When I was in high school, I sat on the bus stop bench feeling sorry for myself because I did not have a date to the Christmas dance. A partially blind women joined me on the bench to excitedly report to me that she was able to save just enough money for a plastic Christmas tree. Her level of glee invoked a level of shame in me, I had more then I needed and I was engaging in self-pity and she was blind in one eye and yet she possessed a brighter vision of life.
In my twenties, a black man sat down next to me on the bus, feeling that I take to much room in life, I moved my purse to create room for him to sit more comfortably,
he exclaimed "I am not going to take your purse". Being stunned, I squeezed out "of course not", he did not appear convinced. The verbal exchange was an indelible lesson on what it was like to feel like an outsider.
I was staring at my tennis shoes and feeling that their dirt stains were emblems of my income reversal. The bus approached and as I paying the fare I looked over the passengers and I took in a rider without feet. It sounds like a country-western song! it is true. A perfect lesson of appreciating what you have, because the next person may have less.
