Window View

Every morning, I trundle on down to my local coffee shop where I sit at a table by a picture window to the right of the front door. I order iced tea, regardless of season. I open my laptop to review email and begin the day’s work of teaching creative writing to college students in a different state. I am happy with employment as portable employment. 

Yet every day my happy work extends to my serious work: window witness, sometimes directly, but always peripherally. I see the stooped-over grandmother who asks for bus money in the last week of the month. I see the 30-something man who talks to an invisible someone and has not stuck to his A.A. plan. I see a toddler in a stroller whose father has face tats and is pushing the stroller a little too fast on his way to what we locals call the Heroin Hilton three blocks away. Every day or two, a scary disheveled woman comes in to buy coffee and is muttering fuck this and fuck that while paying. I do not know what happened to the woman who had finally gotten into a Section 8 apartment a bit north. She still owes me $20 and I know she hasn’t forgotten because she always paid me back before. 

I suspect our purported beautiful federal budget will not mean much to those whom I watch from my window. But it will mean much to those who may join their ranks, new faces I may come to know.