“Do you know if you can get internet here?” The ruddy faced man with glasses and a slightly odd stare looked directly at me but with his body turned away at an angle as I looked up from my phone. We were both seated and waiting in the chiropractor’s office. I looked at him and then down at my phone and I said, “I’m looking at my email right now, so I know that you can get internet here in this office”. He stared at me. Something was just a touch off. Waving his phone at me he said, “I mean, I have a tracker phone. I don’t have access to internet. I need the WIFI code from this office so that I can log on to the internet that way”. I shrugged my shoulders and answered, “You could ask the woman at the front desk if they have a code. I don’t know what the code is. I have an iPhone”. He turned his head away quickly and snapped, “I don’t have lots of extra money like some people do. I have a tracker phone. I don’t have money”. He faced forward.
I looked at the back of his neck and at the reddening skin and decided that he really was angry. He was angry at me. I did not respond. Then I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed the exchange. There was no indication that anyone else was paying any attention. “I live in a house with a lot of people and I pay rent and I’m going to get out of there because all I can afford is this tracker phone and I’m 35 years old and I shouldn’t be living with my Mother anymore and I’m going to leave”. His rambling dropped off into silence. I looked at the ceiling and thought, “I may die in my chiropractor’s office today”.
He started up again, addressing no one. “Everyone needs to get away from their Mother. I’m 35 years old”. I shifted in my chair, leaned forward slightly and spoke. “Yes. Everyone needs to get away. Things happen. It’s good to get away”. I leaned back. He was silent. The chiropractor working on the table behind the counter in front of us looked up. The huge fish tank bubbled and gurgled. One beautiful orange and white fish squiggled in and out of a gray castle on the bottom of the fish tank. It was my turn for my adjustment so I stood up and I walked carefully around the man with the glasses. I went to my table. I stretched out.
“I never get physical with them because then, they’re going to call the cops because they are just cowards. They are cowards. I never get physical with them. They call the cops”. I heard him stretch out on his table two cubicles over from mine. I sighed and looked at the floor through the medical paper stretched over the opening in the head rest of the table. “I’m probably going to die in my chiropractor’s office today”. I resigned myself. I was just too tired.
There is a thin space between here and “there’ for most of us. For some souls, the one area of space has bled on into the next layer and they don’t really know where they are anymore. I’m reminded today of what was purported to be some of J.S. Bach’s final words before his death. Supposedly he uttered, “Don’t cry for me. I’m going where music is born”. Sanctuary for some comes in the briefest encounters with other people, no matter how odd. The moment before the rubber band snaps, someone says something and the person is able to come back from the edge and go “where the music is born”. It’s never enough and after all, sympathy butters no parsnips, doesn’t heal, doesn’t repair but it may offer the only available temporary cushion between bleeding over into the “there”.
I did not die in my chiropractor’s office, and as usual I left standing up straighter than I entered. I made sure I was gone before I had any more encounters with the ruddy necked man. I dropped my iPhone into my bag and drove away thinking about sanctuary, and mental illness and the place where the music is birthed.
690 Saint Paul 