Cleaning for Jesus
The Time Iris Stevenson came to JPAC
Iris Stevenson was coming to JPAC to teach a choir workshop. I didn’t know precisely who that was or what that meant, but T. made it sound like it would be the greatest event of our lives. I remember him vaguely mentioning that she was in Sister Act 2, but that didn’t mean much to someone who had only watched a handful of movies in their life.
What did matter to me was that all of our afternoon arts period was cancelled for two weeks prior to her arrival. The first day of this new schedule, when my mother picked me up from school, I was red faced, tears slowly beginning to spring from my eyes.
“I wasn’t meant for dancing!” I exclaimed, flopping my bookbag down into the passenger seat.
“What happened?” my mother’s eyebrows shot upward.
“We had to dance and sway and clap and sing all at the same time” I wailed.
“You won’t be at the performance anyway,” she reminded me. We had already scheduled to visit my grandmother in Baton Rouge that weekend.
“T. said we couldn’t miss, no excuses.”
“Well, I already talked to him and he said he understood.”
We all knew that my grandmother was dying. The whole family was far too familiar with the look of cancer, the creeping death of that disease to think otherwise.
I had to practice like I was performing anyway. I wobbled as T.’s face folded in on itself, his forehead wrinkling into a v.
“You all must not realize what a privilege it is to have someone like Iris Stevenson come visit you.”
I knew I wasn’t doing well enough. Everyone else seemed to just know how to clap and sing and dance and stay in rhythm without watching each other. Being on stage with the other students was worse than being a sore thumb – it was like being stuck in the center of a tornado. Maybe it was because I had been homeschooled too long. What if I never caught up to all the people who fit in here? How could I ever possibly know the things that they knew – like dance moves and movie titles, and who apparent celebrities were? Just weeks before, T. had kicked out one of the juniors of the school and made her stand outside in front of the building with her bags until she could be picked up. I wondered how close I was to being like her. I couldn’t dance and I had terrible math scores.
I should probably go ahead and quit.
The last few days before Stevenson arrived, classes were cancelled entirely. In the mornings we were to clean and prepare the building for her arrival. In the afternoons, we could continue rehearsing.
“The problem is that you all think of these things as what you have to do – not things that you get to do. Other children, in other schools, wish they were you. It’s a privilege to have something like this to prepare for. Real artists are the people who enjoy this part, who enjoy the process, because they know that this is the work that comes before the performance” T. told us, his whispery voice echoing off the roof of the building.
I felt my heart rate slow. The truth was, I didn’t enjoy the performance. But I did enjoy the work, the quiet moments that our morning cleaning allowed me to have.
I paced in circles finding trash other students had left behind in hidden corners, dragging it all to the nearest can. I swept the stairs, then used the broom to brush dust from the top corners of the walls.
If there was one thing I knew how to do here, it was clean.
I stopped in front of one of the windows lining the top floor. Leaning against my broom, I looked down onto the traffic below. People were stopping at red lights, talking on their phones, each living in their own little bubble of a world. Microcosim, that was the word T. used. All those people down below would never know that I existed, that I was looking down on them and wondering about their lives. They would never know the bustling complexity that was happening in this building just feet from them.
That was the first day I was ever called out.
It was a good thing to get called out, to have Terrance tell everyone that you belonged to the school, that you were doing something worthwhile with your time, something worth imitating.
I don’t remember exactly what he said when we gathered on the fourth floor for rehearsal that afternoon. It was something about my work ethic, my contributions as a team player. Considering later patterns, he probably told a few students that they were being lazy in comparison.
That evening when Mom picked me up, I told her what happened, that Terrance said I was actually doing well.
“Of course you are,” she smiled. “I was thinking today - it takes all kinds of people to make a world. You’ve always liked being behind the scenes. Some people are Mary, others are Martha. Martha worked behind the scenes so that other people could sit and learn from Jesus. Your hard work means this week that other people get to sit and learn from Iris Stevenson this weekend1.”
I nodded, folding my hands primly. Maybe I could last at this school after all
Luke 10:38-42