Today and yesterday I encountered some rather disturbing people... well, they didn't know they were disturbing because I judged them as such. For as much as I like to think I'm an advocate for having justice served to those deserving of it, I act just as much as judge and executioner to those that don't know what's going on in my mind regarding them and the inconvenience their presences make on my life's stage.
What happened yesterday night was like a scene out of a horror movie: Nothing too new in a big city this side of Heaven; a man begging for money... with a cardboard sign in hand asking for monetary donations. He leaned to the right with every step. The horrificness came from the angle at which his right ankle curved. It looked like he had been hobbled like the man in Stephen King's Misery novel. With every step he took he looked like he would fall - teetering on the edge of a cliff. His calf jutted a little south-east from his knee and then turned with a 90 degree angle exactly above his ankle, ending with his right foot turned slightly toward his left foot, almost pigeon-toed. The skin on his legs looked leprous. His hair was matted and the smell of urine saturated his clothes and wafted through the air diving into my nostrils feet first without invitation.
Maybe that's too harsh an assessment - his life looking like a scene out of a horror movie. It's his life. He seems to be living it just fine and does not seem to mind asking for others' to help him finance his way of life on the corner of Randolph and Dearborn - the theater district, making him an appropriate character in this play, on the stage of my life.
Brit'ny was sagging her jeans, unintentionally. She hadn't eaten in who knows how long because I didn't ask, but she asked me... for my cell phone and some of my food... like this: "Have you ever had to ask someone you didn't know for something... never mind..." I said, "Brit'ny, what do you need?" "I'm hungry," she replied. I offered her some of my Trader Joe's spicy sushi. She took one bite into it and then looked at the innards quizzically as they dangled on the precipice of her finger tips. A piece of sushi nori (seaweed paper) was hanging down with sticky, starchy white rice hanging on for dear life. I didn't have the heart to tell her what it was and told her so... she proceeded to shove the piece in her mouth like she hadn't eaten in many days... and it could have been the case. I lied to her when she asked for money. I threw the girlfriend I was with under the bus asking her if she had money and she coughed it up as I coughed up only one dollar. Brit'ny also used my cell phone to call Thelma. Maybe Thelma would be picking Brit'ny up on Wabash and Roosevelt so they could take a road trip and drive the car into the Grand Canyon... her life already a canyon filled with broken dreams and promises... and she scared me. Her neediness. Her lack. They both scared me and I judged that which I didn't know about what I was observing and making up in my mind... another character cast in the play of my life of sometimes inconveniences on a stage without a curtain.
Then today, the food court in Union Station. My eyes were privy to see a homeless person digging through the trash receptacle fishing out discarded bags of food that had leaked out into the bag it was discarded in. Leaking ecru milky spittle from the corner of its mouth - could not discern the gender of this one - while bent in a right angle at the waist in order to use the left arm as a crane lifting out the wreckage of garbage now found as a delicacy - I instantly became nauseous. The friend I was dropping off and trying to enjoy lunch with had no idea what was happening behind his back four feet away. I didn't dare tell him. He would have shrugged it off. Not that he wouldn't have cared; he would have said something to the effect of, "It's the choices we make that land us there." And as nauseous as I was before this episode/scene, I continued to eat my blessed meal and made a concerted effort to only look in the eyes of my lunch mate. This homeless person found their lunch in the trash can and made away with it... happily ever after? Doubtful. Feasting on someone else's left-overs? For certain.
After the above character left center stage, who should find their way into my field of observation center stage right, but a frail little bald headed boy. So bald his scalp shined more so from the overhead fluorescent lights. His arms looked like they would break just from a much needed hug I felt compelled to give him... but I didn't move from my comfortable orchestra seat. I just observed what was being played out before me... his other siblings didn't treat him with the kid gloves of my imagination. They treated him just like the leukemia that almost ravaged him: harshly, derisively, without concern for his age or small stature... but it seemed to make him a survivor...
And like all three of these characters and their varied challenges and sad circumstances (what I perceived as such), they all seemed to find the light in the down stage center of their lives, let it fall on them, and smile... while I cried observing.
