Fall 2007

Making the Invisible Visible

My son Will called me yesterday to tell me about something that happened on his job. He just graduated from college (Honors in Sociology, pardon my small bragging moment) and is working as a security person on Portland's light rail system. The other night he was checking the cars of the train when he came upon a man who had apparently passed out while drinking. He recognized the man as a transient he'd seen on the downtown streets. Unable to rouse the man, Will called the police, who checked the man's pockets and opened his backpack, which seemed to contain all of his life's possessions. At this point in the story, my son became so choked up that he could hardly speak; he said they pulled out a number of toy stuffed animals that the man carried with him.

Will told me he felt overwhelmingly sad: for the man, his life, his current situation. That these stuffed animals were so important to him just broke his heart. Seeing the stuffed animals brought someone's humanity to life, allowing Will to glimpse the complexity of a man's life and feel for him as another human being. We all sometimes distance ourselves from the transients on the streets, and that sometimes means not seeing them as human like us. We make them "invisible" and we overlook them. As I spoke to Will, I realized that even the "transient" label is a way of distancing.

When we see a very frail old person slumped in a wheelchair, particularly if they can't speak or suffer from a dementia, we also tend to distance ourselves. . . .

Read the Conclusion of Nora's Corner Fall 2007

These documents are in PDF format. If you don't have a program that can display PDF files, you can download Adobe Reader for free.

April, 2007 The Last Time I Saw Mary

April, 2006 The Constancy of Sports in our Lives

November, 2005 Scenes from the Middle of the Night at Gaffney House

December, 2004 I can't tell you how much I love living...where?