Tears

Today I made two people cry.

No I didn’t tell them bad news. No I didn’t yell at them.

In fact, the opposite.

I told one man that he was a talented writer, that the stories he had to tell were very much worth telling. We were sitting across from each other in the penitentiary’s visiting room. He is 37, convicted of aggravated murder and serving a sentence of life without parole. There are many other things to know about this man, some that will scare you, some that will crack open your heart. But what I want to tell you now is that when I told him how I felt about his abilities, he looked down at the floor and was silent for a long moment. When he looked up, his eyes were brimming with tears.

“I don’t cry,” he said. “I don’t ever cry.”

He said it had been a long time since someone believed in him, that he no longer believed in himself.

A few hours later I was helping to serve meals at Food for Lane County’s innovative Dining Room—not a soup kitchen but a service-at-the-table, cloth-napkin restaurant-style venue that feeds as many 300 hungry people a day. A woman at one of my tables had finished eating and was sitting, staring into space. It was not a dreamy stare. She sat like that for close to ten minutes, almost motionless. I asked if she was okay, if there was anything she needed.

She looked at me hard, like she was trying to remember if she knew me (no) and then if she wanted to engage with a stranger (yes).

“I was taught to trust people,” she told me. “But they take advantage of that. They see I trust and they use that.”

A woman living on the streets, living on the edge. Of course she is right to be cautious, to protect herself, to present as less vulnerable than she feels, than she is. I didn’t know what to say. But I had to say something.

“I hear you,” told her. “I understand as well as I am able to. But I have to tell you, I think most people are good. Most people are good.”

‘I want to believe that,” she said. “I wish I could believe that,” she said. “I no longer believe that,” she said. And then she cried.