Meek

I yelled at PJ this morning. Yelled might be too harsh a word. I admonished him. I would like to say, and even believed in the moment that my words were meant to teach. You see, he was using a flat shovel, a big wide one like you might use to scoop snow. I use this to load living chips from the back of my truck and into a wheelbarrow. 

PJ jammed the damn shovel into the center of the pile and grew more and more frustrated with each attempt. I lay down cardboard on the other side of the fence, peeked through the slats to watch him like a probation officer on double duty. I, who for days, for every time we worked, told him to slow down, and now I wanted this faster. I would walk out to him and show him again how to scoop the lip against the metal of the truck bed and then rock the scoop back and forth until more chips fell.

His face got redder and redder each time until he said, “I’m about to leave. I’m about to walk off this job.”

That didn’t feel good, driving him to that response, but this is something that is still inside of me, and if I look deeper maybe this started with our arrival. The lady for whom we worked somehow thought we were going to remove all the sand that had been laid down by whoever built this new house. This after I sent her a detailed estimate describing exactly what we would do.

Rather than address the feelings that arose as a result of that, I instead silently judged another man and led him to a place where he was about to explode. I realized this. I told him I shouldn't have talked to him that way.

He said, “I was about to leave. I was wondering where those train tracks led to. I’m thinking where the hell am I gonna go. I don’t have a car. Nothing.”

“I didn’t have the right to talk to you like that.”

“I understand.”

“I know,” I said. “But I will try to do better.”

I don’t know if PJ was born in a barn. I only know this is a question asked to those who constantly leave doors open. I don’t know the history of this phrase. I know PJ shared his trail mix with me. I know I bought him coffee with dollar bills I found in my pocket after picking up the coffee grounds from down the street.

PJ worked hard moving living chips. We spread these across two hundred and sixty feet on a day when the clouds were on our side. I learned that sometimes I do best in conversations when I am silent. I learned that when I can admit my wrongs right away they are easier to swallow. I know life must be strenuous inside the head where PJ often lives. And I know that for me to survive I must try to find myself in others.

I can only imagine how my consistent micromanagement would have made me feel. I know in the way I tried to come up with solutions for a compost box and was met with problems for every suggestion. She had a corrugated tin roof on the old one with cinder block sides. Our space was not big enough for three sets of cinder blocks. I suggested walls of tin so that the compost would not touch the wood.

“What if I cut my fingers?” she asked.

PJ sprayed the living chips beneath which the seeds of daikon radish spoke to me, told me they would try to dig deep through the sand and sacrifice themselves in order to offer life to what did not exist. This sand may have once known a river, may have known the carcass of a fish, and now was only bits of glass, shards so small it would take a microscope. This sand, these particles, some of them dreamed of passing through both ends of a worm. They dreamed of becoming vermiculite, even though they never knew the word.

I dreamt of being a conduit, a silent messenger, a man who might share his mistakes in order to help others avoid the same.

You want to know the best design for getting your way? Don’t have a way.