A Stranger in the Corner

It’s like when you've been sitting near a campfire and then you turn away into the black night and your face still tingles with the heat; your skin feels tight and dry, and the fiery figures still dance before your eyes and then are lost in the endless night. And you glance back for a moment, and you’re flashing in and out of the flames, and then the images fade, and the fire dies, and the quiet night sets in.

I step down from the airplane onto the jetway, and the dry, summer air blasts my face. After more than twenty hours of crowded terminals and cramped, economy-class middle seats, I hobble along the walkway on wooden legs, lugging an old American Traveler bag stuffed with as many heavy items as the frayed, black canvas cloth or the dull-toothed zipper can possibly hold. My coat pockets bulge with the journals that I kept while in Ukraine and with whatever else I managed to cram in at the last moment. Up ahead of me is the portal, and there’ll be a lady there who gets paid to look nice and smile and say, “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas,” over and over and over. I can already hear the familiar clink of quarters from the slot machines in the terminal, and cigarette smoke is just beginning to tickle my nose with the smell of home. I feel as though with each step, the airy mists of some perfect dream unravel behind me and trickle off into nothing. Twenty four months wash by me in an instant, and for a moment I wonder if it has all been just a dream.

Give them Bread

His hands were rough and worn, his face made raw and red by wintry winds. A tattered coat hung limp over melancholy shoulders, and ragged spurts of icy breath materialized before his face and lingered momentarily in the air before fading into the white of winter. I barely understood him above the hissing of the winds when through cracked lips came a stuttered, "Do you have money for bread?" I peered at him, fixing my gaze on the black beads, huddled beneath a forlorn brow; though he stood but a few feet from me, his eyes were miles away-- a glimmer at the bottom of an eternal well. "Are we not all beggars?" I smiled wistfully to myself and nodded to the man, and we walked together into the nearby corner store.

Before Ukraine, I never understood what it meant to be poor. Sure, there had been times when money was tougher to come by, and I had certainly read about abject poverty, but there was never a day where there was no food in the pantry, no money to pay the electric bill. There was never a day when I had to pawn my dishes so that I could buy bread or when I stood alone and cold in a frigid gale, begging from the apathetic and hurried handful of people crazy enough to still be out on the streets. We just happened to be passing by, but that experience and hundreds of other similar ones have got me thinking a lot about the plight of the poor.