BENEATH THE SKYLINE

MATTRESSES AND GARDENS

Deborah Good

For purposes of the story, we shall call the mattress Abby.

Almost three years ago, two friends and I were apartment hunting just as another friend was moving and wanting to lighten her load. She gave us house plants, dishes, a coffee table—and Abby: one big, awkward, futon mattress without a frame.

We did not want to turn Abby down. After all, we had almost no furniture and were soon to have a three-bedroom apartment to fill. When the time came to move in, however, we found we had no idea what to do with her. Abby was heavy, blobby, and badly needed a futon frame to hold her shape.

I searched briefly for a cheap frame, but to no avail. Eventually we folded her in thirds, leaning one against a wall, and made her into a squatty loveseat-of-sorts in our living room. It wasn’t ideal, but for about a year, Abby made herself at home. Then, she was displaced by a nicer piece of furniture and, again, seemed useless to us, sitting awkwardly against a radiator in one of our bedrooms.

Finally, a new possibility presented itself. A repositioned desk had created a brand-new corner with one wall. My roommate and I decided to stuff Abby in the corner. We pushed, tugged, folded, and lifted Abby’s heavy form until she settled into place—a low, comfortable armchair. Now Abby is one of my favorite spots in the house. When I sit there to read or stare out the window, drinking tea , she seems to hold me, as though I am sitting in the palm of a giant and comforting hand.

Possibility has been an important word for me recently. If I wrote Hallmark cards, I might follow Abby’s story with a rosy slogan: "If good can come of a lumpy, old futon mattress, just imagine all the possibility that lives inside you!"

But I am not Hallmark. I’m just another tired, little human being trying to do something creative with my life.

There is a neighborhood in North Philadelphia that continually inspires me. It’s certainly a tough neighborhood, the kind that never makes it onto the tourist brochures. This is a place where people—mostly young black men—are lost every year to drug violence and the (terribly unjust) prison system. Yet this is also a place where an African-American man named Arthur Hall and a Chinese woman named Lily Yeh had the eyes to see possibility in an abandoned and neglected lot.

Hall invited Yeh, an outsider to the neighborhood, to build a garden there, which she did. Over the years, the garden was followed by more parks and gardens, mosaics, murals, youth and theater programs. Today it is called the Village of Arts and Humanities. (Please Google it to learn more.) I do not talk about hope as freely as some, but I have walked the streets of the Village, and when I turn the corner from Germantown Avenue onto Alder Street with its many-colored mosaics, hope feels like a blast of cool air in my face.

In a magazine article, Lily Yeh put it this way: "I came to conceive of the neighborhood as a piece of living sculpture, in which people live and work, and the forms are brought to life by living community events" ("A Luminous Place," The Other Side, Jul./Aug. 2004).

Like Yeh, I want to be a seeker of possibilities—in my own life, in others, in broken people and places, even in old futon mattresses. Every other week, I sit with a "youth aid panel" of community volunteers. We serve as an alternative to the court system for first-time juvenile offenders. Through a series of questions, we try to learn not only about the offense committed but also about each individual teenager, his interests and passions, the directions her life could go, those pieces that most need nurture.

One could say that most of these kids were born into a world with far fewer possibilities than those kids who have easier access to money and education. And this is true. The "freedom and possibility" some of our national leaders claim are so American really have more to do with money than with citizenship. Yet I want to believe even the most limited situations leave some room for choice, creativity, and hope.

I was recently at a conference whose theme, "The Creative Leap," encouraged its participants to approach their lives and their work in new and imaginative ways. John O’Donohue, a wonderful Irish poet and Catholic scholar, gave one of the keynote addresses. He spoke about how, over and over throughout our lives, we are faced with multiple possibilities and have to choose only one.

I would add that we are faced, over and over, with circumstances beyond our control—be they cancer, job loss, or hurricanes—which also shape our lives. The sum of these conscious choices and uncontrollable circumstances, then, creates the reality we wake up to each morning.

I sometimes think of my life as a ball of clay being constantly shaped. As a child, that clay was molded by a bilingual public education, war in the Gulf, my best friend who refused to wear dresses (so I refused too), and my decision to join a co-ed soccer team.

In college, I chose to study sociology, not education or religion. I was shaped by the books I read, movies I saw, by my professors and friends. Afterward, I chose to move to Philadelphia, not Guatemala or Tucson or Washington, D.C. I took an editing job at a magazine. In 2004, I lost that job when the magazine closed. Then came Dad’s cancer and, soon after, his death.

Through it all, my life has been shaped by so many larger forces: my race, my socioeconomic situation, my Mennonite background—whose frugality may explain why I choose to save an old, useless futon today. And somewhere in the mix, I believe another force is also shaping my clay: call it Mystery, call it Great Love, call it God.

Who would I be if the shaping forced had been different—if I had, for example, grown up wearing cowboy boots and driving a pickup instead of playing basketball in the alley behind our row house? And what would my life look life if I had made different choices along the way?

"What happened to your unlived lives?" asked John O’Donohue. "And where do they dwell?"

He claims that all the unrealized options—the ones we did not choose along the way—continue to journey along with us. They exist in a "penumbral world around us, which is different than the unconscious and different than the shadow, but is another world of implicit, latent, held-over possibility that accompanies every life."

I love this idea—that a whole world of possibilities is accompanying each of us. Maybe it’s like having a garden inside me. If all I ever do is look outward and straight ahead, I may never realize it’s there. But if I pause and am willing to do a little digging, I just might find possibilities where I thought there were none.

I imagine this kind of digging takes practice, and I commit myself to it. I want to live viewing with a creative eye not only my own life but also, just as importantly, the lives of others. I want to believe that even in the darkest of circumstances, practiced diggers can help one another uncover possibilities for growth and change—like transforming broken neighborhoods into art and an old mattress into a large and comforting hand.

—Deborah Good, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is taking odd jobs while she works on family writing projects based on interviews with her father and grandparents. She owes much of the inspiration for this essay to John O’Donohue’s keynote address at the 2006 Psychotherapy Networker Symposium in Washington, D.C. She can be reached at deborahagood@gmail.com.