Human Clay

I was thinking today about a woman I met a while back. I’d been filling in for the teacher in my Core Training class. The class has gotten fairly popular recently and gets pretty crowded. But back then, only a few of us die-hards would show up on a regular basis. And on that particular day, there was only one woman besides me. Needless to say, it was an easy class to teach! 

So it was that the two of us talked a lot for that hour. And somehow we ended up on the topic of how/where/when we grew up. She, it turns out, was raised in New York City where her first nineteen years were spent in an apartment. She talked about how it felt to live sixteen stories up. How the sound of the street was non-existence and how safety was in height.

She told me about when she’d gotten married, taken straight from daddy’s arms into those of her new husband and how the first thing they did was to move. Out of the city and into the suburbs where her one story, single family house freaked her completely out for the first few months. She told me how terrified she was of being at ground level, to hear traffic on the streets outside. To know that the window of her bedroom was all that separated her from the potential stranger lurking somewhere out there.

How odd that I never considered a lifestyle so different from my own. So different from the farm where I was raised, where safety was in distance not in height. In being close enough to the earth to touch the dirt with my bare feet. To walk outside and get lost in the silence of trees and orchard and land and sky . . . for as far as the eye could see.

I tried to place myself in her setting: a taxi cab at the curb instead of an old, rusty truck. Skipping along crowded sidewalks to get to school rather than that one mile walk along a country road where a car might pass on occasion. Tall buildings that reach toward the clouds and crowd the horizon like they own it. As opposed to those endless almond trees, grape vines and barbed wire fences stretching on and on to infinity.

To a certain extent, we’re all carved and shaped by our beginnings. Formed into the persons we become by the mold of our surroundings. I could no easier imagine being rooted in the city than she could envision living out her youth on the farm. And yet, there we both were, together in Tim’s Core Training Class in Houston,Texas, flung together by life, time, age. And possibly the shared need to transcend our flabby middles—a shape we now shared . . . regardless the earlier molds we were cut from.