There is no history, only biography

I. Intro

I had a decent metaphor earlier today for what it will be like to leave Charlotte, a shoe emerging, muddy and dripping, from a deep puddle...but mud carried too many wrong connotations, just like homelessness.

There is a difference between a contextual love and a boundaried love: this is something I am trying to learn.

I decided to buy a house for its windows, moved in, then promptly thought of all possible ways to cover them up. The homeless have no curtains to hide behind and are known by their role, not their name.

II. Neighbors

Everyone in rehab has a biblical name.

When Sara was fifteen she was raped by a nameless boy, then ran off to marry her Louisiana sweetheart, and lived her lifetime over as his wife. One night when he went wandering, like a deer, eyes glistening in the headlights, stunned and stationary; with a quick chug, he was sliced out of her life forever, as easy as paper through a paper cutter. Freighting nothing but a severed family, a drug addiction, a forfeited business, and four years living in a tent, the train came plummeting. Sara has not seen her kids in eleven years; that’s twenty-two times as long as she’s been sober and over seventy times as long as her puppy Daisy has been alive—last week she spent the best ten bucks she ever spent on that furry pillow of a heartbeat that she fed with regular milk from a baby bottle; ten bucks for little lungs to make her feel needed and to help keep her clean.

Matthew is a short man with deep dimples, and a gentler, more patient voice than you’d expect from a man who’s spent twelve years in prison for a crime he did not commit and a man whose bunkmate was filleted like sushi grade tuna in his sleep, and a man who slept for a year in orange traffic barrels to keep away from snakes. He spends afternoons building a church out of children; their love, shown in a handshake and kind word preparing shelter for future bodies to dwell in.

Samuel used to fly jets with the Special Forces in Vietnam,and is now convinced that his nurses are selling his dirty briefs instead of washing them, and pocketing the money. He misses everything about his wife who passed seven years ago and misses New York, tells me he accidentally fell in love with me, and invites me to return with him to find his fortune of $750, 000 he buried somewhere south of Albany—the ground being, of course, the only appropriate place for money these days.

Mark's forehead sweats like a cold Gatorade bottle on a hot day when he eats red sauce and the men tease lawyer Luke about his executive status and ignorance of can openers. He likes to make a lake out of the kitchen floor being, after all, a champion swimmer. And his best friend, also Luke, a man with the brownest eyes I have ever seen, is obsessed with personal fitness, and maintains his mohawk with sexually innuendoed hair geland holds my hand a little longer than all the others do when he shakes it.

Joseph’s head is covered by a cul-de-sac of hair, and a thin braid runs the length of the valley between the tendons on the back of his neck. He talks quickly, and seems to be missing all of his top teeth. One week he found out the spelling of my full name; and the next, when I noticed a swirl of incongruous red scrawl in the bottom right corner of a canvas in the dining hall, a painting of a white swan on a lake, signed with my name, I didn’t know whether to be scared or flattered.

Sampson is a stunning array of towering muscles and a short shock of dreadlocks, and though he is old enough to be my father, treats me with the respect of a little sister, forfeiting opportunities to spike a volleyball in my face for the chance to commend my hit, show me he’s proud of me, demonstrate that he knows my name.

Jacob is biologically the teenage father of beautiful baby Ariana, but showed up at her birth high and without identification, so was left off of the birth certificate. He risked getting kicked out of the program to sneak upstairs to show me a picture of her soft lily face, to make me understand that she was his, or that he was hers, or to make me part of their story.

A handshake means everything when it is all that you have.

Storytelling is the best seller

Here at Hands On Charlotte our mission is to strengthen our community and enrich lives by mobilizing a diverse, committed corps of citizens in direct volunteer service.

But, why?

The purpose of this blog is to explore that very question. Here we will post your experiences of engaging in the mission of community involvement.

SEND US YOUR STORIES! Let us in on the joy, struggle, dirt, frustration, and fun of your volunteering experiences. Tell us why you do what you do. We want to know, and we want everyone else not only to have a chance to hear about it, but to experience it, too.

www.handsoncharlotte.org