Ten minutes ago, I was pulling into the parking lot of a grocery store in my affluent community of Temecula, California. People are bronzed and fit, well-heeled and rolling in nice wheels.
I get out of the car and see a woman of seventy, dignified, well-assembled. She's driving a modest, but late-model sedan, about to load about ten bags of groceries into her car.
She is crying. She has a handkerchief up to her nose.
I try to look away in good suburban fashion, but she waves at me, so I approach her. "I'm so sorry to do this to you," she begins, and I assume I'm going to be called upon to assist her with the groceries, or maybe she needs a jump. Clearly something is troubling her.
"We have so much in this country, and I just cannot stand it."
Now I think she's unhinged. Alzheimers, perhaps. "What's wrong?" I ask her, and she just points. We see a woman of about eighty-five, shabbily dressed, head covered with a throw to protect her from the heat, hobbling along, pushing a shopping cart filled with survival tools.
My new friend's hand shakes as she points, and the tears are really streaming now. Soon, so are my own. She continues to diatribe, understandably, and I feel awkward, but I give her a hug.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," she says.
I'm not. It's a good thing to know that fellow-feeling is alive and well, that people are heartbroken by the conditions we find all around us as a nation.
I gross $565 a month, and only live where I do by good fortune. Today I was supposed to attend a seminar, but had to cancel because I lacked the gas money requisite to get to where I was supposed to be; where I wanted to be.
My paycheck didn't arrive on time; hasn't arrived yet, and it's five days late. I'm one of the little people whose job is peripheral to anything of real importance in a society still mad with "success," defined largely in economic terms and achieve by exhibiting the kinds of social grace than put you in positions where you can increase your worth in precisely that sense. Adolescent behavior, in other words.
I can't help but think - this is a Kantian point - I can't help but think that I didn't have gas money precisely so that I would arrive at that store at precisely the moment when the woman in tears would beckon to me, a stranger, so that I could witness afresh, for myself, up close and personal, the anguish that elderly people are sometimes feeling over what is not going on in this country. She had no obvious way of knowing that I'm a writer and a philosopher, and yet I was the one who was there in her moment of need, seemingly only by chance.
But now the world can know.
Words are the shopping cart I push in my own poverty.
Larry Fike
Larry Fike is the author of "Piker," a book about overcoming child abuse by familial reconciliation.
I get out of the car and see a woman of seventy, dignified, well-assembled. She's driving a modest, but late-model sedan, about to load about ten bags of groceries into her car.
She is crying. She has a handkerchief up to her nose.
I try to look away in good suburban fashion, but she waves at me, so I approach her. "I'm so sorry to do this to you," she begins, and I assume I'm going to be called upon to assist her with the groceries, or maybe she needs a jump. Clearly something is troubling her.
"We have so much in this country, and I just cannot stand it."
Now I think she's unhinged. Alzheimers, perhaps. "What's wrong?" I ask her, and she just points. We see a woman of about eighty-five, shabbily dressed, head covered with a throw to protect her from the heat, hobbling along, pushing a shopping cart filled with survival tools.
My new friend's hand shakes as she points, and the tears are really streaming now. Soon, so are my own. She continues to diatribe, understandably, and I feel awkward, but I give her a hug.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," she says.
I'm not. It's a good thing to know that fellow-feeling is alive and well, that people are heartbroken by the conditions we find all around us as a nation.
I gross $565 a month, and only live where I do by good fortune. Today I was supposed to attend a seminar, but had to cancel because I lacked the gas money requisite to get to where I was supposed to be; where I wanted to be.
My paycheck didn't arrive on time; hasn't arrived yet, and it's five days late. I'm one of the little people whose job is peripheral to anything of real importance in a society still mad with "success," defined largely in economic terms and achieve by exhibiting the kinds of social grace than put you in positions where you can increase your worth in precisely that sense. Adolescent behavior, in other words.
I can't help but think - this is a Kantian point - I can't help but think that I didn't have gas money precisely so that I would arrive at that store at precisely the moment when the woman in tears would beckon to me, a stranger, so that I could witness afresh, for myself, up close and personal, the anguish that elderly people are sometimes feeling over what is not going on in this country. She had no obvious way of knowing that I'm a writer and a philosopher, and yet I was the one who was there in her moment of need, seemingly only by chance.
But now the world can know.
Words are the shopping cart I push in my own poverty.
Larry Fike
Larry Fike is the author of "Piker," a book about overcoming child abuse by familial reconciliation.
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