Dragging up a chair

I was 14 years old and I was locked up in the jail cell of a little west coast town where we had lived for a few years. A friend and I had got ourselves in to trouble the night before, the end result of which was I was now sitting there behind the bars of the local police station.

I yelled, pounded, pouted, whined, swore, threatened, pleaded “you know “the regular repertoire of adolescent antics designed to make the world behave in the manner we think it should. Never effective, but always satisfying on some level. While I did all this, the local cop sat at his desk working. After a while I settled down.

And then the cop walked over, dragged up a chair, sat down and started to talk to me through the bars. I don’t remember exactly what he said. What I do remember is that he talked to me about me “what I was doing, what I was going through, what I was feeling. He talked about family, self, and relationship. He didn’t talk at me, he talked to me. And after a while he was talking with me. And that’s what I remember most. The time. The being there. Building that thing called relationship. Entering into that place called connectedness.

I learned something that day, and I know I learned it because here I am some 40 years later talking about it. I learned about “dragging up a chair”, and sitting down, and taking the time to connect. And I know I learned it because the first thing I did as a child care worker was grab a chair and drag it up to the table where a group of kids was sitting around.

It was my first shift, my first day, my first hour as a Child and Youth Care worker. I had walked in to the residential unit, saw a bunch of adolescents sitting around the dining room table and, not being filled with the inhibitions of later learning, I grabbed a chair, dragged it up to the table and sat myself down. Marty, one of the group, looked me in the eye and asked with fierce aggression to explain what I thought I was doing there. Me, all I had done was drag up a chair and sit down. Suddenly this young man was attacking me, demanding something from me, challenging me.

So there it was. The first moment. My first Child and Youth Care interaction. But what was it, really? Was it aggression? Was it a demand for me to leave? Was it a challenge? What was it?

It was, as it is so often, the opportunity to travel to that place called connectedness. To find the territory of connected experience.

So many of the things we do find their foundation in our earlier experiences. In the end, some say, we become that which we experience. We are the composition of the myriad of our experiencing. Today is structured by our yesterdays. When you are with a young person you become a part of that young person's history of experience. You are a part of them becoming who they will be.

I don’t know who that cop was “I can’t remember his name “but I do remember what I learned when he dragged up the chair. All these years later, my experience with him is a part of who I am.

Thanks for that.

Thom