The unseasonable heat made sleep more elusive than normal. The upside was knowing at 4am fresh bagels would be available at the local coffee shop. Opening up the front door and walking out into the muggy air was still a surprise for the early hour. The drive did not take long as there was no traffic except for an 18 wheeler driving what I deemed to fast in an effort to make it through the traffic light before it turned red.
The coffee shop was cool, filled with the smells of baked goods, donuts, bagels and coffee. I was the only customer making it more than probable the transaction would be quick. Wrong.
A young woman came out of the kitchen wearing a brown apron covered in white powder. Had I not known she was "dusting" fried dough with confectionery sugar I might have assumed she was cutting cocaine. Perhaps my looking at it prompted her to explain she didn't bother to wash it as the work was so messy it made no sense. At the end of the week it would be put in the washer, made clean for the next week. I said something like, "It's too bad you don't have another one to wear." And she replied, "But I do." Oh, ok.
Now you may wonder why any conversation would be necessary at that early hour with no other customers keeping me waiting. The coffee shop had no decaf coffee brewed. Typically commercial brewers are much faster than the home variety but only when one knows how to use them.
As she poured the ground coffee into the pot and adding water I inquired if she was ever nervous about working alone and she said no because it was a good neighborhood and added the only time the shop had been robbed it was an "inside job" by a former employee. And it is a safe area except that during the more clement weather there are homeless people who come out of the woods from behind the shops and one needs to be careful. And in a most sincere voice she told me about a homeless man who came into the shop, during a recent rain storm, who messed up the floor with his muddy feet and booth he sat in.
With that I forgot about the coffee. How terrible to be without a home, I said. She informed me that she herself had lived in her car for six months as she had no home. This 20 something girl covered in powered sugar had lived in a manner she didn't ask for and yet held no empathy for the rain soaked mud tracker who made her use a mop.
How was that possible? Those two strangers had something in common..It could have been her rain soaked and hungry. Maybe her lack of feeling comes from being employed, with a roof over her head. Grateful those 6 months are now a memory she looks forward only to the future. But to be so cold. Does she not realize how large this country's homeless problem is? Does she even read a newspaper or watch the news? Or is she like so many others who feel its not their problem. Then whose problem is it?
I took the coffee and bagels and left thinking I just don;t get it.
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