Bedside observations

I was at a conference recently and one of the small group discussions I was a part of kept coming back to the ineffectiveness of doing everything through committees. There were all sorts of examples given to support this notion. At the end of the discussion the kind lady sitting next to me said, “We really need to form a committee to deal with this.” I felt my belly start shaking and the laughter about to pour out at her joke when I looked into her eyes and realized she was not joking. “We need to form a committee to dismantle the committees?” She answered with no sense of the obvious irony, “Yes, it is the only fair way to distribute the workload or else nothing gets done.” It was one of those rare few times in my life that I was absolutely speechless. It sounded like the alcoholics I encounter who go drinking to celebrate their 30 days of sobriety. I am not without sin here. I have gone to Pizza Hut to celebrate how well I have been doing on a diet before. Sometimes it is simply hard to let go of old ways of seeing reality. We get stuck viewing things the way we have always seen them. Sometimes it takes an outsider’s perspective to help us see things in a whole different light. Yesterday offered such an encounter for me. Every Monday in June and July a group of teenagers from a local camp come to the shelter to do a service project. I usually begin with a tour of the facilities and then turn their eager hands loose on a project. One young lady who is one of the camp counselors said to me on the tour, “You can read a person’s life by that person’s bedside table.” I was intrigued by what she meant by that. She said that she could learn everything she really needed to know about her campers by looking at their bedside essentials. “It’s the last things you lay down at night and the first thing you grab in the morning. It’s what is important to you in the middle of the night when you are alone.” She said that she had been noticing the different collections of things on the headboard shelves of each bunk in the shelter. I was too busy to really think about it then, but when I came home I took a close look at my bedside table. I had to agree with her opinion. My side of the bed is lined with rows of books that spill out into the floor. My wife’s is lined with technology. There is a time warp running through the center of our bed with two different centuries represented on either side. Mine is the Amish side. My wife and I have matching lamps on our bedside tables, but that is all they have in common. I have the same alarm clock that I used over twenty years ago to wake up and go to high school. I do not think that means I am cheap. I simply believe if something works it does not need to be replaced. I keep my Bible and my Book of Common Prayer beside my bed along with loads of antacid. I have one of the crosses that I wear and I usually have a rock or a fossil. I find comfort from both and I sleep better if I have something 300 million years old beside me. (Yes, I could make a wise-ass remark about my wife’s age here, but she occasionally reads this blog and I do not want to disrupt the cozy time warp previously mentioned.) I also usually have a copy of the latest book I am reading on my bedside table. Right now it is A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet’s Future by Roger S. Gottlieb. I also have two large North American Road Atlases beside by bed. I have always kept road maps close by. They are for me what the old Sears and J.C. Penney catalogs were for my grandmother. She used to just look at them to dream and wish. I have an odd compulsion that has been with me for years. Whenever I see a calendar photo or a television show of somewhere that has really beautiful rock formations, I have to look it up on the map, calculate how long it would take to drive there from here and then it usually ends in depression because I have to be back at work on Monday. They are as much an atlas of my dreams as they are major travel routes. The young lady was right. I had never seen it that way before, but bedside tables are windows into the psyche.

I arrived at the shelter this morning and began to apply this new insight. I realized that I am often simply looking to make sure that each room is clean and everything is in proper working order. I looked on the beds in the women’s shelter and saw school books from a couple of the young ladies who are going to start summer sessions. I saw photographs of children who are not with their mother at the shelter, but she is working hard to regain custody of them. I saw a photograph of the husband who is prison. One lady had a photo of her favorite country musician displayed for all the world to see. It made sense because she walks around singing his songs all of the time. There were stuffed animals and a rosary with a candle. In the men’s shelter I saw photos of girlfriends and hot rod magazines. Some beds were almost barren---those folks travel light. Others had loads of things. They probably will stay for a while. I realized how young some of these men are when I saw the same Manga and video game magazines that my son reads piled up on several beds. One fellow had stacks of National Geographic magazines on his spot---a man after my own heart. I keep mine on the floor beside my bed. One fellow had dozens of socks piled up on his bedside. When he first arrived he was so grateful for a pair of dry socks because his feet were in such bad shape. Now he has managed to assemble quite a collection of them. I saw many Bibles and one drawing of a cross with hands reaching out. The fellow who made it is quite an artist. I was surprised by one photograph that was on display. One young man, whose father has been in prison almost all of his life, professes nothing but hatred and loathing for his father, but there he clearly had a photograph of the two of them together when he was just a small child. I guess our bedsides do really reveal more about us than we realize. The young lady from the camp helped me see things a whole new way. All I had to do was pay attention and I could see myself and others in a whole new light.