no shame

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It's tough times all around these days.

A little while ago I was driving up Rt. 4 in rural Maryland when I passed three little girls sitting on the side of the road in front of a pickup and utility trailer. Just shy of 8am, they were helping their mom sell odds and ends - and the image was so striking, I stopped and talked with them for a little while. Times are tough, and they're out most weekends to make a little extra. Their mother was so embarrassed to admit this - and when I asked if I could take a photo of the girls, at first she didn't want the little one to hold her can of generic cola even though I liked it, and thought she should keep it with her. She said it was "poverty cola". I insisted it was called having three kids. Just people doing what people do: survive.

Then today while working a job at a surgeon's office up in a really really nice part of northern DC/MD, I walked a few blocks for coffee in the full crowd of noontime lunch, passing at least twenty or thirty people. They were a mix of professionals and of well quaffed shoppers heading to Saks, Tiffanys, etc., and all had one thing in common: they looked absolutely miserable. Along with their Yves st Laurent, they wore a mix of worry and severe distaste either for their own lives or for ours ... or both. No eye contact - no acknowledgement. No life.

Leaning is a healing form of contact. If you can afford to be an island, the world is a lonely place.

It reminded me of the humanity laid bare in Steinbeck, and more recently of the audio interviews Studs Terkel did of people who lived through the great depression. Please take a moment and listen to some of them here as Act 1 of NPR's "This American Life" episode 368. They start around 6 minutes into the hour-long broadcast.

I'm floored by the wisdom of these voices.