THE BRIDGE

WEALTH • HOME • BIG CHANGES

What if wealth was a question of human, not material, resources? If the American Dream changed? If what you wished for your children was that they’d be more empathic, aware, imaginative, and socially talented than you. Spiritually richer, not physically, stuff-wise. The Bridge is a story about getting used to another life. It questions the notions of wealth and luck and what defines a home.   

INFO:

Read it or listen to it (7 minutes), then proceed to the three basic questions that follow.

Relevance: When life really changes, what do you do? When things look bad, what are your options? Whether life is tough or gentle is, at the end, a question of perspective and comparison. Or? The Bridge is told from a child’s perspective. It reminds us of a few universal questions and therefore must be labelled ‘high relevance’ to all of us.

Prefer listening? We’ve prepared a recording of The Bridge for you. You can hear the full story below. Remember to check out the Three Universal questions afterwards. You’ll find them at the bottom of this page.

CHAPTER 1

It was the summer that my parents lost their jobs, and I learned to play the ukulele. You could say that our lives changed for the worse, but at some point it just didn’t feel important. Our lives changed; that was all.

It all began before I knew we were poor; before the factory near the ravine moved its business overseas, and my parents became unemployed; before we sold our tiny bungalow with the orchard; before we had a garage sale one humid June morning and sat on the lawn as neighbors and strangers examined our belongings. My mother counted the money in the evening and folded the bills with a sigh.

“We still owe money,” she said.

“That’s it”, my father said as the streetlights lit the street that was no longer ours. “We’re broke. We have nothing left.”

We were five in our family. My two brothers, my parents, and me. I was the youngest. We were six if you counted our dog. “What now? my mother said”. “It’s time to move,” my father answered.

CHAPTER 2

I remember the summer heat as we wandered the city streets one early morning. My father hadn’t told the truth when he said that we had nothing left because my mother had packed three bags with clothes, schoolbooks, an old picture album, letters, pots and plates, soap, whatever must have felt important to her. We carried it all with us, trying our luck with acquaintances, friends from school, former colleagues. The phone company had cancelled our subscription, and I remember my brothers screaming in anger when they found out. My father told them that we all had to get used to a new life. That we all would have sacrifices to make down the road. I didn’t have a phone, but I worried about dog food. And I worried about the price of everything. That’s what my parents discussed late at night. The price of everything. Would our dog have sacrifices to make as well? My mother told me that our dog would eat whatever we didn’t eat. It was better than not eating.

We walked the streets, and the sun was everywhere. We knocked on doors, and most of them remained unopened. My mother said we were a sorry sight. We tried the shelters and the homeless organizations, but it turned out that we weren’t the only ones with a change of life. I sat down crying, and my brothers picked me up, and I didn’t understand how they managed to carry me through the heat of the afternoon, but they did. Then someone told us that people like us were gathering under the freeway bridge.      

CHAPTER 3

People like us – it turned out – were nothing like us, but they welcomed us like we were family. There were students and retirees with faded tattoos, there were people with no teeth or no legs or no idea of where they came from. There were families with books and porcelain cups, and people praying to the moon or the sun or some god hiding in the bushes. They all lived in a makeshift town sprawling in the ravine under the freeway bridge. It was a town of tents and beat-up mobile homes, of tarps and plywood boards. There was a smell of foreign food and sweat and smoke. Someone showed us to an unoccupied spot, someone else brought us a platter of food. I laid down and fell asleep on the ground with the hum from the freeway high above me. I woke up when someone lifted me off the ground. My arms and legs felt like stone.

“Where will they put me?” I thought before falling asleep again. They have nowhere to put me.

We took up living under the freeway bridge as the summer heat choked the city above us, and the ravine still felt surprisingly cool and fresh. There was a small stream below us, visited by butterflies and birds. In the evenings a lady with an eyepatch taught me to play the ukulele.

CHAPTER 4

Early in the morning I would follow my father and brothers to a deserted gasoline station by the freeway to look for work. Other men would be there, all lining up and waiting for the contractors to arrive and shout their orders like at a restaurant: Three men for digging, four men for clearing bushes, five men for a shitty job. Then they would take off for the day in minibuses or vans or just open trucks with the men hoarded like cattle in the back. Some mornings there would be enough for everybody, other mornings involved fighting and arguments and skipping lines. I hated the contractors, and I hated seeing my father and brothers being driven off to build the city above us.

“We’re lucky,” my father said one evening as we sat around the fire in the ravine, and I practiced the ukulele that belonged to the nice lady with the eyepatch but would later become mine. “We’re lucky,” my mother repeated and smiled. I paused. Luck? How could this be luck?

One hot morning near the end of summer one of the toughest men broke down in the line at the gasoline station. He stood behind us as tears began running down his cheeks, his body shaking. I heard him sob and felt miserable. The line fell silent. I heard the birds chirping in the bushes by the stream. Then my father gently touched the crying man’s arm and switched places with him. Others did the same, and he was slowly moved to the front of the line. I was baffled. “Why did you do that?” I asked my father. “He might take work from you.”

My father looked down and squeezed me lightly. “It’s okay,” he said. “We have plenty.”

Credits:
Written and produced by The Empty Square
Illustration: Samuel Toi
Voice artist: Mercy Maya