Jack Shivers

Around three weeks ago, someone broke into the Communicycle Co-op and stole all of our tools. Our shop is located in a ministry center where a couple of churches and other groups meet, and several of these spaces were robbed on subsequent days. Eventually the man taking from the building was caught and has found himself locked behind steel bars.

Without tools at the shop, we have been spending time with the youth participants in other ways. Tonight, we brought them all to the building's concrete basketball court, where we enjoyed a crisp spring evening shooting hoops.

One fellow became bored and started rummaging around near the building's dumpster where a miscellany of discarded construction supplies were stacked in messy piles. He returned to the concrete slab a few minutes later announcing that he found a really cool sweater that he intended to keep.

My heart sank when I saw the garment in his hands, because it was a sweater that once belonged to me. In a flash, I was transported back to a January night of record cold when a man named Jack found his way into the shop. He was looking for coffee and a place to get warm as his makeshift home behind our building offered zero protection from the freeze.

I had nothing to offer him that night except for the thin blue sweater I was wearing. I shook it gently in front of him in insistence that he accept what little warmth it might offer. After we switched the lights off and locked the door, I shuffled around town gathering sweaters and blankets from my closet, a roast beef sub from the deli, and a tall cup of joe from the convenience mart.

As I returned to the Communicycle lot, Jack's tall silhouette appeared in the shadow of my high beams. I handed the humble gifts to him, praying that he would find the warmth to make his way through the frosty night. How crestfallen I was to learn that Jack returned to the Communicycle shop a few days later, shattering glass to enter and departing with handfuls of community-owned tools and supplies.

I never anticipated laying eyes on my blue, striped sweater again, but there it was tonight, tossed aside and dusted with fragments of last autumn's brittle leaves. I felt equally discarded by the unwelcome discovery, and anger began bubbling into my throat.

My emotions would have remained through the night had it not been for the marvelous Communicycle youth. These friends rallied around me as I told them the story, sympathetically resonating with my discomfort and frustration. I am watching these teens take ownership and pride in the program we are building together, and I could not be more elated at their sense of investment.

What do these meandering paragraphs have to do with the Redline Project, or with music of any form? Everything, really.

I drove home that frigid January evening through sheets of blurry tears, and not knowing how else to process the pains and injustice unfolding before my eyes, I grabbed a pen and scratched some lyrics onto a blank journal page. I have much to consider now about the direction this song should head. Initially it was a song of observations and simple lines that stated my confusion from a disconnected stance. The subject matter has since become deeply personal, and I am more a part of the story than I ever anticipated or wished to be.

Where to go from here? I don't know.


Jack Shivers

Jack shivers in the frigid night
Blue sweater, he is not all right
Black coffee, awake till dawn
Not alive, but not quite gone