Not here, not now
It
was a Sunday morning and my husband and I were walking back from the gym,
our pockets empty except for our gym cards. We took a different path home,
cutting through an alley, in order to check on his truck/tractor parked
in a nearby parking lot.
A
very thin, young, ragged black man approached us for money. The type of
person that I normally don't look at or acknowledge. However, it was Sunday
and I was with my husband.
I
asked my husband to tell him to follow us to near our apartment, but not
to follow us home. We made sandwiches (I remember thinking how ironic it
seemed to be putting low fat miracle whip on the sandwich made with healthy
choice sandwich meat because the guy really looked like he needed a few
good meals with LOTS of calories) and grabbed a few cans of soda, some bananas.
My husband gathered a pair of pants and a couple of t-shirts for him as
well.
Then
my husband left the apartment to give him these things. But when he got
to the bench where the guy was sitting, he saw the guy being interviewed/interrogated
by a police officer. The guy left in the back seat of the police car. My
husband came home with the CARE package we had prepared.
I
look back on that instance wondering if the guy thought we had set them
up. In a former community where we had lived my job had given me enough
prominence to have intervened. But not here, not now.
