The Story of Cindy

I see her almost every morning as I head to work.  A solitary figure in a long black skirt, a man's black windbreaker, sturdy boots and a hat pulled low over her face, despite the raging south Florida heat. She's usually carrying a bag or two, but never more than you'd see after someone has been shopping at the mall. Never enough to give her away. Never enough bags to look homeless...but she is.

If I stop for tea or a bagel before work, she's often there  -- sometimes eating her own breakfast, sometimes just sitting at a table, sometimes walking past.  We've talked now and then.  She knows me well enough to say hello, to chat for a bit.

The first time I talked with her, she was sitting alone on a bench by the fountain.  It was well over 90 degrees, but she was dressed entirely in black.  Layers of black.  I said hello, and she began to talk to me.  Her face was surprisingly young -- maybe late 30's or early 40's.  Her voice and her vocabulary suggest a very good education, a comfortable upbringing.

She used to be an artist, she told me. A good one.  She had a studio and a future. She shows me some sketches from one her bags.  The subjects are confusing...a bit of this, a bit of that, but the skill is very much there. She tells me she lost everything to a partner, who took her studio, destroyed her career. She watched the partner walk away with the success that should have been hers.  And that was the end. She didn't say how -- I have no idea if she walked away from her former life, had a breakdown or simply gave in to demons that may have existed all along.

But the result was a loss of her home. And perhaps saddest of all, a loss of her name.  You see, I call her Cindy to myself.  She looks like a Cindy.  But she says that when she stopped being an artist, when she lost her future (her words), she also lost her name.  Whatever she loves or likes, she tells me, she loses.  It is taken away.  So she hid her name, even from herself, so she would not lose it. She would not say more.

So nameless, she walks the streets and rides the buses in South Florida.  Always clean, always polite, always dressed from head to toe in heavy back clothing.

A lost soul, who lost her own name...

Belonging...is it all it's cracked up to be....

Reading a new book called "The Daily Coyote" by Shreve Stockton, and in the first few pages, I came across a Salman Rushdie quote about "those born not belonging." That quote and her description of her wanderings could have come from my own pen, so I immediately looked up the quote, wanting to see the quote in context...

What I came across was another blogger who had been on the same search, motivated by the same lines in Shreve's book. Melle.ca, the blog, includes the full quote from Rushdie. And I read, fascinated, as I recognized myself in the lines...

[people who are] simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as “natural” a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity. And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers’ seal of approval.

So my question for my readers...are you a secret "not belonger" or do you truly value your identity as a member of a tribe, group or fraternity/sorority of kindred souls, whether by birth or design or chance?

If you practice a religion, do you stand in the middle of what ever identity society assigns to you, as a Jew or a Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or whatever you may be called, and feel more whole for the experience, or do you feel a keen awareness of non-belonging even as you do or say or sing or bow? (Note, that non-belonging is entirely separate from non-believing. One can believe wholeheartedly in a creed, and remain a non-belonger.)

Do you have deep and solid roots to a place, whether the city or town of your birth, or the place you now call home, and struggle to imagine leaving it behind (or long to return if you have left.) Or do you wake up some mornings and fight the urge to throw your essential possessions into the back seat of your car and hit the road for "somewhere else?"

Your thoughts? Your ideas?

Ironically, as I was writing this post, the song "See Rock City" by Kate Campbell came on the streaming radio site I was listening to...and it's a song about the very same thing...Here's a video of that to listen to while you think about your own attachment to belong -- or to not belonging. (A word of caution...the video has a LONG lead in as she talks about her guitar and the song...but it's well worth the wait to hear the song, so bear with it.)