To Make my World a Better Place
To make “Our” world a better place
Last week, I saw a woman begging on a street corner in the rain. I held a couple of ones out of the car window for her, and when she reached for them our hands met briefly. Two of us the same age, one a tall elderly lady with silver hair wearing pink; the other stooped and old, cold rain running in rivulets down a sodden gray sweatshirt, hands as cold as ice. Then she looked at me, and for a moment …
… all I could see were her eyes … black eyes … helpless … sad.
Why do I keep thinking about this woman’s eyes?
What comes to me is from forty years ago. A creature-is it a seal?-stands? sits? upright in a smallish murky pool of water at the entrance to a dilapidated zoo. There is no way out of the pool, nowhere to hide. I watch as a teenage boy, laughing, hurls an almost full aluminum coke can, which hits the creature with a sound I will not remember.
How often have kids thrown things at this creature? How often has it stood there, without hope, while they laugh at its pain?
I am haunted by its eyes … black eyes … helpless … hopeless.
But what I’m trying to remember is further back. It is a memory that I don’t want but that has never left me. It is something that occurred when I was…
