I'm in Dallas, Texas this week...home to JR (and the one who shot him), the grassy knoll, and the first Steak-House/Gas-Station I've ever seen. I'm surrounded by pickup trucks and people who wish they owned bigger pickup trucks in a land so expansive that the office towers seem to be built out long before they're built up, just because they can. Dallas, Texas is also the home to Narrissa, the Ecuadorian Maid, and the closest thing to an angel I think I've met.
I met Narrissa while she scrubbed my tub. I had come back from breakfast to find the door open, her giant-maid-cart (home to villages of tiny soaps) in front of my door, and her feet sticking out of the entrance to my hotel room's bathroom. She was yellow-gloved and scrubbing furiously...working so hard at something nobody would ever, ever thank her for...and unaware of my presence. I cleared my throat, which I gather scared the living @#$# out of her, as she jumped in a way that only a person on their knees can. She immediately turned around and stood, a vision of tiny Latin maternalism, less than five feet tall and with a wholly ambiguous aging that Latin and Asian women seem to have won in the racial-bonuses lottery. (I guessed her somewhere between 30 and 60...turns out she was 62). What got me was the smile...real, deep, proud, humble, and born from somewhere I've never been.
She greeted me with a "hi, sir, do jou wan me to leeb?"
"No," I replied...stumbly and a little taken aback by her grandma's-cookies warmth, "No, not at all."
"OK, I'll be done in a mow-men. Is OK if I pass de bac-ume?"
"Yeah, of course...please."
She pulled off her gloves, started the vacuum, and swept around me while I opened my computer and started to get to work. An email came in from a co-worker that included a picture of a child recently born to (another) co-worker. I opened it to my screen. The sweeper stopped behind me. A confident, quiet, and infinitely cinnamon voice:
"Is your baby?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Is a peek-shur of your baby?"
"Oh...OH, no, no...just a friend's baby."
"You have cheel-drun?"
"No. Not yet."
"How long you haf been married?"
"Five years. Well, just over five years."
"Oh.
I paused. I had nothing to say back to this. I hoped so. I hope so now. I want that...we want that. We have for a while. We worry. I said something very, very honest to someone I just met:
"You really think so?"
"Jes. I think so."
Sweeper clicks back on. Engine spins up, carpet meets rotating-bristle-brush, and Narissa goes back to sweeping. I'm left feeling very different than when I woke up...a little stunned, and a bit like I just got half-a-telegram from Jesus, that got cut off right after, "Justin, I've got something important to tell you, but it's good news..."
I turned back to my computer. My heart was thumping a little. I can't tell you why I believed her, but I did.
The sweeper shuts back off. I look into the desk mirror over my shoulder.
"Can I pray for jou?"
Total....stunned...silence.
"Umm, what?"
"Can I pray for jou?"
Yes.
"yes."
"I'm shore. Jour tall...will you seet while I pray?"
I sat, flushed and a little shell-shocked.
"Whas jour name?"
"Justin."
"Ju-stin. Good. I pray in my language. OK?"
Yes. Absolutely, yes.
"Yes."
She stood across from me while I sat on the edge of my (just made) bed, held a hand up in a Christian mudra I'd seen many times but never felt until now, and prayed in Spanish. She prayed for me, for Stacy, for the blessing of a son...she spoke of wombs, and organs, and fruit, and health, and birth...she spoke of something so private that to have done it in English would have been offensive. She spoke with reverence, but with authority, and seasoned with a knowledge so deep of something so deeply unknowable that I shrunk in a kind of humble shame. I felt her prayer rinse over me, starting at the heart and radiating outward, spilling over my gel-hair and polished shoes and just-ironed shirt. She prayed, and she meant it, and I think she actually spoke to God. I don't claim to know how that works, but I think she did it.
She finished praying, said "Amen," and looked at me just long enough to let me know that her prayers were in love, not in plea for my response. She rushed over to the desk drawer, grabbed a Gideon's Bible, opened to Psalm 127, pointed at it, and waited for me to read aloud. I did. She smiled. And then she went back to the bathroom to scrub the tub.
She was done. She wanted nothing...no money, no thanks, no conversion moment, not even a prayer in her favor. She just wanted me to be prayed for, and fully expected me to receive the blessing. It's like she waited...like she was planted there...like she had been there, in my hotel bathroom, in Dallas, Texas, just waiting for me to come. I feel like she was waiting for me to come along, all filled with insecurities about child-bearing and reproduction and would-we-ever-be-able-to and just waited. I came, she prayed, then she was done.
I tried to thank her profusely. Good god, I even tried to give her money to say thank you...it's stupid, but it's all I had to offer. She would have none of it. It didn't fit her somehow...it was far too cheap, it didn't fit the plan. She was there to pray, and she was there to scrub, and that was all.
As you may have noticed, it's been a very long time since I've written. My last post was about an inspiration lost...and I think I've been waiting to find it again. I had no idea I'd find it in a hotel bathroom in Dallas.
Thank you, Narrissa. I can't wait to send you a picture of the blessing some day.
Peace,
Justin