12/16/10 a boring person
Well, you meet her and she usually wears a stained, faded shirt and has a cough from chainsmoking and all in the household--man, woman, dog--all are overweight, and her house across the street is in disrepair, the yard overgrown with weeds and scrub trees, and when she starts talking you just better clear your schedule because she has a lot to say and you are going to be there for a while. I have lived across the street from her for eleven years, and slowly over time, her amazing spirit has shown itself to me.

In one of my incarnations I would have found this woman boring. I would have been judgmental about her clothing, or her health, or how she talks about her husband the fabulous bus driver, or her sister, the institutionalized Down's Syndrome patient. I would have been dismissive and gone looking for someone who would thrill me with positive feedback and beautiful details. I would have been judgmental and mean-spirited, and I would have written something poetically disparaging about her. But here is what I have learned: Stir the pot long enough, and the soup is delicious. Shake the tree long enough, and a perfect golden pear will fall to the earth. Listen with interest to the heart of another person, and what you hear will be as holy as if it were the prophet Jesus himself speaking it. Here is what I learned about my unhealthy, long-talking neighbor, over eleven years of occasional listening:

She has given asylum to a ghost. The ghost wears a red shirt, which on her first description reminded me of the Italian revolutionary, Garibaldi. But no, my friend thinks of the ghost as Native American. She calls him the Chief, which might lead me to think she's racist, but given my friend's dark eyes and long dark hair, her vague, northern Minnesota lineage, which I think she's called part French, part Slavic, she could herself be native American. The ghost now stays in her house with her and wanders around her property, occasionally making ghostly comments on her relationships and life by knocking things off shelves or moving the laundry around. Prior to their current arrangement, the "Chief" used to wander around the neighborhood, playing pranks on people, like messing up their car or their trash cans, or driving all kinds of animals into a certain yard. The Chief doesn't do that anymore, now that he is cozy with my neighbor. In fact, he follows her instructions to the T, creating happy coincidences and beneficial meetings for various neighbors.

My friend has another magic power. Either that or she can summon angels at will. Here's how I know: She told me that her abusive first husband pushed her off the top of a 90-foot grain silo, onto a concrete slab on the ground. My friend describes grasping desperately at the external steel ladder as she plummeted, and breaking one or both of her arms to bits, and ruining her back, which has her disabled to this day. But she lived. She lived to tell about it. I think she has the magic power of flight, since she clearly was able to slow the speed of her drop to a fair hover by sheer mental effort (either that, or she called angels to her, who held her aloft as best they could during her fall). Part of why she lived was so that I could tell you her story, because she would be too modest to relate it herself.

My friend has a special relationship with babies and children. I have no idea what in her early life helped her form such beautiful and protective attachment to children. But she lost a baby once during a pregnancy, because of some other action by that first husband. And she is from a family of 10 children, and is herself, I think at least number seven if not higher in birth order. One thing she does to make something positive of her life, I think related to that loss of her baby, is that she volunteers to crochet clothing and burial gowns for poor and abandoned newborns in area hospitals. Also, she is a neighborhood mother hen, watching some kids after school and at the morning bus stop.

My friend has a special relationship with the disabled, or at least with her Down's Syndrome youngest sister, who is now close to 50 years old (my friend is a few years older). My friend finally obtained legal guardianship of her sister, after waiting for 30 years for her father, then her mother, to grow too old and/or ill to keep track of the sis. My friend has now systematically set about improving her sister's life, including getting the staff at her institution to teach her to read. That's right, my friend provided the right reading materials, incentive, medication change and devoted attention to allow a 50-year-old Down's syndrome illiterate to begin to read. To READ.

I truly think my neighbor is gifted and magical. But no more so than anyone else, than the people I ride the bus with and judge as boring, than my distant relatives who rarely communicate with me, than any person of any ilk who might read these words. We all have magic in our lives, in our stories, and it just takes patience--or eleven years of being neighbors, to bring it out.