When I lived at home, before all the moving, there was a woman we were all aware of. She wore a white hat, with a pony tail sticking out, white short sleeve jacket, and loose shorts. And she would run. She would be running when I came home from school, and I'd see her running when I left for work. I'd see her running on the weekends when I was headed to see a friend. Sometimes I had to swerve out of the way for her safety.
Her run was at a better pace than I could claim to have ever been at, but the form. The way she ran.
Who was this woman, how often did she really run, where did she live? Did she work or was she taken care of? These questions came up and went away just as she did from the front windshield to the rear-view mirror. Day after day, for those few seconds that it took to pass her by, the questions lingered and slipped away. I wonder if they did for all of us.
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In Atlanta, on the way to the farmer's market, across the street from a small post office was this strange cart. It looked almost like a hot dog cart you would see on a city street. There was a pole attached to it and a tarp covering the whole thing down, with just the metal legs showing. Next to it was a shopping cart, contents unknown. I passed her often, as did thousands daily. This was in an industrial area, near a steel factory and blue collar homes.
I believe it was a woman who resided in this thing. If she resided there. I wonder if anyone ever stopped by that tent like structure and asked any questions, tried to talk to her. Or if we all assumed that it had happened or that it had never happened and would likely never happen. I thought about her when I drove past the post office, on that eighth of a mile stretch of land between intersections. It was her tent and cart, and gravel for fifty feet past it. She was on the west side of the street, nearest to the encasement of trees around this rectangle of pavement. The only place without the trees was where that street passed by, like some kind of window to watch, observe, see.
See what someone can live like. Wonder what exactly they lived on, or if they ever moved, or what happened at night.
She didn't exist unless a car drove by and someone saw her and looked upon the tent, and thought about it for even the briefest second. Then she would cease to exist again. The forgotten. The part of our collective consciousnesses' hippocampus that would never make it into the short term memory. Always stuck in that first stage, the sensory image of the person, before it fades away forever.
The last time I visited the farmer's market she was gone. No trace left. Did she ever exist. Does it matter?
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And finally here, in Annapolis, we have our own invisible man. He walks and is clearly making some attempt at speaking, while carrying a black garbage bag between his arm and his side. He always walks on the street, never on the sidewalk.
No police officers have offered to help this man? No one has seen to his well being? Why does this happen. As far as I've observed his black garbage bag is full of clear grocery bags. Refuse of our consumerism, being carried by a man we deny the privilege of full existence in this collective consciousness of ours. How many people are excluded, how many are lost. How many brain cells of the human collective have had their synapses separated from the rest of the system?
We all except someone else to do the right thing, to help one of these lost cells in our system back in, to allow entrance, but no one does. They just drift in and out every time a car goes by, feeling the slightest electrochemical shock. Or maybe they don't feel anything. Maybe we just do. Just the electrochemical shock of shame.
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