This Is Us
The Agony of Hope
All my life I’ve wanted someone to notice me
At the landscaping company where I worked for two summers, they called me “Danimal.” They gave me this name because I didn’t landscape. I attacked.
I filled my wheelbarrows so full of earth, sand, and rock that the handles creaked and groaned. It took all my might to wheel the barrow without tipping it over. A coworker once asked, “Why do you do that?”
And I, like a wild Danimal, said, “I don’t know.” But what I meant was, Why does the bear roar? Why does the tiger also roar? Why does the lion’s hair look effortlessly amazing?
What choice do we have?
Another time, my boss needed someone to dig under his house to make room for a new foundation. That’s a good reason to dig, but I didn’t care about the reason. All I knew was my boss had selected me, and digging is one of my favorite things. The darkness and quiet of the underground calm me down like my dentist’s weighted blanket, and in the freedom of that soothing calm, I go insane.
Beneath that house, I battled the Earth with pickaxe and spade, working by the light of bare bulbs, little golden moons. I howled at them. I became Stephen King’s gunslinger, sort of. I was the dirt-slinger: “I do not dig with my shovel; he…
