My first visit found Stan in a sort of shell-shock. He'd been in jail for the prior 12 days, and had been sleeping on a thin permacell matt on the concrete floor outside the restroom. He complained of soreness of his shoulders and knees from being on such a hard flat surface. One of the other inmates had shown him how to make a pillow from a towel wrapped around a hardcover book so as to get his head off the ground. He described his headspace at the time as feeling "confused and abandoned." He shared these feelings freely with me, and was moved to tears often. It seemed crazy that this was the same guy that we shared a great afternoon with on the porch of his lovely home just a month prior. To see Stan visibly upset was incongruous to the person I knew who was always laughing and making light of every situation. Rather than having a conversation standing in his kitchen with him sipping herbal tea, we were separated by bulletproof glass lined with steel wire and were speaking through a telephone bolted to a steel countertop. Talk about weird...
One of the saddest things that he told me was about mail call. They often rouse his pod at 4:30am to do mail call. He shared with me that he hates when they call his name out. He's afraid that someone will hear his name and know what he'd plead guilty to. With tears streaming down his face, he told me he was ashamed of hearing his own name. This was a tough thing to share with Dan, his brother. Stan was at a low point that day and had been effectively alone for 12 days away from family and friends. I asked him why I was the only person who had been to see him other than his lawyer, and he'd not put put his 4 names down on the visitation list. I asked him why, and he replied that he didn't want anyone to see him like that (in jail). I begged him to reconsider this and he said he'd think about it.
The last thing he described was the slit windows in the jail. They are thin windows common to jails and prisons; they are vertical-- about 4" wide and maybe 3' tall. The exterior side of the window has frosted plexiglass so you can't see outside, other than to see if it's night or day. But one window in his pod has a broken piece on the bottom of it, and if you sit at a certain angle and smash your face up against the window, you can see a tiny slice of the outside world. Sadly for Stan, that only window outside looks directly at the college where he used to work. It's a beautiful campus filled with mature trees, formal grounds, and older brick buildings. As Stan lay on the floor night after night, he was less than a mile from his comfortable craftsman styled home. It must be a lot to try to take in...
Our visit ended with us praying the "Our Father" together. The last thing Stan asked me is to get people to write him. Please contact me directly for his address, and I'll be happy to send it to you. Deacon Pat
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