Suboxyn, the men said, in prison Friday. So began the tutorial. Its use in recovery programs. Its relation to heroin. Its substitutionary function. How one proposed reentry house was refusing to sponsor it for proposed population in proposed newly purchased house.
Two of men in our room had been heroin users. They knew suboxyn, explained the feeling, explored the politics, stated their own positions, supported the drug-free stance for returning to the street.
These were serious men in for serious crimes expressing serious consideration for a serious issue of our time, and their time. They’ve been working on themselves. They have practices and points of view. You can feel it.
Someone brought The Science of Mind, a book by Earnest Holmes. We read around. Another was paging through Zen and The Birds of Appetite by Thomas Merton. A new fellow was going through Tricycle magazines.
Men came in and out. We silently sat. We did walking meditation. We talked. It’s a Friday morning ritual over twenty years running. I greet one man in German. Four, five, six in hallway — our brief yet sufficient re-up. These are friends. One tells me of another man in smu having a shitty time of it.
After final silence and final circle, we embrazzo, shake hands, extend greetings to absent woman and dog, and I wander through heavy steel doors. A short-timer wants to know if he could attend a meetingbrook conversation when he gets out in four weeks. Come on by, I say.
Signing out at captains row woman introduces herself as part time chaplain while regular chaplain is doing military chaplain training duty. She’d done it, she says, happy to be filling in, hoping to stay on, proud that her father had been baptized in prison many years ago and she’s now here.
The walk out is, as always, a practice of gratitude for having walked in and being able to walk out. Desk officer as I sign out says same thing to me. “So, they’re letting you out, eh? He reaches over and shakes my hand. Something very profound is acknowledged in haiku brevity.
A work crew is removing the large stones from failed path cut into grassy oval years after the failure was apparent the day after laying it. Something new, asphalty, will be coming. Men from the farm shovel and rake the rehabilitation in hot sun.
I started teaching college courses in the old prison thirty years ago, eleven years before the millennium. I’ve sat with and learned with a lot of men. Something more unexplainable than fondness is felt, is in the bones.
Somebody up there likes me.
Or, it’s been a lucky hand.
DeThe Science of Mind, a book by Ernest Holmes.
