[When the student is ready the teacher appears.]

Next to the Porter Square subway entrance is a bus shelter often used by homeless people, their worldly belongings, crammed into black garbage bags, piled beside them as they sleep.

The other day I was walking on the sidewalk opposite that refuge just as a guy in a gray minivan was going the other way. Seeing that someone was asleep in that shelter, Minivan Guy honks. A “Hey, Loser! Wake up!” honk. A held-longer-than-usual-to-be-really-heard honk. (The homeless man did not stir.)

A paunchy, middle-aged white man, Minivan Guy’s grin, one part sheepish, three parts pleased with himself taught me something: This is what evil looks like. It looks like an overweight guy in a polo shirt, a father, maybe, doing something mean and nasty and feeling a little bit bad about it but mostly delighted to get away with it. (And a helpless, vulnerable victim versus a guy in a moving car isn’t exactly Fair, is it. But that’s what evil looks like, too.)

Like most privileged white people, I have spent much of my life bewildered by the heinous things humans have done and continued to do to one another. “How can people BE like that?” It is only now, in my sixties, that I am finally accepting that the possibility for cruelty lies within all of us. ALL of us.

Minivan Guy inflicted a brief, random, but consciously evil act.

Minivan. Mini-evil.

How easy it is, now, for me to extrapolate how beating up your wife, sexual abuse, anti-semitism, racism—you name it—happens.

[When the student is ready the teacher appears.]

The other day I was walking through Union Square feeling sad about my rapidly declining father, when a construction worker, singing “Hey, Jude” really, really badly, made me laugh out loud. Because he was so genuinely off-key but so equally genuinely into what he was singing, I took full advantage of my little old white-haired lady status by joining in. And (I am so glad none of my daughters were with me; they would have been mortified), I  waved my arms around in a futile, I-wish-this-were-a-Technicolor musical moment, vainly trying to encourage other Union Square pedestrians to join in.

“Take a sad song and make it better,” indeed!

A little background: For what feels like decades but has really only been a couple of years, Somerville Avenue, one of the city’s main thoroughfares and half a block from my house, has been under construction. Which has meant endless tie-ups, ear-shattering noise, sometimes, and ongoing daily annoyance. (Good thing I mostly walk or take public transportation.) So my attitude towards the guys in hardhats has been a little like someone living under occupation.( A little, I said. Okay?): When are you going to leave? When can I get my normal life back?

So that one of those construction workers should, by his guileless, horrible singing—he was loud, too!—crack me up, was a huge gift.

So what did this teacher in a hardhat teach me?

I heard his goofy, open-hearted song and thought: He hates this noisy, sweaty, sometimes dangerous, sometimes stultifyingly boring job. That’s why he’s singing. To get through it.

We don’t sing aloud, do we. Unlike those Technicolor musicals, we don’t burst into song. But that construction worker didn’t care. He sang, anyway. Even though he was terrible. So he taught me something about ART. Even badly done art. You do it because you can’t NOT do it.

The next time I wake up at 4:00 AM panicky because I’m scared  no one will love the book I’m writing, I’m going to remember that guy.

Bonus: My enormous relief to laugh showed me the depth of my sadness. (I don’t do sad very well.)

Good to know. And why I was so ready to laugh.

[When the student is ready the teacher will appear.]

Much as I am eternally grateful to Dr. Lynda Woodruff and Reverend Owen Cardwell for all they patiently and lovingly taught me, I need to give mega credit to Friends Meeting at Cambridge’s Friends for Racial Justice. For it was only because of FORJ’s workshops and discussions that I was (kinda) ready to be schooled by Lynda and Owen. So as I begin this month’s account of the teachers, mentors, and kind souls who’ve brought me along and brought me up short, a Quakerly fluttering of outstretched hands* for FORJ!

Fluttering your hands in the air is a customary Quaker sign of approval, a gentle and quiet substitute for clapping.