Where I am Going There are Empty Couches

Its almost three am on an early Thursday by the time I am getting off work. Normally I would have no objection to this. I'm used to working long/odd hours ranging between way too early and way too late and since I am kind of a night crawler anyway it doesn't really phase me. Tonight though I got stuck at work against my will and had a paper to write before nine o'clock the next morning which I had yet to do the reading for.

The majority of the shift was spent standing around wiping bottles and letting occasional pleasantly drunk people come up to the bar and order things. There was Mary, the incredibly fit Sam Adamsrep who as the night progressed went from telling her co-workers about her career ambitions to leaving her notebook for work and purse sitting on the bench to stumble off from the bar and after being brought back again telling everyone her and her identical twin sisters were cheerleaders in high school.

There was Tom and Bob who gave me there business card for it I was ever in Northern Kentucky and in need of a taxi. And some guy whose name I don't remember who tipped me too much on three different shots he let me make up which he bought for both of us.

It was a slow night and as it dragged on I became increasingly irritated that I was here and not actively working towards being in all the magical places I want to see in my life and all the ambitious things I want to do as long as I can focus.

Two-something eventually hit and I ended the night after spending extra time getting ready for healthy inspection in the morning by getting a ride home from my friend Mike who had been patiently waiting for me at the bar stool to make sure that I got back safely. I was very tired and as we headed home I sat in the passanger seat trying to proccess the next set of responsibilties I would be up against in the coming days. Finish application, show up for internship, do wash for community center dinner tonight, find time to run to get ready for marathon...its a lot and has been for the past several years of my life; an endless series of deadlines one leading to another climbing higher and higher till some undefined time when I feel as though I have reached success.

We stopped as one of the traffic lights turned from yellow to a useless red which shown alone with the lights on our car on the empty city streets. There, on a bench just outside the window to me, sat an old women on a bench sitting up and sleeping. Her skin was a ruddy wrinkled white and she sat with a knitted cap tied tightly around her aging chin. Little wifts and tufts of gray frizz came spraying in various directions out of the edges of this hat as they were blown by the wind and she her hands were clutched tightly around her waste to prepare for the cold of sleeping outside sitting up without so much as a blanket.

Surrounding here were what looked to be most of the belongings that someone who take with them from a wardrobe. A few plastic bags of shirts and a paper bag overflowing with unpolished looking shoes.

At first I just wanted to take a picture of the sad looking fierceness of her as she sat with her eyes shut tight, her belongings blocking her from the wind as her frail body sat up ridgigly, primarly defenseless, against anyone who could be so cruel to take one of these bags from her. Yet then I realized that where I am going there are empty couches. There is even a sleeping bag that I keep under my bed for when friends visit or I want to go on a camping trip.

Should I nudge her awake and ask her if she'd like to come sleep in the couch in the little parlour at the front of my house? There is no one who uses it, and even if the fear that all homeless people, including skinny looking grandma ones, are violent thefty maniacs was true, there is nothing in the little parlour worth stealing and she wouldn't have access to anything else in the house. Would she feel threatened or confronted if me, a total stranger at three in the morning,woke her up from her hard won sleep to tell her she is welcome to come home with me?

And if not that, I mean I do have homework to do, perhaps I ought to give her some of the money thats in my pocket. I made more than i'll need to feed myself and stay on top of the few bills i'm responsible for at this point in my life. Perhaps I could just offer her a few dollars for some warm coffee in the morning or a blanket?

But as the light on the other side of the road starts to turn yellow I realize that instead of getting out to do anything I am just going to keep heading back down the road to my house. I'm going to try to forget this guilty feeling instead change my focus and look ahead.

Is this where is starts? I have homework to do, I have life plans to work on, I have things I need to save for because I want to be someone important. I work hard and I feel like i've won some sort of right in my life to look out for whats best for myself. Yet is this the beginning of a deeply innate human sin of a growing seperation between the will to power and the will to do what is good? Is this the beginning of a removal from empathy, or simply a blunt revealing of the truth about what drives most human actions?

Where I am going there are empty couches, there are important people to shake hands with at the other ends of long flights and serious meetings to sit in on about environmental blah blah blah and multi-cultural yada yada. There are thesis papers to write on social abandonment on little lap tops and long conversations about socitial responsibility over cups of expensive coffee to be had.

Where I am going there is mobility. This is my senior year and for the first time i feel like i've got it all right in front of me, the options I want to do what I want when I want to. There is a full life ahead of me and several volunteer experiences that might look good on a resume behind. Where I am going there is future, there is history to witness and in some small way help direct and motorcyles to be purchased. Where I am going, I think in a brief second as the light turns green and our car putters off, there are frozen vegetables in the freezer to eat while writing my paper about feminism and headphones with which to listen to music while I try not to fall asleep as I work on steadily improving my gpa. There is a lot of work to do and many more long, tiring nights of working too long to be fought through.

Where I am headed I will be looking out for this women. I will be making the important decisions that will directly effect her life and because I'm "trying to do whats right" and i'll be sure to make the ones that will help instead of ignore or harm her. I'll personally put an end to whatever corporate evils have left her homeless and ensure that people feel a responsibility to stop and do something when they drive past someone like her at night.

A Lesson in Language Aquisition

I am walking back from my first real day of classes to the boarding house on 14th street that I and several others are calling home for this semester. One of the little girls who live just around the corner comes up to me. As she moves her skinny hips back and forth on the edge of the sidewalk she asks, "wanna buy a book? A dollar for one of these books here!

A boy who might be her brother comes running up behind with two books in hand. The first one a carbon copy of "The Little Mermaid" put into literary form, the other a knock off of the Lion King only his name has been changed to Leo. Each of the books is pretty beat up looking.

"I don't want to buy a book from you," I say. "But I will read it out loud to you!" They are instantly thrown off to this reaction of their panhandling. "Are you going to let us inside your house?" the little boy asks. He was caught in there earlier today by one of my housemates looking through the refrigerator.

"No, we're going to read it outside!" I say, reflecting closely upon my mom's recent lectures about the importance of language acquisition as a critical part of a child’s development. The early phases of childhood are a “critical stage of development in a person’s ability to interact with the world”, my mom says, “that is a fact.”

They look weirded out by the idea of being read the thing they were trying to get rid of for a dollar, and then follow me to the little plot of land that separates my building from the next one that we call a garden.

The two who tried to initially sell me the books are interested in the idea of me reading allowed for perhaps thirty seconds before they start climbing on top of the fence and threatening to jump off.

A man clearly strung out on something walks by shaking and mumbling to himself. He passes us, and then turning to make eye contact his pants begin to grow wet from the crotch. "You peein' yurself!" the little girl, not more than seven, says from the fence she is sitting on. I am mortified. "He a crackhead" the little boy says to me, momentarily shaking his head and then jumping off the fence to the other side to run off. He can't be older than eight.

By now a little crowd of neighborhood kids has gathered. A chunky girl with pink and white beads in her hair comes up to me as I light up to see her deep brown glossy eyes. In an foreign stereotypical teacher voice I ask her how old she is and when she puts up four fingers an older girl says, "She lyin! She six."

"Want to read a book?" I say, having giving up on successfully capturing the attention spans of the other without resolving to threats of disciplinary action that I am in all ways incapable and unwilling to go through delivering. The chunky little girl nods her head and lets me take her hand. I sit on the bench and open the book as the others open and close the fence gate and yell at neighbors as they pass by.

At first the chunky little girl is more interested in my cell phone. She picks it up and tries to call the emergency contact in it as she offers me a part of the purple gum she has strung out between her mouth and her fingers. I tell her my cell phone is not to be touched right now and gently put it into my pocket. "Do you know how to read any words?" I ask. She nods her head no. "I'll point to the words on the page, and you can help me say the letters as we go along."

This is something that I have done countless times with my niece back at home. Olivia, who is probably very close in age to this little girl, cuddles up with me and engages brightly with the pictures as I flip through. She points out little ironies in the story line and occasionally corrects me if I fail to impersonate a character in the way that her parents traditionally portray it. She will do this until the book ends, and then pick up another book for me to read, allowing for her to enter an infinite amount of times into a world of imagination that she can interact with again and again, whether it be a place Where The Wild Things Are or a napping house where everyone is sleeping, its a world that she is familiar to and that she can lead.

The chunky girl and I get about two pages into "The Little Mermaid" before she starts to pull the book from out of my arms and shut it to look at the cover. One of her siblings is running around the yard now clapping her hands and singing as she poses by sticking her skinny butt out and bending her knee.

"She pretty" the chunky little girl next to me says, pointing to the Little Mermaid on the front of the book. "She got pretty blue eyes and pretty skin."

"You're pretty" I say to her and open the book back up again. Her brother interrupts to ask if I have any snacks in my house. "How about any juice?" the little girl says in alliance with him. "No, I’m drinking water though" I say, and hand her the overly priced bpa free Nalgene I've been carrying around in my backpack all day.

She chews on the end of the cap and seems distracted by the sidewalk commotion going on around her. People driving by locking and unlocking car doors as they come and go, men with tightly clenched paper bags walking through the parking lot across the street to and from Washington Park.

But then, as her brother runs off to find something else to entertain himself with, something happens. I begin again and after the second page she is still listening. Her bright beautiful eyes getting brighter during the scene with the shark, her thick fingers carefully pointing out Prince Eric as the same person in the pictures of him both standing on the boat and washed up next to Little Mermaid on the beach.

And then, just as suddenly as we began, we are at the end. Out of pages. What I would like to believe to be a brief silence of disappointment passed through her as she turns the back cover around and around in confusion to search for more to read and says "it ain't done."

Because both of us have seen the little mermaid movie, I know that she is right. This little beat up hardback must be part of some Disney series to which we do not have the next chapter.

You don't even get to know what happened in the second part of the book, I think. You probably never will know the rest of the bad lines these Disney characters say on paper because having the second half of the book to finish isn't of much importance to the people responsible for giving you the books you have, perhaps not of importance to anyone in your delicate and beautiful life.

And while you don’t know it, I think, there are children all around the country who are read a book every night before bed. Children who are bought puzzles for their birthdays while you’re out trying to sell used books for a dollar with your siblings. And while you are here watching homeless men pee their pants on the gray sidewalks where you play all day, there are little girls your age in ballet lessons and in art classes who come home to pink bedrooms and pink backpacks and pink nightgowns. And while the school where you and your siblings went to got knocked down to build a parking garage just last year, there are people your age being taught how photosynthesis can grow lima beans into plants which are set up in neat little rows in a window filled with sunlight. They take breaks from this to have neatly packed little lunches with their friends as your brother breaks into my house to see if there is anything good to eat in my refrigerator.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" I ask her as she lays her head in my lap and smiles at me with her crooked teeth. "I dunno" she says. "I wanna make some money." "You have two baby teeth in the front!" I say. She smiles bigger and wiggles them for me with her pointer finger.

Olivia just got her first loose tooth; I remember the emotion that her mom had, and the celebration of my family as we doted about how big she was getting and how so soon she'd be all grown up. She was standing in my parent’s kitchen eating a frozen pomegranate fruit bar. Devona, her mom, picked her up, asked if she wanted to read a story, and before long the two of them ran up the stairs together to read, say family prayers and get tucked in so that she could dream of all the everything that is and will someday hopefully be hers .

"Hey! Chico is calling you!" says one of the older kids to this girl from the other side of the fence. The little girl gets up off my lap, hugs me with a grin full of pure white teeth, opens the rusting and squeaking gate door which defines my yard from the sidewalk and then walks away through the cigarette boxes and broken bottle covered streets which are her playground, her fairyland, her childhood.

"You forgot your books!" I yell. "Keep em" the older girl says. "We ain't reading thems." And with that the two are gone before I even have time to protest. Going inside to pick up my own packet of reading for the night I think about all of this. And in terms of acquisition, I don't know which of us today learned more.

Is this thing on?

Its 5:06am according to my computer screen. Its still set back in Ohio time and I don't think i'll ever change it.

Its raining and cold in the Colorado Rockies. Both of my waitressing outfits are set out for tomorrow since i'll be working two back to back shifts totaling close to 17 hours of straight serving.

A friend of mine, a really hard working girl from Nepal putting herself through school to be a doctor works shifts like that all the time. "I miss it when my back doesn't ache" she said to me the other day over what was my first time trying Napalese food. We were sitting in a little diner overlooking the Rockies - the clouds intermingling with the tops of the mountains making where we sat seem like heaven or in her words, Nepal.

The food was delicious and reminded me of why I am facinated with anthropology; other cultures, interesting people, and the curosity about life that is found in glimpsing moments which so often have nothing to do with being anywhere near a class room.

Yet that in turn reminded me of why i'm in school - to feel connected to a larger pool of anthropologically wonderful moments and thoughts that I can help build upon and to open the potential for me to always be in a mode of exploration.

Just writing that, in turn, reminds me that I'll be working 17 hours straight tomorrow, to have money for school. O bother.