Hell on Earth

There is a lot of hell on earth, I’m afraid. If you have yet to experience it, and want to explore the dark side, I have located a parcel. It is family court inside the Oklahoma County Courthouse. If Disneyland is the happiest place on earth, this is the saddest.

In recent years, I have made several trips to the courthouse. As a witness in a custody hearing, I have waited a few hours on a few occasions for the case to be heard, all the while watching human drama after human drama unfold. It is unbelievably painful to watch the shattered hopes and dreams of families paraded before the court and other unsuspecting people who find themselves there for one reason or another. Later, the stories are morphed into public records, but they don’t do justice to the stories of the broken who come spilling out on a daily basis, hearing by hearing and case by case.

At one time, I might have welcomed a trip to family court. I often ventured off the beaten path seeking not only the ether of life, but the inferno as well. When I found myself in St. Louis one snowy, picturesque Christmas, I had to go to the east side to see for myself the poverty I’d heard about on the news. Turns out, it was worse than anything I’d seen anywhere including Central America, downtown L.A. and the streets that combine to form Oklahoma City’s Mulligan Flats.

When we passed through Louisville on our way to Tennessee, it was the row houses I would most remember, not the blue-green grasses of Kentucky. Seemingly an inch apart and mile a deep, each house rang out a shotgun blast of not just disappointment but lack of expectation altogether. During a scenic road trip from Maryland to Vermont, I filed memories of not just the winding Connecticut roads or overcast boardwalk of Atlantic City, but the “scary” I saw in Wilmington, Delaware.

In college, I always reached for the unusual experience. I occasionally attended services at the Jewish Temple or the Russian Orthodox Church. I wanted to know how other people lived and what they believed. I wanted to glimpse their celebrations and hear their dirges.

Through all my adventures, I sought to confront things that actually made me uncomfortable, including at one time, my own loneliness. About 10 years ago, I found myself on a thin strip of highway in the middle of a cornfield on the road to Red Cloud, Nebraska. The sun was bright red in the sky and across the ether stood the moon, a beautiful peach-colored sphere. I was on my way to visit the childhood home of Willa Cather, one of my favorite writers. At the time, my heart was broken and I was learning to live with a tremendous loss. A part of me wanted to crawl inside that moon hoping once I got there I would find a carnival. I wanted that bright red sun to burn the sorrow right out of me. But another, bigger part of me wanted to grasp the hand of loneliness and walk all the way home with her. In the end, my bravery neutralized my misery.

There is a lot to be said for facing reality, whether it is our own or someone else’s. I have always wanted to be engaged in my world in a meaningful, authentic way. Along the way, I have discovered many a line among compassionate onlooker, distant spectator and all out voyeur. Court is neither sport nor exhibitionism. It is unfortunate disclosure that is stripped down and ugly. Everyone watches while people take turns carving at each other – some more than others. At the end of the day, I swear, the janitor is mopping up bits and pieces of human spirit, and surprisingly, there are no Jesus kiosks outside the courthouse chambers.