It would be easy to become the “lady who helps stray people” living on this corner.
Our House
This morning as I am clearing up my breakfast dishes and pouring my second cup of coffee, I hear a sound almost like a windchime of light metal gently joggling around. When I look out the window I see a white-haired woman carrying three large garbage bags of returnables heading away from the liquor store toward another party store a few blocks away on Wayne Road.
She stops and I step back away from the window, so she doesn’t see me watching her. I don’t know if it is her embarrassment that concerns me or mine.
She yells back in the direction she came from “Go back! Go with your mother!”
Whoever it is must keep coming because the old lady shouts a couple more times for the person to “go back”.
A smaller voice finally shouts in response, “Grandma, she told me to go with you.”
“Mighty generous of her,” she says out loud.
A young girl, maybe 10 years old, runs up to the old woman and relieves the grandmother by taking one of the garbage bags. They continue walking, but the young girl tells the grandmother to wait. She turns around and yells, encouraging her mother.
“Catch up, mama.”
“Shhh,” the grandmother, who has done the most yelling of all, hisses at the young girl.
Undaunted the girl continues to yell to her mother.
“C’mon, mama. You can help carry one of the bags.”
“She’s too proud,” the grandmother snarls at the girl.
The mama finally catches up to her daughter and mother. I see that it is a girl that I went to school with. I wonder what accumulation of circumstances has culminated in her being her here walking down the sidewalk outside my house at 9am on a Tuesday with her mom and daughter and three bags of returnables.
I try to think of a way to help. I could give them our empties, but they can barely carry what they have. Maybe offer them a ride to the store, but I have car seats in the back of my 2-door Monte Carlo and a stroller in the trunk. Every thing I think of only seems like it would be further embarrassment to them.
I stand and feel the weight on my heart as I watch them go; three generations of women depending on whatever prosperity three garbage bags of returnables might offer them.
