The Eyes of Others
Take the woman with food stamps on the check-out line who is causing such a delay, the woman resembling my mother, small, wearing glasses, with a nervous smile, the high-school diploma she never got the credits for still on a shelf in her mind, under fifty years of dust, the school itself gone, like her sister’s furniture, all those stainless steel pots, the dull silverware she polishes at night. Notice her fidget as the clerk tears off the coupon. The young housewife next in line losing patience with her child, and sniffing the air, trying to be charitable, hoping this goes quickly, as the woman explains these stamps are her daughter’s: her sick daughter’s, the dark-eyed phobic who lives with her. And isn’t it too bad that some of us wake to an absence, though the moon is still visible, thinning in the sky, and isn’t it too bad these stamps don’t buy the happiness so many others enjoy? And what is your little girl’s name, isn’t this a school day? Oh, there’s so much that God provides besides hunger and illness, if it doesn't get lost.