Washed clean...

Some days, life gives you balance. Today started with me helping a young girl - Claire's age - surreptitiously retrieve her worldly belongings from her abusive boyfriend's place. I'd feel better about it if we hadn't done this same thing about six months ago. At that time, we brought Rob along, since it was thought that said boyfriend might become violent and she thought it would be good to have a man along, at least one with 911 pre-programmed into his cell phone. Thank goodness the boyfriend wasn't home that evening, and all went uneventfully. It was so clear back then. She needed out.

So, tell me, why were we doing this more than once?

This time, the boyfriend was at work. He lives in a converted section of his parent's garage. She asked me to go inside with her, "just in case," she said. The room is virtually windowless, with a small, filthy bathroom, and opens not to the outdoors, but to the garage itself. Two small lamps barely lit the room, making it impossible to find all the belongings she had kept there. But even with the lack of light, it was hard to miss the looming pile of beer cans and empty alcohol bottles that littered the center of the tiny space. What young girl could imagine that this could be right? How could this look attractive for even a fleeting moment? Who could imagine that they could fix this?

Our mission was accomplished, but I had a hard time shaking the mental picture of that room. And I had an even harder time shaking the picture of my young friend living there. With this guy. This slob. This abusive alcoholic. I felt like I needed to take a long shower. So did she. Or so she said.

That feeling lingered throughout the afternoon. But my day ended not with sadness and anger, but with joy and dancing. A friend from church has a grown daughter, Sandy, who is mentally handicapped. Each time I see Sandy she asks me to come to her group home and then, she says, we can go to Taco Bell and eat burritos supreme. So, tonight I went to Sandy's group home, we went to Taco Bell and we ate burritos supreme. She explained to me that she knew the Spanish word for "hello" which was "hola" and the Spanish word for "thank you" which, apparently, is "thank you." Then we went to Baskin Robbins for ice cream and called Rob so he could explain why he wasn't there with us (he's in Canada) and she could say, "I love you Robbie." We laughed and laughed, especially when she showed me how she is going to make ghost sounds on Halloween. When we went back to the group home, the lights were out, the strobe light was strobing, Shakira was singing "Shake Your Bootie" or something like that, and everyone was dancing. Sandy and I joined in and it was a moment of bliss that washed clean the earlier images of despair that had been swarming in my head. Shaking our booties in the dark with flashing lights and no one making much sense, somehow made a whole lot of sense.