Thomas Sullivan

Sometimes you don’t know you’ve lost something till you find it again.  Inspiration, adventure, laughter, love, honesty, idealism.  The best things are like that.  Unscripted, nebulous, ill-defined, ephemeral.  It’s their nonconformist free nature.  After all, how can you define magic?  If you could, it wouldn’t be magic.  And writers depend on magic.

Want to borrow some?

I’m just back from the Dominican Republic and a massive transfusion of the kind of magic I search out 24/7.  People magic.  Nature magic.  And it re-silvered the mirror I hold up to life in my writing every day.  Here.  Take my place.  Hop on the bus or the pickup truck that will take you down the roads, lurching around rubble, flat tires inclusive.  This is your first religious experience.  Because if U-turns into on-coming traffic don’t put the fear of God in you, nothing will.

You have to travel 45 minutes to get to the work site each day, but little Manuel with his chirpy voice and luminous eyes shining with hope, and his thin arms reaching out to you in desperation for love, will be waiting no matter what time you arrive.  And a hundred others like him.  But before that, gaze hard out the window.  Skinny dogs, skinny chickens, skinny people.  70% live in poverty — not the kind of poverty defined in the US that includes color TV and a second car, but sweep-the-dirt poverty, shotgun shack poverty, one room of tin and cinder block with curtains for walls same-clothes-every-day sit ankle deep in water in your “living room” when the slashing rain rolls through every few hours poverty.  Over the next eight days you will not see a toilet seat that is attached, or uninterrupted electricity if any electricity at all, or potable water if uninterrupted water at all, or plumbing that can flush paper, or hot water. 

Welcome to Villa Esfuerzo, or as I call it (because I can’t pronounce it), Villa Espresso.

See the man who was playing dominos when a gang fight broke out, killing two and costing him his leg.  See the razor wire on the church school where you are working.  Yeah, lots of violence, and screaming poverty, BUT… also angels.  Angels everywhere.

The people are not time oriented here.  They are event oriented.  And you are an event.  Even though they have seen you before.  You came and went.  Thousands of times.  So forgive the guardedness in the faces of the adults, especially the women.  Especially the poorest women, who by their early 20s so often have five children and no prospects.  Yeah, you can sneer at that.  But in this depressed neighborhood where children raise children there is very little else, and maybe someone told them they were wonderful at age 15 and so there was the first baby.  I do not know why there were four more in quick succession.  You’d think after the hardship of the first one became acute they would…what?  Stop escaping?  Hey, what do I know?  But the women and dogs seem terrified sometimes, as if to step from the figurative and literal narrow margin between doorstep and road is to invite being run over.  Driving is, in fact, creative.  A car horn is indispensable, and you may see five people on a motorbike, including that 15-year-old girl with her first baby in her arms.

But there is great love here.  Huge love.  You see it in the children first.  They shine with it, and if you look at them a second time, or remember their name, you might as well adopt them, because they will follow you like the crocodile shadowing Captain Hook.  They want so desperately to be held and hugged.  I remember embracing a frail old woman in a church when I felt something clinging to my right leg.  Looking down, there was an angelic little girl about three years of age.  Usually I am the dry rot, the mold, the rust that brings things down, but at that moment I was Sully the bridge.  Quite unforgettable.

Yeah, you can find resentment if you look for it, but those walls collapse pretty quickly.  One can only live on indignation so long, however painful one’s awareness.  And these are not uninformed people.  They get it.  Who they are, who you are.  Most of them have seized the courage to live life with honest pride.  When you own nothing, nothing owns you.  So go ahead.  Walk through the winding streets.  Accept one of the invitations to come inside.  Sit in the cool darkness on a tropical day and drink their tea.  Look hard in the gloom and you’ll notice that medal on the wall for a child who graduated from the church school.  Do you see the elegant purse on the table with its vibrant patterns that looks like a Birkin bag original?  The matriarch of this single-room dwelling weaved that handbag out of bread wrappers.  They throw nothing away.  Pull tabs become chainlink jewelry.  A mason’s level is a string between two cinder blocks.  When you are done working at the end of the week, and decide to throw your skuzzy cement-encrusted clothes away, they will collect them, wash them, sell them, buy medicine for the children.  The kids are so often sick…

I speak a little Spanish, and there were translators, but that wasn’t the lingua franca that broke through with the adults, if you want to know.  It happens like this.  You are pouring third-floor cement when some women bring food.  They form a circle and start clapping.  Then they call out someone’s name and that person is obliged to dance a few steps in the circle amidst much laughter and encouragement.  Everyone knows someone, and so all the names get called, including yours.  Maybe you grab someone up and make them dance with you.  The more outrageous your signature moves the better.  Walls.  You are pouring a floor but walls are falling down.   It happens differently with the men.  The day after the circle dance, you are shoveling cement in the dizzying heat and sweat and you suddenly sing out a line of “La Bomba.”  To your surprise, men you’ve worked with elbow to elbow for three days without exchanging a word spontaneously answer in chorus.  It is impossible not to throw out another line, and in any case, they won’t let you stop.  Like a brush fire in the heat of the day, it keeps flaring up until you’ve lined out “Day-O” and every song you thought you’d forgotten.  Music.  The universal language.

But that music is nothing compared to the haunting rhythms that flow out of the church on the last afternoon.  Choral voices that stab the soul and heal the heart.  Keyboard, drum kit, guitar.  Interpretive dancers.  My kingdom for even just a grainy cell phone recording of that!  I’d give up lemon pie for life for a video.  Not gonna happen.  It’s gone now.  Some things are too perfect for anything but memory.  When it’s your turn to speak, you try to tell them.  You try to say that this simple open room they call a church, with its open wooden shutters and open iron gates and the breath of life flowing in and out and fans whirring overhead like hovering angels, is more alive, more impressive than the cathedral in Santo Domingo with its vaulted domes and cold saints in stone coffins.  You try to say that you came here to this place of contrasts to find the sameness between people.  You try to say that you came to build rooms but together with them have built bridges.  Ruben – my 17-year old translator – is golden and a close friend now, but Lord knows how it all came across the mic we shared.  Doesn’t matter.  We didn’t have to say anything.  Those people knew.

Going to leave off the last million pages here because, well…you just had to be there.  But you see what I mean about finding the magic every day, don’t you?  Easy to discover in the Dominican.  Tougher in your own backyard.  But absolutely do-able (see last month’s column).  There is more about the DR experience in the July Sullygram (newsletter) being released today along with many photos — e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll send it to you.  You’ll also find archived copies of Sullygams w/pictures on my author’s web site, though the latest one is always slightly delayed so that it can include a Permalink to this column.  And please feel free to follow me on http://twitter.com/thomassullivan .  As always, your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com    

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan