Volume 4, Number 2 - Spring 2006
Listening to a
Participants from People & Stories
Interview with Ismael Vasquez
Ismael Vasquez read “Abalone Abalone Abalone” and thought about his salt and pepper shakers.
For years—before he was shot and paralyzed and wheelchair-bound, before he came to call Kate’s Place, a Philadelphia residence of low-income apartments, home—Vasquez had an extensive collection of salt and pepper shakers. There were some shaped like tiny monks and a pair in the shape of dogs with inscriptions saying, “Shake the P out of me” and “Shake the S out of me.”
“I’d find them at thrift stores,” Vasquez remembers. “I used to go into the kitchen every day and look at them. I used to see something exquisite in them. I miss my salt and pepper shakers.”
That experience helped him understand the narrator of Toshio Mori’s “Abalone,” who finds unexpected beauty and solace in collecting and polishing abalone shells. And it is just one example of the ways literature and life have collided for Vasquez, an avid participant in People & Stories.
His group, led by coordinator Lawrence McCarty, meets weekly at Kate’s Place, a residence operated by Philadelphia’s Project H.O.M.E. Vasquez, who dropped out of South Philadelphia High School after 10th grade and “hardly read books,” saw a flier posted for the program and decided to check it out.
“I thought it was just going to be reading, not discussing, figuring out the plot,” he says. “It’s pretty cool. We can voice our opinions on the stories. Everyone has a different opinion, but nobody has the right answer.”
Recently, after reading Langston Hughes’ “Thank You, M’am,” members of the group speculated about the race of the older woman in the story and the young boy who tries to steal her purse. Sister Mary Ellen, a staff member at Kate’s Place, suggested the woman was African-American; Vasquez disagreed.
“I feel pretty at ease in the group,” he says. “Lawrence asks questions and I feel free speaking.” After reading about how the woman in “Thank You, M’am,” took the boy home and taught him a quiet lesson about compassion and responsibility, McCarty asked, “Do you think he ever stole another purse?”
“I said, ‘Yeah,’” Vasquez remembers. “Boys’ll be boys. The boy got a lesson out of the ordeal, but I didn’t think it was a lasting lesson…I think he might have seen her on the street later and said, ‘Thank you, M’am.’”
The story made Vasquez think about people he would like to thank. “The doctors, when I got shot,” he says. “And there was one real nice nurse” at Jefferson Hospital, where he underwent surgery after being shot in his apartment on New Year’s Day, 1994.
People & Stories has given Vasquez, 45, a chance to talk about his life—his early childhood in Puerto Rico, the 7th-grade teacher who gave him a copy of Charlotte’s Web, his first job delivering soda—and to learn more about other residents of Kate’s Place. It has also given him a new thirst for reading.
“You get pictures in your head when someone’s reading to you,” he says. “You go along with the story, and you can’t wait until the next week. Now I’m going to pick up a book from the library. A mystery. I like to see what happens to people, what life brings them.”