The Work Ethic of the Shopping Cart Shaman

 

“What are you going to be when you grow up?” my grandfather’s neighbor asked me. As I looked up at him, it was hard to make him out.  Shadows from the sycamore trees jostled his face so it kept pulling apart and coming together again like a reflection in water. This apparitional aspect disembodied his voice, as if the question were coming not from him but from the shifting leaves. “What are you going to be when you grow up?” I took it as another test. My answer would depend on whether or not I could discern who or what was asking. I knew, as a kid, I was always mildly under suspicion. If it were truly the neighbor asking his question would either be motivated by enviously wondering would I answer as he might, were he to be young again; or it would be the voice of impersonal authority testing my conformity. In either case my answer would be a condoned lie irrelevant to whatever I might imagine for my future. But if it was the voice of the leaves my answer would require a more subtle form of deception: it would have to be true but coded, like Jesus always coded his answers in parables. In addition to the undercurrent of suspicion adults maintained toward children, I also had the vague but mounting sense, as I grew older, that something was coming behind me with a not altogether benign intent,  like a gothic street sweeper, and not just toward me, but all kids. Where did this feeling come from?

Every place we loved was disappearing. Vacant lots we had dug forts in, our instinctive refuges into the mysterious underground, were  rapidly disappearing under subdivisions, and magnificent oak trees few dared climb were being quickly collared by parking lots. The cow field, a kind of eternal horizon, turned into Ampex Corporation, and the marsh, its egrets and ducks wisely out of range, leveed and drained to create acres of barren, pink salt beds for Leslie Salt Company. I could see an eerie Mount Fuji, a mountain of salt several stories high, glittering at the edge of a bay retreating farther and farther away. Wrecking yards and trailer parks had taken over its filtering wetlands, a stopover for migrating birds that no longer showed up. Grownups were occupying the wild places, those refuges where our imaginations ranged and strengthened. How can you know what you want to be if your imagination is losing the habitat it flourishes in?

Years later, I was stopped at the light at Shattuck and University on a Sunday morning, the streets deserted. A man was doggedly trying to push ten inter-connected shopping carts diagonally across the intersection. The pavement swelled in the center into a slight rise, forcing him to push with all his strength. His  stained coat briefly shorted out in a blinding, soft explosion of sun as it rose over the East Bay hills. When the man reappeared, one wheel of the front cart had caught in a manhole cover and the cart began to teeter, tilting the one behind it, lifting its wheel, and threatened to spiral down the chain. He struggled to hold the line upright as it twisted, like a pilot trying to keep a plane that has lost an engine from going down, but it was too much for him. Each cart was stuffed full, the incline unbalancing them. The long train of carts, interlocked, began to spill over until it collapsed in a clattering wave like a basket of silverware, jarring the quiet street. 

As I watched this catastrophe, a former cabinet member of Clinton’s administration was being interviewed on my car radio. He was talking about the role he played to create welfare reform, which resulted in Clinton signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996. “We wanted people to work,” he said, “to re-instill in them the ethic of hard work that America was founded on.” Within twenty years general consensus acknowledged that the welfare act added up to a messy compromise. Clinton himself described it as “Welfare reform in a bag of shit.” And as for work ethic, please don’t tell me pushing ten shopping carts through city streets isn’t hard work. 

As the politician spoke I watched the presumably homeless man unhook his carts so that he could get them back up on their wheels and re-connect them. A few other cars had showed up in the meantime, as if drawn to the scene like seagulls to a picnic, imposing a polite pressure on the man. His manner had an ironic charm, given that the whole thing was playing out in the middle of the street. It was admirable how unhurried he was, how he worked with ritualistic patience. The empty streets that Sunday morning allowed the intersection to emerge as a stage, an altar even, transforming the homeless man into a shaggy shaman tending a sacrifice.

But what was being sacrificed? The notion of getting anywhere. His train’s destination was put on hold by its accidental collapse. The incident gave this otherwise socially useless man a chance to exhibit his transformative powers by creating a play. He needed to be useless to become useful in this way. Traffic waited. The active world paused. When the caravan fell it tore open the fabric of time, bringing us together, dispelling the illusion of our individual isolation. Isn’t this just the break we need? Isn’t this why John and Yoko took to their bed in a world torn by war? Einstein leaped out of his grave to flicker over the shopping carts as a blessing. 

Just then a plastic bag scooted over the street, swelled, lifted and escaped gravity so effortlessly the man stood there, and I, in my car, watching it flit up the side of a building, as if tapping it for weak spots, until it sailed above the rooftop and was swept out of sight. Indeed, what was the purpose of the sacrifice? And who could have predicted an angel would appear as a plastic bag, showing that you could fly free of everything you’ve collected and live more simply.

In another era, the shopping cart shaman might have been a herder moving his goats to another pasture, part of the essential work life takes. So much of the future depends on how we see things. This incident refocused the question about what work is: what motivated that man’s work, incidentally picking up what’s been thrown out by a culture working compulsively to produce even more of it—on the Sabbath? From what source did he receive his mission, what inspired his patience and authority, what fulfilling social function drove him and, with what caring, did he he lift his fallen beast back up? What, in fact, is true work?

Thinking back on this incident I invoke the angel of the plastic bag. She showed us we can fly free—of our things, of our stories, of what we’ve done and not done. I remember the leaves whispering through my grandfather’s neighbor’s question, “what are you going to be when you grow up?” I felt my grandfather, in his suit and vest, made of wool woven so meticulously it had the texture of fine brown sand, intricate and jewel-like, each stitch a pearl, anticipating my answer. I focused on his suit like one road I might take. I admired it but it looked too constraining. It didn’t look comfortable. I wore Levi’s, tennis shoes, a T-shirt. I ran through the marsh like Huck Finn, floated on make-shift rafts in the sloughs. But I was a badge of upbringing for him. I knew there were columns in the want ads for engineers. This was the fifties—decade of The Bomb. Math and Science were the power and way. “An engineer,” I answered. I heard my voice thin. I was lying. And the two men were complicit. I liked to go barefoot, and was beginning to resent the regimentation of school. Huck Finn had caught my imagination on fire and I had my own way to go. I had to master the art of disguise, and for that, I knew I would have to understand the language of leaves.

It’s vital that we struggle to do what we want to do. Our dreams are often casualties of growing up. What happens to them? The answer is in the streets. Homeless people are pushing shopping carts through our cities’ back alleys looking for the dreams we threw away when we grew up and took jobs we hated. As a culture we are living an unimagined life. We are destroying the habitat of our imagination.