The Stories
“Don’t let your passion project bankrupt you.” These were the words spoken to me by Malcolm White, head of the Mississippi Arts Commission when I first bought the 100 Men Hall. I tried to heed the warning during the first year of resurrecting the nonprofit but found myself caught up in the momentum of potential.
Then a pandemic halted my momentum. The Hall’s St Joseph’s Altar was cancelled, Chapel Hart was cancelled, Alvin Youngblood Hart was cancelled, Cedric Burnside was cancelled. At the same time, the little bit of my 401k I was funding this momentum with was decimated. And my passion project was shelved to wait out COVID-19’s trajectory.
In the halt of it all, a small amount of wonder opened up as well as my old work – investigative reporting – where I have plowed my trade for the past decades. I tried to leave it behind, but the work clings to me me like ivy and I accept its tendrils because it pays my bills.
Lamenting its return, I spoke with a friend yesterday who was also in a state of pandemic inquiry about her own work. She asked, “Didn’t you like it at one time?” Yes, I said, I have a talent and skill for getting folks to speak to me and I was rewarded handsomely for it in its heyday.
Sadly, the work now pays mere shekels of what it did ten years earlier as journalism has been eclipsed by the culture of free the Internet created. And since we all need money to survive, I must gladly accept its scraps.
But I have been wondering what is it about money and work that come together to make a good life?
Yesterday, I was interviewing an elderly widower for a project. We were finishing up, and the man said, “I have a story I want to share with you.” He told me of his wife’s decline, and how the week she passed, she sat upright and began speaking clearly and told him, ‘I’m okay. Don’t worry about me.” Then the day she was gone, a pink rose bloomed outside his window, its petals were larger and a deeper hue than the roses that surrounded it, and he knew it was sign she was okay.
He said, “Roger took a photograph of the unusually large rose and put it beside my chair with ‘I’m okay’ written at the bottom. I’m looking at it right now.” So I told him about a similar event in my life. My mother had lay dying in her hospital bed, and I asked her how I would know her from beyond. She said, “Dog.”
I wrote about it a long time ago in an essay titled My Mother The Dog:
Right after Tin turned one year old, he needed to have surgery to open his tear ducts because his eyes watered all the time. I had grown up with a doctor for a father and a nurse for a mother, so I had always entered the medical world with a knowledgeable person by my side. Now with both parents gone, in the post-operating room, as the nurses strapped my son’s little body down, and inserted into his thin arm an IV drip, I started panicking without my parent’s support. When the nurse wheeled the gurney away, I was ushered into the waiting room where I went to the window and began sobbing. “Mom, please, if you’re out there, please show yourself,” I whispered.
The window looked out to fenced backyards in a nearby subdivision. The yards had gas grills, patio furniture, soccer balls, and bicycles. I felt sure I would spot a family’s dog, but there were no dogs to be seen. I sat down in the dull orange fiberglass chairs and stared vacantly at the television screen turned to a daytime talk show. One after another commercial came on, and not one had a dog in it. I kept repeating under my breath, “Mom, where are you? Please take care of him. Please be with him.”
I went around to each table and thumbed through magazines. I grew a little alarmed because there was not one image of a dog on any page. How could this be? I was starting to think that no dog was the sign. By the time the nurse came through the doors to tell me Tin was fine and now in recovery I was tied up in a knot of worry.
When we arrived home, Margarete, his nanny, was waiting for us. Together we put Tin into his crib. She put her hand on my shoulder, and I almost started crying again from relief that this whole operation was behind us.
I stood by the video monitor outside Tin’s room watching him as he lay quietly in his crib.
“He’ll probably sleep for a few hours,” I told Margarete.
I went upstairs to my desk. I let out a few deep breaths that I had been holding onto since before dawn when I had gotten up to take him to the hospital. I set about my work, turning on my computer, opening emails, and then began my phone interviews.
An hour passed quickly, and I hadn’t heard anything, so I went downstairs to check on Tin. Margarete was sitting at the dining room table with her sketchbook open.
I walked over to the video monitor. Tin was sleeping peacefully on his stomach.
“How’s he doing?” I asked.
“He’s fine,” she said.
“Good,” I said. “Whew! I feel like I need a nap after that ordeal.”
Margarete smiled and continued sketching in her book.
I refilled my water bottle, and started to head back upstairs.
“It’s funny,” Margarete said as I opened the door. “After you left, Tin barked like a dog for about 20 minutes before he fell asleep.”
I told the widower about how I had been trying to adopt a child and my mother was dying in ICU, and she died on a Monday and the following Monday I met my son. He said he and his wife had adopted a son too – Roger, the one who took the photograph of the rose.
When I hung up the phone, my eyes glassy with tears, I realized this work I have dismissed has always paid me handsomely in stories. If you listen to stories, you could piece together what makes a good life. And then you too could suss out a life that even the rich aspire to live.
