man cornered me in public and asked whether I wanted to have sex, and I can’t even count the number of catcalls I received. But these were annoyances, not threats. As long as the sidewalks were busy, I felt safe from serious harm. And they were almost always busy in our neighborhood, night and day.

In Grand Rapids, Michigan, the small American Midwestern city where I attended college in the late 1980s, there were no busy sidewalks. The busses stopped running at 5 p.m. The city center was an undeveloped ghost town. With no driver’s license and no car, I walked and took the bus or my bike – but only during the day. No people around at night meant no witnesses to possible danger, so I never went out alone after dark.

Every time I went back to Toronto during college, the first night, I’d head to the sidewalks for a walk by myself. Heat from the sun no longer rose off the cement, so the air was usually crisper. People didn’t rush the way they did during the day; they laughed and lingered on the sidewalk, which made a simple stroll feel like a celebration. It was my favorite coming-home ritual, better even than my first bite of a Coffee Crisp candy bar.

When I left Grand Rapids  for New York City, I vowed never to return. “Never” lasted five years. Today I’m back in Western Michigan, and while many great, big-city things are happening here now (a better bus system, tons of businesses downtown, and multiple arts festivals that draw crowds during certain times of year), busy sidewalks in my neighborhood is not one of them. Which made it tough when my daughter reached the age I’d been when I started to roam freely.

I wanted to set her free, but my experience on those city sidewalks I love so much taught me that men in the street can’t always be trusted.

If safety is in numbers, and there is no quorum of the public generally around, no shop owners always at their stores with well-lit windows, no nosy older folks sitting on their stoops or leaning out their windows to keep an eye on things– how could I let her go?

But I had to let her go forth on our empty sidewalks. Alone. I so valued my independence as a child, that I couldn’t keep her from experiencing the same sense of competence.

My solution, since I first let her travel alone to her friend’s house across the park at the age of nine, has been to make her take her bike, since she could get away from uncomfortable situations faster than she could on foot. But still. Can I confess that I’m relieved that her best friend now lives four houses up, so I’m 95% comfortable letting her walk over? But only 95%.

Now that she’s fourteen, I set her free as often as I can, and encourage her to head out with her squad. What will cue her memories of freedom when she grows up? It won’t be the big city sidewalks that I still daydream about, but I’m determined that it will be something.

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unnamed“Big City Sidewalk” is written by Natalie Hart. As the child of an entrepreneur, she only wanted a “normal” job when she grew up. Yet she’s wound up as a writer who is going all-in to indie publishing, simultaneously preparing a book of biblical fiction for publication this summer, and a Kickstarter campaign for a picture book for children adopted as older kids. Although she grew up in Toronto and Brisbane, and has lived in the mountains of Oregon and three of five boroughs in New York City, family and cheap real estate drove her to West Michigan. She blogs at nataliehart.com

 

Where I Came From: 5,000 Miles and Back Again

Posted on by under Welcome to You Are Here

When I was a little girl with two brown pigtails and bangs cut straight across my forehead, home was a grey-blue ranch-style house situated in the middle of Michigan’s palm. It was also a musty-smelling blue canvas tent, the sweaty brown vinyl backseat of a station wagon, and the open road, always leading to someplace new.

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If “home” is defined as a specific place, then my answer to “Where are you from?” is clear: I’m from St. Johns, Michigan, a town of about 12,000 people with a two-stoplight Main Street that’s anchored on the south end by a classic Midwestern courthouse. My parents still live in the house they bought when I was just five, and when we visit today, my own daughters sleep in my childhood bedroom.

All the kids who went to my elementary school lived in town like me, but by the time we were in middle school, our classmates were pretty evenly split between “town kids” and the “country kids” who grew up on surrounding farms. (My best friend Rhonda was a country kid with horses we rode on the weekends.)

Besides sleepovers and football games, there weren’t many parent-approved things to do for fun, at least not until we were old enough to drive the half hour to Lansing for date-worthy restaurants, movies, and malls. But St. Johns was a good place to be a kid. Growing up in a sheltered town meant plenty of freedom to bike everywhere—the city pool, friends’ houses, the library, and the bakery for custard-filled long johns. We didn’t wear helmets or lock our bikes—the only requirement was a wristwatch so we wouldn’t be late for dinner.

But even with such deep roots in a single place, I also grew up with an understanding of home that was nomadic: Home was wherever you stopped and pitched the tent when it was time to cook dinner. bluetent

My parents were both teachers, which meant summers offered more time than money. Flying from Michigan to visit relatives on the West Coast wasn’t in the budget, so each summer we packed up our wood-paneled station wagon and hit the road for about six weeks.

I was prone to carsickness, so there were just two ways I rode in the car: sprawled asleep across the backseat or awake and perched dead center, leaning forward until I was almost as much in the front seat with my parents as I was in the back. Luckily, my big brother was never the sort to draw a line down the middle of the seat and enforce it with punches or pinches. Besides, I think he was happy to let me chatter away to my parents, leaving him in relative peace with his books.

The ultimate destinations we drove toward—a visit with our grandparents in L.A. or our favorite cousins in Portland, a week spent hiking in Glacier National Park, or a few days exploring San Francisco—were well-worth the 5,000-or-so miles we covered each summer. But so many days were devoted to just getting there, driving through endless-seeming states like Nebraska or North Dakota, only stopping for gas, bathroom breaks, and to eat the sandwiches Mom had made at the campground that morning.

After a full day of driving, as the sun was lowering in the sky and Mom’s voice was hoarse from reading aloud Little House on the Prairie books, we pulled out a thick campground guide and chose a place to stay—with a pool, if my brother and I were lucky. At the campground, Mom pulled out the camp stove and started dinner while the rest of us got to work setting up the tent and filling it with sleeping bags and pillows. The next morning it all came down again, was packed back into the car, and we drove some more—to the next place we would call “home” for a night.

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Now, when I think about where I come from, I still envision that ever-present grey-blue house, first. I am very much a small-town Michigan girl. But it occurs to me that my rootedness in that place has always been filtered through an understanding of other places—of treeless plains and impressive peaks, of rugged beaches with magical tide pools, and of Chinatowns and subways, operas and contemporary art. I knew where I was back home in Michigan because I also knew where I wasn’t.

And in that sense, I come from places that protected me as well as places that exposed me—from a small Michigan town and big Montana mountains; from the inside of a station wagon, where my entire family was always close enough to touch, to a crowded San Francisco sidewalk where strangers pressed in as I absorbed glimpses of the world.

stationwagonPhotographs by William E. Tennant