Abecedarian of Oppression and story time

I got the idea to write a larger piece based on all the words that the current administration is deciding to make myriad people remove from documents, business papers, what-have-you.

It's a grim list.

I am finding that because of how I feel about the entire thing, especially the fact that they are *censoring words*, my first draft is pretty depressing.

I won't link the article from I got the list, but it is easy enough to find on Gizmodo (and probably other sites).

The reason I won't link it is I refuse to have that man's face (or the back of his head or any part of him at all) on my poetry and writing blog.

However, documentation of what we are going through, what we are thinking and feeling right now is really important. So I will continue to work on that piece over the next few weeks to see if I can do it.

For now, here's a story, which is true. It was posted on my socials in January. If you're on Mastodon, I am easy to find.

Water Kiosk Story #1, January 2025

I saved up enough quarters to go get water at the water kiosk that sits in the middle of a parking lot in almost the middle of town (now). It is a dollar for 5 gallons, but it only takes quarters or gold dollars. The water dispenser side doesn't have a dollar bill capacity for some reason.

I pulled up today and there was this kickass old blue Ford truck parked parallel to the kiosk's west side. I made sure that when I pulled up on the south side of the kiosk, I would not block it from moving forward. You know, because civility. 

There was a long-haired, wildly-bearded, gray-haired guy in a big leather hat sitting in the front seat. 

People pull into that parking lot all the time to look at their phones and do all sorts of other stuff, and sometimes there's a rush, so a wait, at the water/ice kiosk. It's possible for one person to be getting water and one person to be getting ice -- if you cooperate.

I started my routine, filling up my 5 gallon jugs from the back of my Element, and beardy guy got out of his truck and started paying for bags of ice at the ice payment panel. The two functions are separate, but the payment panels are right next to each other, so you have to do this little dance, kind of the way you do a dance at a four-way stop.

Beardy guy got one bag of ice as one of my jugs was filling. He placed the bag  of ice in the back of his truck, and I started switching out a jug. Then he came back to get another bag of ice and I stood back so we weren't shoulder-to-shoulder at the panels. 

After he had put both bags of ice in the back of his truck, he then came over to give me a tip: a 16-lb bag of ice costs $2.75, so he said if you're gonna get two bags of ice, he recommended putting the dollar bill in first, and then the five dollar bill. Then you would get $.50 in quarters back.

I said thank you, not really understanding the math, and doing the autistic thing where I immediately didn't file it away because I never get ice there.

I continued to fill up my jugs. He continued to sit in his truck for a bit.

I don't know why he wanted to talk to me again, but he then just got out of his truck and started chatting with me about how July 16th is gonna be the best day of his life ever. I asked, what's gonna happen on that day?

He said he was going to get a full set of new teeth. 

He said he had been living with just four front bottom teeth for a while, because so many of his teeth had broken out of his head. 

He told me about this amazing dentist that he had found in a town that's about 30 miles to the east, and how he was so happy with them that he didn't mind driving over there to get his work done. 

He talked about how he had grown his mustache really long so nobody could see that he didn't have good teeth. And that he had just trimmed it so he could go to the dentist and they could pull those remaining four teeth.

He also told me that he had stopped smoking cigarettes about a year ago, and had stopped drinking as much beer as he used to. He said he would go through a 30 pack in two days, and he had only had about 12 beers in the entire last year. I congratulated him heartily for that.

Then, he told me that his current health insurance covered all of his dental work! $3000 so far! You can believe that I was astounded. That is so amazing, I said. 

I, being able to put on my listening ears and appear social (thanks, theatre and therapist training!) reacted properly, held my hand over my heart at the touching bits, held eye contact (I know! The autism!), and did all the right sounds and and wows when he was talking. 

He really opened up to me. It was amazing.

I told him it was gonna be so great cause he could eat anything he wanted after he got his new teeth, and he said he was really looking forward to being able to smile again. That really touched my heart.

The funny thing, the internal dialogue I kept to myself was this: yesterday I was watching an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, and I thought to myself, humans don't have eyebrows like this alien does. The alien had these amazing short, dark brown eyebrows that were really long and pointed upward in a neat triangle.

Beardy guy had the same eyebrows, triangular, gray, but pointing downward. That is like the first thing I noticed about him when he got closer to me. (I've really been into looking at eyebrows lately. It's a mini autistic obsession.) 

He thanked me for listening to him, and I said it was absolutely my pleasure, I appreciate you. It just made my heart melt. He got into his truck and drove away after that, and I finished filling up my water bottles.

All this to say, that it often doesn't hurt to listen to someone when they get the inspiration or the nerve to talk to you. 

I believe that is crucial that other people help carry our stories, even if they're strangers. I think it is a communal thing that we really no longer do. I cannot emphasize the necessity of it enough. 

Stories are essential to the human condition. Having other people hear them and carry them for us is also essential. That's why we have poetry and books and plays and memoirs and hidden diaries and all of the ways that humanity has attempted to record its experience in the brief time that it has been on this planet.

This was a complete stranger, but for some reason, I appeared approachable at the water kiosk. I was wearing a purple T-shirt that says, "the first pride was a riot", dirty farm jeans, and rainbow Keens. My truck has anti-Republican political stickers and anarchist stickers on it. But this guy felt like he could tell me this wonderful story about how excited he is to be getting a new life in six weeks.

Good listening is healing. That is what I learned in my listener poet training. I couldn't write him a poem today, but I could write you all this story. 

Thanks for reading. 

#ListenerPoet #KindnessMatters #AmListening #YouMatter #ChooseKindness