Click clack

Someone is usually knitting at Quaker meeting. Sometimes multiple people. Once, during 'Meeting for Business,' I saw three women sitting on the same bench in a row, all knitting away, in varying stages of 'done-ness.' The three of them looked like an image someone might have put on a T shirt, back in some simpler time– eyes made invisible through glasses, some folksy slogan written beneath.

Sometimes it's quiet enough to hear the sound they make, this tiny click clack, click clack, click clack. It's a good sound. Steady people turning something into something else. Or, really, turning many things into Something.

This morning, on a walk, I ran into a guy in my neighborhood who I had only just met. We both volunteer in a neighborhood group that monitors our local Home Depot for ICE, and had shaken hands briefly a few days before--him standing brightly at one entrance, me on the way over to another, heart pounding, as it always does.

I have been walking in my neighborhood for 7 or 8 years, and could count on one hand the times I've run into someone I know. This morning, it was, in some substantial way, wonderful to see him.

A few weeks earlier, when I was arriving for another shift, a young woman volunteer looked at me with that squinty, thoughtful, "I-know-that-I-know-you" face. It took her a minute. We realized that we live in the same building.

During my brief Home Depot shifts--an hour or less at a time--my system is in a kind of active agitation. I spend every minute somewhere between a little nervous and actively afraid.

Once, when a potential ICE vehicle was parked and idling, I knew I would eventually have to knock on its window, to confirm one way or another. Knowing this, anticipating it, I froze like a deer.

I am aware of this freezing instinct in myself. It is what kept me from showing up to the Home Depot for weeks after I had signed on, and has kept me from many other things. I said--then, as now--that it was because I was busy. I was actually just afraid--of freezing, of doing the wrong thing, of somehow irreversibly fucking things up.

Another volunteer–a young woman, probably a foot shorter than me, who rides her bike to her shifts—sensed my trepidation, in that parked-car moment. She said, "Want me to come over there, and we'll to go together?" It is a sentence that I keep hearing in my mind.

I spend my shifts counting down the minutes, watching the road, feeling the beating of my own heart. I hope--and believe--that as I wait, and watch, hearing the rhythm, that the scattered things, my loose and blowing edges, are becoming something new.