THERE IS a town in California called San Luis Obispo. I arrived there one rainy day to discover that smoking had been banned in all indoor places where the public gather, including bars, restaurants and hotels. Things got even worse, I learned, since that awful day in 1992 when a few of us lit up under a dripping tree on the sidewalk.
In 1993, the people voted by referendum to ban smoking in the streets. Earlier this year it was proposed to make smoking illegal in private homes. How they intended to enforce such a measure we’ll never know because San Luis Obispo was recently razed by an earthquake and they have other, more pressing, health problems on their minds such as plague and homelessness. Speaking of the USA it would now appear to be true that President Ronald Reagan did forget to duck when the guy shot him.
Black humour is no help at all, mind you, when you’re really poor. I’m thinking of a woman I know who is not the best mother in the world and who gets herself into even more debt than is usual for people on welfare by buying useless presents she can’t afford in an effort to compensate her children – she buys mountain bikes on the hire purchase in an area where stealing the bike from the neighbour’s child, and selling it down-town for a deposit on the back-rent, is a way of life.
I had been intending for years and years to persuade this woman to enrol in the self-development courses run by nuns in her area. You go to school a couple of hours a week, while the children are in class themselves, and the nuns more or less teach you to start putting one foot independently in front of the other.
This is a massive achievement in those parts of Dublin where a woman can feel so defeated by life that she feeds and dresses her family in the morning, then sits in front of the television all day long, stirring forth only to buy food, and that only on the days when she has cash, which is from Thursday after she draws welfare until Saturday afternoon when the money runs out.
When I say “stirring forth”, I mean a trip to the shops, nothing more, and that only for as long as it takes to do the shopping. There is no such thing in the lives of the really poor as having a cup of tea while they’re out and about.
First Pregnancy
Anyway, twelve years after I had made her acquaintance, the nuns somehow made contact with this woman and enticed her down to the school. She invited me to her graduation. The nuns had provided her with a skirt, the Vincent de Paul with a blouse and cardigan and she wore her own shoes. On an autumn day, she had no coat, and I arrived late, to pick her up in the car as she made her badly clad way down the street.
She was as high as a kite and happy as Edward Kennedy at having pulled herself back from the brink of total disaster. For the first time in the long, dreadful years since I had known her, I liked her and what had become of her – all thanks to the nuns for that. They saw potential and kept human faith where I had seen only one disaster after another.
At her graduation, she danced with other women in a liturgical celebration. Ginger Rogers she was not, nor were most of the other women, but they were moving in unison and in public after years of being hidden behind walls.
I use the term “unison” loosely. This woman in particular moved as if she had two left feet and she never once got the simple steps right. However, she was smiling and laughing and enjoying herself and she said afterwards that it brought back memories of the first dance she had ever attended, when it was enough – more than enough, heaven itself – to get out on the floor and be part of the music. She had not danced since her first pregnancy and that, let me tell you, was decades ago.
One step into the world led to another and she embarked on a second personal development course. Development, in this context, might mean nothing more than actually leaving the house, spending a couple of hours a week with the rest of the human race, and discussing how to rear children, or how to cook cheap nutritious meals.
This woman progressed by literal leaps and bounds, to the point where she began to venture forth to the community hall once a week, by night, to dance with the neighbours. In third level education terms, that is the equivalent of doing a doctorate.
A while ago, she fell in the community centre, while dancing, and broke a limb. No dozen when it comes to her rights, she wants to sue, which the centre can ill afford, if it can afford compensation at all. Maybe she has no rights in the matter, anyway.
I chose not to ask.
I want to cry.