TENDERLOGUE: PAM BENJAMIN

(Photo Courtesy of Julie Michelle @ iliveheresf.com)

 FAITH IN HUMANITY

Faith in Humanity

Sometimes the planets align in just the right manner,
and the air is clean and cold,
and the stars seem brighter,
and things are just too perfect,
and my limited faith in humanity is refilled.
Filled to overflowing
with the generosity of strangers.

“I’m Mary. This is my partner Joseph.” We squeezed into their boundary at the bar hoping for a space to put drinks down.

“Get this, Get this!” Whit screamed hands waving dramatically, “He’s a carpenter!” She was the first to hone in on the bar stool with a wink and a smile to Mary; they were hugging within minutes of introduction.

“I don’t believe you. This is a clever ruse you two perform at bars to hustle strangers. Do you juggle too?”

“No, but he’s trying to convince me to name our first child Jesus. It’d be just blasphemous enough. I could yell, ‘CHRIST! Jesus! Get the HELL in here!’ when he was playing in the street or something.”

Joseph had a thick red beard, lumberjack style. “I sort of have a thing for Lumberjacks.” He pulled out a picture of himself atop a 50 foot tree.

“Funny enough, I WAS a Lumberjack before I traveled around the country with The String Cheese Incident.” He spoke eloquently with Bostonian accent, a juxtaposition that almost caused cranial aneurism, while his friend played poster child for the Massachusetts Accent Council with phrases like, “Wicked retarded, kid. Wicked pisser.” Which came out phonetically as, “Wikkid Reeetahhded, kitt. Wikkid Piissahh.”

We laughed and talked and yelled and danced and made fun of accents and admired beards and drank and smoked listened to the juke until Mary said, “You guys should come over!”

Now, I usually don’t go home with strangers upon first meeting. I live in the Tenderloin. I have trust issues. I don’t have faith in humanity. I don’t have faith. I get in these mindsets where I think that everyone is evil and after me and that flying monkeys are going to descend from the sky and steal my bus pass or my keys or that someone is going to slip a roofie in my beer or lace my bowl with PCP, that wild dogs will tear my throat out on the street and I’ll be found days later by a top-notch CSI team going through my purse pulling out empty baggies and scanning my body with black-lights, heads shaking, muttering to one another in hushed tones, “She had too much faith in people”.

You could say I carry an unhealthy dose of paranoia in my personal baggage.

You could say I have a lot of undiagnosed fear.

You could say that my desire for adventure is often overshadowed by my limited viewing window to reality.

I had none of these feelings around Mary and Joseph, genuinely good people (No, GREAT people), when they invited us into their home.

As we stumbled down the darkened streets of Hyde and Ellis, Whit picked up their accents screaming, “You drunk! You pahhked your cahhr in the bahhr!” and continued butchering the noble Boston sound to impossible levels of absurdity as we fearlessly ping-ponged down the alley to their apartment.

My cup overfloweth.

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