people person
I joke and call myself a hoop jumper, me with my hair flying wild around my face and my exercise clothes still on from before carpool; me with a pen in one hand, and a mess of papers stretched across the desk in indistinguishable stacks, some paper-clipped, some loose and, as Kevin would say, “flapping in the breeze.” I put the phone on speaker and it chirps some scratchy music that sounds like it comes from a child’s piano. I shuffle the papers, flip open my laptop to start an online chat with someone else about glucose sensors that malfunctioned when our kids tried to put them on their bodies. Three dots move in the chat window like a pulse and the phone clicks and abruptly the tinny piano stops. No one speaks. I pick up the phone. “Hello? Hello?” I look to see that the numbers still ascend on the stopwatch counting the minutes of the call so I know I’m still connected.
Connected? What an odd word to use for these disembodied attempts to work together. For at least five minutes I hear nothing but silence on the phone. I begin to wonder if my call has been lost, held in perpetuity on some dusty phone in the hall at the Social Security Administration. Why dusty and why the hall? I admit to some preconceived imagination. Having been to our local office, I know that the waiting room feels like a gym locker room, that before COVID they lumped us together on long benches bolted to the floor, that we stared at corner mounted TVs announcing vague numbers and accusatory reminders, that before us we saw a row of windows and beyond that a field of desks, that on either side, two sterile hallways stretched. I know that the lady behind the glass talked on an old fashioned telephone, black, with a tangled, curly plastic cord, that she glared at a computer monitor that looked to be at least twenty years old, that she took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes with her fingers. But the emptiness of the silence conjures no face, just those long, aimless hallways, just that phone with the hold buttons flashing orange-red. I am not even in the waiting room. I am invisible.
“Hello? Hello?” I say again. It’s possible that after the silence stretches another ten minutes my call will simply be dropped, as though someone pauses in the hallway long enough to wonder why the button flashes, as if they push it and then just hang up. This has happened before. But this time, as if in answer, the kid with the piano begins to play again, a song that sounds like the preamble to the startling pop-out of a jack-in-the-box. I do feel like a monkey chasing a weasel. But at least, I seem to have found my way back into the funhouse. Suddenly I realize, with alarming embarrassment, that this shuffle between tinny piano and silence could be similar to the experience of my friends when they reach out to me. While I’m hoop jumping. We are a horde of hoop jumpers, all of us longing for acknowledgement.
The online chat guy, his name is Luis, types that since Adam is over 18, it would be better if Adam called about his own technical difficulties with his diabetes management devices. I am tempted to feel frustrated with Luis, who has no idea that Adam has Autism or that I have guardianship of him and all of that very big why, but I think of Zoe and I watch the dots in the chat window pulse, and I try to imagine Luis the person, Luis with a pulse I could feel beneath my fingers, with a life. I try to remember that Luis isn’t merely a gateway to something I want.
Zoe works at a big box store that sells home decor; she walks for miles; she grows strong ferrying rugs and furniture through the store and to the customers’ cars. She tidies the aisles after people browse and kids grab and shoppers randomly choose no all the way on the other side of the store, leave something–sometimes full carts–behind in the wrong department. She stands at the cash registers when the lines get long and helps ring up purchases, wrapping fragile items in paper, and sometimes not-fragile things that customers insist should be wrapped anyway. She likes her job, mostly, but she tells us that every day rude people bruise her with their blind and self-focused behavior. They snarl for no reason that she can see; they snip at her with sharp words; they expect no inconveniences. She tries to let this roll and slide and fall away, but eventually, shift after shift, it leaves her a little sore. She recognizes that to many of the customers she’s mostly invisible, a person, but not one really. They can’t imagine her in any other context, nor, as they walk around the store carrying all their hoops, do they have the energy or availability to try. They see her, but really they don’t. Not until they need something, which is when they open their eyes and begin to look around for someone. Despite the nametag, Zoe hardly has a name at work until someone feels unhappy. She knows, having been on the other side of the situation, that the customers mean no harm, that they are consumed by the chaos of their own responsibilities, by deadlines and stresses and even grief. She knows; but still sometimes she feels a little sore. She says we have no idea how much difference it makes when a patron goes out of their way to be kind; when they call her by name to say thank you; when they see that she’s just a person doing a job; when because she’s a person, they find her interesting. Sometimes those people come back in the store and say, “You helped me yesterday,” and talk to her like she’s a new friend. She says those are the people make the work feel a little easier.
So I think of her now, and I try to imagine Luis sitting in a cubicle somewhere wearing a headset. I try to see his face, his expressions as he responds to what I type, and I decide to forgo my impatience and frustration in favor of kindness. For a moment, I try to focus beyond the hoops. I wish that Adam could do that, Luis, I type.
And then a voice, finally, on the line at Social Security. I try to see her, try to see a face in my mind, try to see a person with a life beyond my needs, a person who could be bruised or built by my words. I ask her name, how her day is going. I smile on purpose while we talk, smile bigger knowing that if Riley were beside me she would ask why I am smiling at the papers on my desk. I smile hoping the agent will hear the smile in my voice, in some smoothness in the syllables that are shaped by my lips, that fall from my tongue. Can’t we hear kindness even if we can’t see it? I hear her smile on the other end of the line, and I’m sure: Even these disembodied conversations can make connections.
And as I hang up the phone, I think maybe I’ve given myself the wrong title; maybe I shouldn’t focus so much on all the hoops and all the jumping. I scan the desk, that mess of papers, and turning back to the computer to chat with Luis, I take a breath. I’m a people person. Let’s start with that.
