The year of Craigslist jobs

My husband and I lived a year in St. Louis while trying to apply for an Indian business visa. That year, I spent a lot of time on Craigslist looking for work. I’d never really been on Craigslist before, other than to buy a futon. What struck me about the “help wanted” portion of the site was the amount of work available for adult film actors and actresses, nude models, and jobs of the “other” category, such as “beautiful soul.” (The job description for “beautiful soul” was a bit vague. It didn’t pay, but it did include a travel stipend.)

Finding jobs on Craigslist felt a bit like online dating, which I’d never done. But I imagined it would be sort of disembodied and rootless ,  text alienated from context. And for these reasons, it leaves an impression on you, stirs up some nameless emptiness in your heart, like that of ghosts mingling in a graveyard.

The person evaporates as quickly as he or she came, and you find yourself wondering if you’ve just had a relationship with a person or with a piece of technology.

There are a couple of times I’ve had friendships like this, with people who blow into town and drink gallons of coffee with me and tell me everything. Usually they are hiding in the Midwest from trouble back home, somewhere East or North, and our social connections are so tenuous that, once these friends disappear, I never see or hear from them again.

After much searching, I settled on three part-time jobs, two of which were a substitute teaching job and a part-time music position at a church. The substitute teaching job was by far the hardest — also the easiest — also the most boring and pointless — also the most interesting and illuminative.

You get up before the sun and drive toward the suburbs in a vast sea of headlights, and you know you’re part of it yet completely disconnected from it, and it feels like everything is hurtling toward perdition at 35 mph.

Sometimes, no one will trust you to do anything, so the teacher has you sitting there the whole day, “observing” while a teacher’s aide takes care of everything. Other times, you have a full day’s worth of stimulating lesson plans — but then the charming children decide to be completely insane — perhaps they are in fist fights over a pencil sharpener, for instance, or one child has stolen another child’s “stuff” and the whole class gets involved — or you make the mistake of letting one child be your “helper” and everyone wants to be your helper and they are fighting over who is your helper and those who aren’t the helper are crying and the noise gets to the point where someone down the hall has to come in and shame everyone into shutting up.

Usually, you feel like you’ve lived an entire lifetime — like you’ve worked an entire career — in one day. And it was a horrible waste of a life, a horrible failure of a career. You go home and you just give up. You just think, Oh well. That was an interesting life. Too bad it didn’t work out.

There were moments when subbing felt like the ghosts mingling in the graveyard thing I talked about earlier. There was Katie (not her real name), a little girl with cerebral palsy who brought an adorable stuffed koala bear to school, and she loved it so passionately that she would stop at her locker between classes to embrace it and rub her face in its fur and whisper “I love you” in its ear, and as the day went on, she noticed that her koala had a little tear in it, and she asked me would I take it home and sew it up for her and bring it back the next day, and I told her I’m not coming back the next day, and I felt like the dude in Tom Petty’s song “Free Falling” — a no-good drifter ,  a rolling stone.

Another time I worked with a boy who was blind, and I walked with him around the school, and I helped him eat his food, and I helped him listen to music on his mp3 player. I felt like we knew each other pretty well by the end of the day. I took him out to catch his bus and helped him up the steps. I said “goodbye” as he walked down the aisle to find his seat. He ignored me. “Say goodbye,” the bus driver prompted. “NO!” He shouted.

There was another time I was given the task of accompanying a suicidal middle-school boy to and from his classes. It’s strange to walk the halls with a thirteen-year-old boy  who is wearing some kind of sports jersey ,  trying to make small talk with him about sports and music and whatever, and you sense that his young heart and mind are open and eager to live , and yet you know this secret about him, and you wonder about it, and your heart breaks for him, and you wish you could do something, and then you drop him off at his class, and that’s it.

And then there’s the first grader who is big for her age and a little slower than everyone else, but not so slow that she doesn’t realize it — not so slow that she isn’t frustrated and angry in PE when she can’t seem to do the things the other kids do — not so slow that she doesn’t see the way the little blonde girl in the pink sundress with the flower in her hair laughs at her and talks about her with the other littlegirls.

My job? Make sure her shoelaces don’t come untied.

“And I’m free….free fallin’…”

And, because I was pregnant with my first child, people began to make comments. The first to do so, of course, were children. One of the children I worked with on a sub job had the following conversation with me:

CHILD: Do you have a baby in your tummy?
ME: Yes.
CHILD: Why? Why do you have a baby in your tummy?
ME: ?

She kept asking me this question. All day. After math. After reading. After putting together a puzzle. “Why do you have a baby in your tummy?”

How does one approach this question? She didn’t ask me how it got there. She didn’t ask me where it came from. She didn’t ask me what it’s doing in there, or how it’s going to get out. She asked, “Why is there a baby in your tummy?”

Maybe for some people, there is an easy answer to this question: Because we want a baby. Because there is my biological clock. Because we have an extra bedroom.

It’s the most commonplace thing in the world, having a baby in your tummy . I am probably one among a hundred million or so who found herself in that exact condition at that moment . And yet, it’s also the strangest thing in the world. (At least it was for me.) Here comes a tiny human who has never existed before. Why do we want more of them? Lots of people would argue that we have too many of them already. Regardless — and in spite of the fact that we have the technology to prevent this baby-intummy phenomenon — it keeps happening.

Why?

I think it’s because many of us — maybe most of us — in the face of our messed-up world — shootings, car-jackings, troubled school districts, horrible commutes, philosophers like Schopenhauer— still believe that life is inherently good. That something good happens  when we see the world through brand new eyes. I wonder if it brings us closer to our own origins, closer to the answer for our own

“Why?”

And maybe, for people like me, it’s the antidote to the “ghosts mingling in the graveyard” feeling. I kept thinking about how one day I’d be done carrying this baby, and then I’d learn how to feed her and stay up all night and all of that stuff, and then…once I figured that out…she still wouldn’t go away.

She would still be there, hopefully for a long time. It’s not like a temporary job you find on Craigslist. It’s not like the person you stay up all night talking to at the Waffle House who leaves town the next day, walking off into the sunset, with his guitar slung across his back.

At the church where I worked as a musician part-time, they all had roots. They had mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great grandparents. The treasurer and his wife celebrated their 50th anniversary while I was there.

But, as I told the pastor of the church when I took the job, I wouldn’t be there for long. I would be blowing out of town like some crazy lady your brother met online. He said, it doesn’t matter how long you’re here. What matters is how present and engaged you are  while you’re here.

So I engaged the best I could, and those good people with deep roots put up with me–my absentmindedness, my occasional tardiness, clumsiness, unwieldiness and complaints of discomfort, and my decreasing diaphragm space, which made my voice dull and lackluster as a set of old guitar strings.

And then on the cusp of summer, when I was so big I could hardly move, we received a package in the mail: my husband’s passport, with a brand new five-year business visa inside it. And when our little one was born and given a name, when she had a birthday, social security number, and an approximate hair color and eye color, we took her to the post office, got a photo of her chubby little face on a square white background, got some ink on her foot and stamped the necessary documents (since she couldn’t sign her name yet). Then when her visa and passport came in the mail, we got on a plane with our 200 pounds of luggage and flew off into the sunrise.

"Sun Setting at Seattle Airport" by jody.claborn is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.