“What’re ya havin’ baby?”
Sunday, February 19th, 2012It’s only 9:30 am, but today is already one of those days when I find it easy to love New York because of how often mundane becomes profound here. I got a free coffee from the bodega for being “a teacher who is a very important woman.” Nice. Then I got a seat on an uptown 4 train at peak work commute time.
Exactly opposite the car from me was a black woman I guessed was about 50 and a white guy whose age was hard to determine because he obviously had the mental abilities of a young child. His hair was gray and his face lined, but oddly so–these weren’t laugh or worry lines. The skin looked old, but his face didn’t look worn out from use. He had no teeth and his tongue was roaming freely around the bottom half of his face. His eyes blinked rapidly like he was in a constant state of surprise. The woman he was with murmured to him soothingly once in a while, always calling him “baby.” “We’re getting off at 125th St–okay, baby?” “Don’t drink the juice yet, baby, I’ll tell you when it’s time.” Every time she spoke, he nodded and smiled. This was obviously the routine.
The word “baby”–how she said it, like she was the nurturer of the whole world, and with that deep, gravelly kind of voice that white women never get, no matter how much soul they have–transported me back to the summer of 2001. I was about to be a senior in college and I spent 8 weeks as an intern in Rep. Tom Allen’s DC office. At the time, I imagined that I would have a meteoric rise as an operative in left-of-center politics, and I was so innocently passionate about it that even opening huge piles of constituent mail seemed like an important part of the work of democracy. Ultimately, I became pretty disaffected with the political system as it and went another way, but the brightness of that season, of sudden awareness of being young and smart and of the world revealing itself, sticks with me.
That same summer, my dad checked in to the Caron Foundation, a residential rehab in middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania. The contrast of our reasons for being away from home for the summer was unsubtle. Surrounded by new friends with whom I shared a sense of mission but no history, it was usually pretty easy, publicly anyway, to compartmentalize what was going on with my family. But privately, where it counts, I had hours of feeling all alone in the world. That feeling was one of the life lessons of that summer, too. Whatever static there has been with my dad’s drinking, it has never interfered with the signal that the things I do and say and think are deeply important. Understandably, Caron significantly restricts its patients’ ability to communicate with the outside world, but I felt like he was taken away from me at the very moment when I was doing, saying, and thinking things important by anyone’s standard.
There are two things that I remember from that summer that comforted me intangibly and viscerally. The first is the National Gallery of Art. (The free admission to all museums makes DC’s 10% sales tax seem a little less outrageous.) I was an art history minor in college basically for the quality of life boost. I wanted access to images and artifacts that would make me feel things I wasn’t expected to explain. I went to the museum several times that summer (the way these things go, I’m sure I remember going more often than I actually did, but it was more than twice anyway) and walking aimlessly through the galleries gave me a profound sense of being a part of a history of struggle and beauty that is noble and worthwhile.
There is a woman who worked at the pizza counter in the House cafeteria who I saw almost everyday. In my mind’s eye, she looked just like the woman caring for the retarded man on the subway this morning, but she probably didn’t. She did call absolutely everyone “baby,” though, with the same easy, nurturing lilt. When my internship was over, my parents and I were reunited in DC for a couple days. I was incredibly proud to show them all the important places and people and things I knew about, but one of the most lasting memories of those days happened at the pizza counter when my dad stepped up to get a slice.
“What’re ya havin’, baby?” she asked.
“It’s been a long time since anyone has called me ‘baby,’” Dad said.
Her mouth curled into a smile like she had a secret. “I call e’erybody ‘baby’…tha’s mah favorite word.”
It would be the most I would ever hear her speak, but the word “baby,” the way she said it, is all bound up with my sense of the cycle of disappointment and forgiveness and renewal that makes human relationships possible.
Back to sitting on the train while the Upper East Side raced by, studying this unlikely pair. I suspected that the man might be nonverbal, but he surprised me by pointing to me and one other woman who was sitting two or three people down from me and saying, “I like her…and her.”
“Of course you do, baby,” she said, smoothing his hair. He looked at both of us again. “Yes.”
Then I became aware that he was reaching out his arm across the aisle, and I admit I felt a little uncomfortable for a fraction of a second because I couldn’t make sense of it. But when his hand moved into a horizontal fist, I understood. He was reaching out for a fist bump. The woman knew, too, and she laughed a deep, throaty, knowing laugh.
We bumped and shared a smile and I was connected again to what I knew in the summer of 2001. We are all babies in some way, because of how huge and complicated and terrifying and beautiful the world is. The comfort is in knowing that that world is constantly reaching out to us, constantly offering another insight, another chance.