first creative writing assignment

i'm so overwhelmed by getting my costumes loaded out yesterday, shopping, homework all day today, then tech tomorrow, classes and dress rehersals the rest of the week... i'm going over to g's tonight for hairwaxing, though. and to see jess's ballet. in the meanwhile, writing from other sources for you.
we have to write a paper on our reflections about an artifact in our house. here's the first half.
FINAL VERSION 23 march 04:
Life in a homeless shelter is not an easy one. Regardless of the circumstances that bring you there, all struggle together. Things that you thought were so basic are now fiercely coveted commodities. Toilet paper is never stocked. Cheese is too expensive- food money goes to milk for the babies. All the bread and vegetables are expired cast offs from grocery stores. The neighborhood is too unsafe; you can’t go out after dark. Even the 51st street bus stops running at seven, and it’s not safe to walk the block and a half to Ashland.
The shelter should provide a cloistered feeling of comfort, but it doesn’t. The old building used to be a monastery, and it is like much of the neighborhood-- ancient beauty turned decrepit and falling apart. The heat occasionally goes off. The transom windows don’t work. The pluming is unstable.
The community inside is also a picture of something that could be beautiful, but just isn’t working anymore. A wishy-washy director and her tyrant husband create all sorts of unstable relationships. Communication is not always successful between the Spanish speaking families and the mostly English speaking workers. It isn’t always successful between workers themselves. Striving for consensus leads to a lack of absolute decisions. Trying to live as disciples of Jesus leads to forgiveness rather than absolute rules with consequences. The families try to leave as soon as possible, getting real homes. The workers try to stay as long as possible, fulfilling their terms of service.
I came to Su Casa through the Brethren Volunteer Service. I knew I wanted to work in a large city, and Su Casa sounded like a loving community on paper. I liked the idea of the families and workers all living together in the same way under the same roof, eating and praying together. The house was founded under the Catholic Worker philosophy, where people try to model their lives after Jesus, and live in the world but not of it. The best way of facilitating this change is to create a new society in the shell of the old one, they believe. While I thought this philosophy was new and exciting, I found in practice for it not to be a practical way to live.
The experience put me on the defensive, and I retreated into myself. I was so focused on self-preservation I didn’t always notice those around me going through similar experiences. Ruth was part of the same volunteer program I was, and after training together, we chose to come to Chicago to serve together. As a German, she was for me an escape from the Hispanic culture surrounding us. In many ways, she seemed the only sane person I knew in the whole city.
I'm not sure what made Ruth choose Su Casa as her project, or even why she chose to volunteer at all. Her English was a tenuous when she first arrived, although by the end of our year of service, her Spanish was better than mine. She says now that the language difference helped things roll off of her more easily than if she could fully understand them.
She is tall and unbelievably skinny, with pointy bony joints and a wild mop of curly red hair, and has boundless energy to match. While I tried to hide from life there, she tried to solve problems by working: babysitting, reorganizing the kitchen, driving people all over the city. What I remember most about her is her hands: her long knobby stick-like fingers, digging in the dirt, playing the viola, trying to get her point across, wrapped around her camera, picking the tofu-blueberry crepe bites directly out of the frying pan. She would inevitably get burnt, and she would swear and dance around the kitchen, and still never use potholders.
I think that everyone had ways they escaped from life at Su Casa. Our stipend was seventy dollars a month, and so we had to be creative about our entertainment. We couldn’t afford to buy CDs, but Ruth went to Virgin Records mega store every weekend and listened to her favorite albums on the listening stations. Her favorite one I bought her for her birthday, but she was much more creative with her gifts to me.
In the summertime, the whole house traveled to the beach. The juxtaposition of sand and skyscrapers has always fascinated me. We would bury babies in the sand, swim in the lake, and build sandcastles. One afternoon when we both happened to have the afternoon off, Ruth and I went by ourselves and had a picnic on the rocks. We waded and collected tiny shells the waves had left.
Often, just leaving the house made a difference. The church next to the monastery had been abandoned and was a magnet for drug dealers, and so it had been knocked down and turned into a community garden. Ruth spent most of the summer working in the burms; occasionally I would watch her from my window, a pair of rolled up jeans and elbows in the middle of all that green, and I’d think Chicago was an amazing place. One day as I arrived in the office I found on my desk a little pile of rosebuds she had dried for me.
Being on the Southside, the nearest ritzy community was Hyde Park. Ruth spent even more of her time volunteering at the Hyde Park Art Center in exchange for lessons. She ended up taking pottery and photography classes. Photographs are flat, and she took all her amazing black and white views of unseen areas of the city with her when she went home to Germany. But most of her pottery wouldn’t fit in her luggage, and she bequeathed much of it to me.
Ruth had borrowed a viola from the violin-playing Dorothy. Occasionally they would play together, and raucous laughter and sometimes melodic music would be heard in the staff lounge. It wasn’t until I visited Ruth at her home in Germany that I saw this was for her a link to the comfortable past. Her mother is a music teacher, and their cozy German living room has all sorts of string instruments hanging on the walls.
It all feels like such a long time ago. It’s been five and a half years since I arrived at Su Casa, four years since I met Ruth’s family, two months since I last saw Ruth, and sat in her living room, on the other side of the world. My reminices on my first year in Chicago are not particularly fun memories to go back to. I have my own place now, but with some candles on an end table, I have a little handmade bowl filled with seashells, dried rosebuds, and a coiled up violin string.
The bowl is small and shallow, only about three inches in diameter and an inch high. It has gently sloping sides and a rounded lip at the top. The sides are a seafoam green glaze, which blends in the base with a periwinkle sky blue. The rosebuds in it no longer smell, and they are fragile, crumbling to dusk if touched with more than the lightest hand. They are an odd dried color, not a dead brown or lively pink, but more a faded quiet shade of rose, appropriate to their current state. They are mixed with the white seashells, which are unbelievably tiny. They are like baby’s fingernails, these perfect spirals a quarter inch in length, some riddled with holes speaking of their previous hard life in Lake Michigan. On top of them all is the silver ring of violin string, so pliant and flexible, coiled around and around itself until it forms a two-inch ring, the frayed end unraveling and jutting out the side.
I pile these memories all together in this one place, mixing the objects as the memories are mixed in my mind. The most uncomfortable rub shoulders with the truly beautiful. It happens every time I notice this little bowl of treasures. It reminds me of my Character Building Experience, reminds me to think of those without homes or families or cheese, and reminds me that even in dark days there are amazing moments when people and places reveal loving connections.

to be edited. it's late now. i took too long over dinner, and my hair's ungooed. sad. the ballet was good though. other than joe's hand occasionally brushing me when he put his arm around g. things are really prickly between him and me right now, and i don't know why. but things are prickly between me and everyone. don't know why g still likes me. i feel like such an outside part of her life, and like she knows so little of mine, but whatever. i'm stressed, i've got so much work before my life is sucked away by tech tomorrow and onward.