There is this place ...

When I drive to Charlie's school several times a day, I have to drive through a small Main Street of a town that is really failing.  Not that it has ever been a burgeoning example of prosperity -- but it has gotten much, much worse in the few years I have been passing through on a regular basis.  Gone are the small shops, replaced by soaped up windows and FOR RENT signs.  On the main portion of the street, the only businesses that are actually in business are two banks, a donut shop, a furniture store and an auctioneers store front.  Oh, and two gas stations, one a Cumberland Farms and the other that has the cheapest gas but the people that hang around it are too creepy to imagine ever stopping there.  (I do stop from time to time at the Cumberland Farms, as their gas is the next cheapest, but let's just say I would rather not.)

I stopped at the grocery store that is at the edge of this town last night and because I had been noticing the decline overall, I was struck by the clientele in the store, and walking into it.  There is a high percentage of teenage mothers and even teenage fathers, filling up their carts with the most disgusting junk food, with these unhealthy looking children kind of just there.  They have no life, no spark.  None of them do.  It was hard to see.

Then as we were walking out, I saw this young mother and her little boy walking towards us.  The mother had a cigarette and she was tugging the little boy along as she looked for a place to store the cigarette while she was in the store.  As I was watching what she was doing, the little boy caught my eye and he just stared at me.  He made me catch my breath.  He was extremely pale with huge shadows underneath his big blue eyes.  He too, was devoid of the life spark that so often fills small children, and it took all I could do not to scoop him up and take him home with me.

"Why do you look like that?" Charlie asked, as we continued towards the car.

"Like what?" I asked him.

"You look so sad."

I motioned toward the little boy, who was still watching me.  "He just made me sad."

Charlie wondered if it was because he reminded me of him and if it made me sad that he was so grown up now.  I had to laugh at that one.  "No," I said with great vehemence, "that little boy did not remind me of you at all."  And that was because my little boy had always been full of life.  He may have been screaming and yelling and demanding my life's blood from me.  But he never, ever, ever had those eyes.

That was yesterday evening, and I can't shake those eyes.  That face.  And I wondered.  If I went up to that mother and said to her that I would help her -- that I would take that little boy and watch him so that she could go to school, would she accept it?  Or is she too far gone, like the rest of that town, and committed to sitting on the stoop of their dilapidated apartment buildings, smoking and sitting next to their lifeless children?

Such hopelessness and decay, 15 minutes from my own house.  Why do the rich people go to Africa?  I don't get it.  I don't mean to take away from the African people -- but what about our own?  Born Americans, starving for hope in a small town, which has so many police cars that one only has to imagine how much trouble goes down there.  (It was in fact on the news last year when a couple was arrested for cooking heroin in a building across from the high school.)  It's not a good place.

But how do you get away from it?  Every time I drive through I am treated with a snapshot of their lives that makes my heart ache.  A young girl, walking towards the high school, covered in tattoos, earrings all over, no book in her hand.  No backpack.  She is just showing up.  Going through the motions. 

Or the woman in the doorway, obviously just out of bed, her hair all over the place, cigarette dangling from her lips, as her young daughter waits for the bus.  And I look at this girl.  Messy hair.  Dirty clothes.  That empty face.

The group of teenage boys who are clearly not going to school that day, riding around on their skateboards.  Smoking.  Their pants falling down to their knees, their dirty hair sticky in their faces.  They are, of course, going to be magnetically attracted to their like, and they are going to have sex, and they are going to have babies who will carry those lifeless faces around until they too skip high school, because what is the point?  WHAT IS THE POINT?

The town itself is addressing its problems by adding more cops.  The cops are tough too.  There are several stationed around and they stand with no smiles on their faces.  As I often go by in a convertible jeep, I will smile or try to engage them into some type of human contact.  Nope.  This morning I wanted to yell WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO OFFICER FRIENDLY YOU DICKHEAD.  But I thought that might not be smart.  He was standing in front of the high school, lights on, in a stance of authority.  I have no idea what he is supposed to be doing -- he pays no attention to traffic or human, for that matter.  He just stands there.  I guess he is supposed to be scary.  Personally, I think he has it all wrong.  I think he needs to be reaching out; putting on a face of humanity.  Not being a dickhead.

But I am sure he spends his days and nights arresting young kids for drugs and what have you, and probably countless domestic disputes.  He is hardened, as are the ones he polices.

It is a very sad place and makes me wonder how many other places around the country are in the same predicament.  It is really too much, sometimes, to see the great disparity in wealth and lifestyle.  From a small New England college where parents would do anything for their child; to a small New England town where the parents don't know what to do for their child, because nothing was ever done for them.  It is too much, I tell you. 

But if I ever see that boy again, I will reach out to his mother.  There is no way I could walk away again.  I am not even sure how I did it last night.