stories from the tri-met...

this weekend, I rode the tri-met a few times headed in and out of Portland for CityFest. riding the bus can either be extremely uneventful, or full of all kinds of surprises. Our first bus-ride was the first, pretty uneventful...as was the second, not much going on, so I read the various poems tri-met posts on their buses to keep people entertained. some of those poems are good, some of them aren't...and some don't make a lot of sense...i'll post one i saw on my last ride in a bit...its of the good variety.

but i wanna share a story from the 3rd trip on the bus...when i met a young man who commented on how he liked my shoes and we started chatting. he said he was from Jersey and we got nostalgic and shared a few stories about the east coast and then i asked him about how he got to Portland...at this point in our conversation, all things were normal...he was dressed a bit different, but its Portland, everyone is dressed different...when i asked him about how he got here he responded,

"Oh, that's a long story. Let's just say don't eat an avocado from a stranger in the park."

hmm, i don't like avocados, so i figured i was safe. and then his eyes lit up his voice went high, he started giggling and said, "it just might have some ACID". ok, this is going to get interesting...

we chatted a bit more, i asked him about how he was doing now, said he'd been in various hospital psych wards and detox places, i enquired as to his current state and he said he was headed back because he thinks he messed up his meds (oh boy). and then he asked me, "you ever been to detox?" thankfully, no, no i haven't. he said, "good, don't do it man. i think they experiment on you in there, give you all kinds of weird drugs and stuff. i mean, i was in there and i came out speaking some kinds of tongues or weird languages i've never heard before..." and in case i doubted his new skill, "...zabazimflagumshadophabustanacka...see, i don't even know what i just said."

huh, yeah, me neither.

he quickly looked up and said, shoot, that was my stop. and that was our third bus ride. i pray he made it safely back to the hospital and is getting the help he deserves as a creation of God.

the last bus ride had a poem that i'd like to share with you to close this post out. i have just finished reading Walter Bruggeman's Prophetic Imagination, and I'll post on that at some point once i've digested it more, but reading this poem brought much of it to my mind. anyway, it's by a poet named Jane Bailey, and it's called "For Larry"

I believe in the rule of opposites,
that the two sides of a coin
are loss and greater loss, that grief dribbles
out of the bottle as effortless as joy,
and if you scoop up everything sad,
your hands will discover the texture of hope.

...the texture of hope...beautiful.