In The Median
Turning off the ramp onto Hiawatha Boulevard, I stop at the light to wait for traffic. In the median stands a girl I call Sarah because she looks like someone I once taught. She’s too young and in the wrong city, but I’m not about to ask her real name. We are and will remain strangers.
Sarah works that corner every day, holding a cardboard sign, hoping for change. She has been there every day this year, but I wonder if she will brave the winter or find some other way to make ends meet. What ends, I wonder, does she have to meet? How does she get by?
Sarah’s hair is dirty blonde and she would be pretty if her face wasn’t puffy from whatever she‘s using. Her eyes squint from looking into the sun and her mouth is puckered from smoking cigarettes. She isn’t pretty, but I’ve come to see her as beautiful in the way pity often makes me feel.
Pity. There’s an ugly word, but seeing a young woman, a girl, standing on the median day to day or having her cigarette sitting on the guardrail near the bushes on the side of the road, I can’t help but feel pity. And confusion. And maybe love.
Love?
Sarah shows up to work at that spot every single day which is more than I can say for myself. She stands in her yellow or pink sweatshirt, wears a sunburned face, holds a cardboard sign. Rain comes. Biting wind. Scorching sun. And soon she will have to face the snow and spray of the plow. Sarah stands facing northeast then southwest as traffic dictates and I feel a swell of love.
This is not the same love I have for my wife and daughters, my mother and brother, my dead father, or the friend I’ve known from birth. It is a love born of pity, stoked by her devotion to whatever cause she follows. A charitable love, perhaps.
That said, I’ve never given Sarah any charity, never caught her eye or called out a word as I pass. My windows are up, NPR on, but at the corner of Park and Hiawatha I lose track of the radio show and see Sarah. I wonder where she comes from. I try to imagine what has brought her to this intersection in life.
The light turns green. I drive on. Sarah remains, waiting. I can’t imagine what for or maybe I can and that’s why I love her a little.
And where is it I’m going? A job that pays the bills, that I do because I haven’t figured out what else to do. Sarah and I probably both hope for something new but have no idea how to make it happen. Did she imagine herself in the median with a cardboard sign? What dreams did she have and what dreams remain? I imagine they feel so improbable now. Only children, she might say, dream of new lives.
Dreams and reality are roads that sometimes converge. We stop to see if traffic will provide a handout or a clear lane down which we can speed. We wait for something to happen. We go through the routines of Park and Hiawatha, southeast and northwest, sunshine and rain, motion and stillness wondering what is just beyond our grasp.
All the traffic is going somewhere. The drivers seem to know where and how to go. Given the speed at which they pass, they must be going toward something important.