Transcript

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

One of my strangest experiences as a kid involved an arts and crafts instructor at a summer camp. Let’s call her Laura. I enjoyed her morning classes and put in more effort than the other kids. At nine years old, I was deep into lanyard making and gluing macaroni on paper plates. Laura took a special interest in me. She overpraised my log cabin made out of popsicle sticks.

We ate lunch a couple times in her classroom. What did we talk about? I do not recall, but Laura was one of my favorite counselors that year. Laughable now, she supported my wish not to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in the talent show. We developed a bond.

On the last day of camp, she recommended some books to read; we hugged and said our goodbyes. I thought it would be for the last time. Then, one day in September, my mom told me that I was going to spend the weekend with my summer counselor. The camp had been a religious camp, which gave my mother comfort in my being with this stranger. Apparently, Laura phoned my mother to say it would be good for me to occasionally get out of my “dangerous” neighborhood with all of its challenges for a kid of my talent and gifts.

When she arrived, Laura showed up with her husband. Let’s call him Keith. We went to the King of Prussia Mall, then ate at a restaurant my family could not afford. I learned they didn’t have any children of their own but wanted a child. The following day, we ran errands, went to an arcade and then to the movies. Keith, who was enthusiastic to meet at first, eventually cooled and became distant. On Sunday morning, I came downstairs to hear them arguing. They stopped talking. I noticed her eyes were wet. We all went to church.

When Laura dropped me at home, she asked my mother to talk privately by the car. I ran inside. When my mother closed the door, she told my stepfather, “That woman just asked if she could have my son.” It took me many years to understand. Laura, who was white, took me on as her cause. She felt as if she were rescuing me out of a dark existence, acting out of some noblesse oblige.

Today’s poem points to how people’s sense of desolation and lack of meaning sometimes fuel a desire to save the world, work they go about with patronizing superiority and condescension.

Enlightenment
by Vijay Seshadri

“It’s all empty, empty,”
he said to himself.
“The sex and drugs. The violence, especially.”
So he went down into the world to exercise his virtue,

thinking maybe that would help.
He taught a little kid to build a kite.
He found a cure, 
and then he found a cure 

for his cure.
He gave a woman at the mercy of the weather
his umbrella, even though
icy rain fell and he had pneumonia.
He settled a revolution in Spain.

Nothing worked. 
The world happens, the world changes,
the world, it is written here,
in the next line,
is only its own membrane—

and, oh yes, your compassionate nature,
your compassion for our kind.

“Enlightenment" by Vijay Seshadri from THAT WAS NOW, THIS IS THEN © 2020 Vijay Seshadri. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press.