Memorial Day Rerun

I'm not being lazy,........ okay I am being lazy. Honestly I just don't have time to finish the two or three posts I have in draft at the moment. So this is a repeat of one of my earliest , and in my opinion the best piece I have put together to date. If you haven't read it already, I hope you like it, if you have read it tough shit, read it again. Everyone have a safe and enjoyable long weekend, and I'll see you back here on Monday, maybe Tuesday.

Midtown at 7:00 Saturday Morning

It seems that my early morning walks with the dogs are my most introspective moments. It is usually the time I will see Dorothy the crack addict high stepping to or from whatever mission she is on. It also seems to be the time the elderly people are out doing whatever it is that really old people do on foot at this time of the morning.

On this particular morning it is cold. Max the Yorkie is sporting his cardigan sweater which is a shade too long underneath causing him to pee on his own chest if I don’t roll it up from time to time. So we are rounding the block and I come upon what I first suspect is a homeless person laying in the middle of the sidewalk, but upon closer inspection turns out to be a big pile of clothes. Kids clothes along with a few discarded toys, just laying in the middle of the sidewalk. How they came to be here is anyone’s guess, maybe someone was doing a covert move under the cover of darkness, a practice that is pretty common in these parts. Some random woman perhaps who has left an abusive relationship, packed the kid and a few things, and fled in the middle of the night in a rush, inadvertently dropping this stuff. Or it could be something as simple as some slob tossing the stuff for one reason or another. So I stop and move the pile off of the sidewalk and set it in the grass where it can be seen. Maybe the owner will come back and find it, or someone who can use it will pick it up. Most likely it will just lay there until it is eventually blown and scattered, or deteriorates into nothing.


In the meantime I will pass that pile every morning . I will play different scenarios in my head of how it came to be there. Unfortunately most of the scenes will be sad because that is more often than not the truth of the matter when it comes to children in the inner city. It is usually the kids who suffer the most around here. The parents generally are to blame for their lot in life, but the kids always pay the heaviest price. So I will walk past that heap of clothing every day and with each passing day it wont bother me as much as the day before. Eventually, if it is still there, I wont even give it a passing glance and it will fade into just another discarded pile of trash. I suppose that is the easiest way to deal with some of life’s hard facts. If you look at something long enough you get immune to it and eventually you can just ignore it altogether.