Smoking
More Healing Tales
The poor, inner-city neighborhood in Chicago where Joyce lived was populated mainly by Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Italians, Poles and a few Blacks. The homes and relationships were so broken that an eight year-old boy would put his arm around a ten year-old boy and say, "I'm his uncle," and he would be; yet there was a sense of neighborhood, of community, of family warmth. Whoever was left standing to raise you, loved you - it had that kind of feeling. In 1976, drugs and violence in schools were not as pronounced in elementary schools as they are nowadays. The main problem was that nobody seemed to be teaching the children here how to read very well, or do arithmetic.
Joyce was eight years old, a white girl from the South with freckles and sad light-brown hair. She spoke as if something vibrated her, making her words come out jerkily. At the settlement house where she went to a learning center after school, she usually hid under a table. She stood and walked as if stunted. Nothing specific jumped out to label her, but as Jim, one of the group leaders said, you felt you were doing well if you got Joyce to speak a coherent sentence.
In the group leaders' office hung some pictures drawn by children during a learning center art project, including Joyce's rather abstract picture of a boat with a sail, made out of differently colored painted shapes. After some time, I noticed that I never got tired of looking at this picture. The others seemed to fade, but whenever I came into our office and looked at Joyce's, it remained fresh and pleasing.
Decades later, I still remembers this picture and its curiously delightful balance of design and color.
During the last few minutes after they finished
learning-oriented games and projects, the children sometimes played
recreational games. The five-to-seven year-olds liked the simple
Walt Disney jigsaw puzzles. These were the easiest puzzles imaginable,
containing only a few large pieces whose shapes were etched into
gray cardboard where the pieces would go. On the day this story
begins, the eight and nine year-olds were relaxing with these easy
puzzles. Joyce was trying one, but could not complete even one piece.
Various common-sense attempts to solve this problem did nothing
but puzzle Joyce. "Match the pieces against those etched shapes
there on the bottom of the puzzle," but Joyce couldn't do it.
"Look at this picture of the completed puzzle and match
the pieces against that." This did not help. "Try
to do the ones with the edges first - edges are easy."
They weren't for Joyce. She could simply not do puzzles.
Light a light bulb, Joyce's picture of the big, blue, buoyant shape sailing down a happy river lit up an idea in my mind: "Just put the pieces wherever you think they'd look good, Joyce. Put them anywhere you want." Immediately her hand darted out and put the first piece exactly where it was supposed to go. She finished the puzzle quickly and then it was time to go home.
The thought that, "I taught a child to do puzzles today," seemed like a small accomplishment in a jungle of problems.
A transformation came over Joyce. She stood differently,
walked differently, won spelling bees. She spoke in a bright, confident
way. She never crouched down and hid under the table again. She
made friends. She sassed back in a happy, healthy way.
It may be that the world is a puzzle and there are different ways
to learn to put it together. By using her advanced aesthetic sense
of color and form to learn to put together the simplest of jigsaw
puzzles, Joyce learned to put together the whole world in a new
way.
When I remember saying, "Just put the pieces wherever you think they'd look good, Joyce. Put them anywhere you want," and her hand darting out without a second's thought to put the first piece in the right place, we seem to be in a magic circle, lit by the presence of communication from the divine.