…so we were driving down some arbitrary side street on the edge of our local inner city Friday, early evening…, & we witnessed a site that’s likely not as common here as in other larger cities.  It’s actually the first time I’ve seen anything quite like this…doleful display of humanity on the brink of starvation in our area or anywhere, personally.  I mean a pedestrian in any given city sees the homeless & the beleaguered around any corner, but maybe not this…. 

Walking in single file, more shuffling really, hands in otherwise empty pockets, heads down against the wind in ragged layered winter cloths, was a motley column of dark skinned teens, about five of them, ages ranging from…say thirteen to sixteen, followed by five haggard adults dressed similarly for cold weather & pushing along three grocery carts full of miscellaneous odds and ends…that did not look like recently bought groceries.  I figure they could’ve been on their way home from the grocery store, having borrowed the grocery carts to ease the burden of the long walk home with all their foodstuff, …but I get the impression this was not the case.  This looked too much like all of their belongings, their caravan, their brood, their American dilemma…& it looked to us like they were heading towards the dead-end of the road where the sidewalk meets the path leading into the woods where the State Park borders the city that won’t house them anymore.  An example of the homeless & nomadic disenfranchised?  I think probably. 

I looked @ my wife…who was driving, she looked at me with a mix of sorrow & matriarchal frustration and replied, “This is what gets me about all the American monies spent out of the country on what nightmare business interest or another…when we’ve got this going on right here in our own backyards!?”  I just sighed a heavy & ineffectual stymie…….& watched them trail off, one by one, onto the entrance to the path wherein lies what kind of dismal comfort & resting place…?