October 14, 2005

• I dreamt of Inez and Alvin

  I don’t know Inez and Alvin, never met them except in this dream. 
  Both of them are slender, angular people in middle age.  They look
  enough like one another that they could be siblings.  They have
  Athabaskan coppery-bronze skin, glossy straight black hair, and
  dark/bright eyes surrounded by sun wrinkles–Alaskan Natives, for sure.

  Inez is angry.  The background feeling of anger and resentment
  overwhelms any other emotions that may float through her mind. 
  She has worked for years in a social service job, trying to help people
  whose problems range from concrete issues such as homelessness and
  poverty to more subtle matters of addictions, mental illness, and
  social adjustment.

  Inez has social service burnout.  Some workers internalize it,
  feeling an oppressive sense of failure and futility.  She has
  externalized it.  She fumes and burns with her anger at the
  society that rejects and oppresses her clients and the clients
  themselves who won’t take some simple steps to help themselves. 
  She doesn’t stop trying to help.  She just doesn’t know why she
  keeps trying.  It has gone from being a cause to being a job.

  Alvin is proud.  Pride, for Alvin, is a survival strategy. 
  If not for his pride in his ethnic identity, his masculinity, and the
  long-ago crowning achievement of his lifetime, he would collapse under
  the burdens of his alcoholism, his unemployment, and the prospects
  before him as winter closes in on the street people of Anchorage. 

  He focuses, instead, on the bold action of his youth, when he escaped
  from the foster home and boarding school and made his way first back to
  his village and then, soon after, on into Anchorage, where he was never
  found and returned to the school.  Nothing he has experienced,
  nothing he might have missed or lost in his lifetime, means as much to
  Alvin as having escaped from those crazy people in that horrible school.

  I don’t  know why Alvin and Inez came into my dreams this
  night.   Her anger and his pride feel as real to me as if I
  felt them myself. I heard their voices.  If I should meet them
  sometime, I know I would recognize them.  I love them, and I wish
  them well.  Both of them deserve much better than they’ve gotten.
   

  • 11:48 am
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