Today, I was thinking, I'm so naive that I keep coming back. Every morning I make cereal for Mary whose boyfriend threw her down to the pavement with her(their) baby Mariah still in her arms. Mary kicks it with TJ. Tj who came from the farmlands of Georgia, who checks my tires (of my yiayia's chevy lumina, the one she used to drive before the operation and before the dementia) and told me once over dishes about his mother who adopted him and other disabled children. After rinsing he said that she locked them up in an empty room for a check each month from our government. At 11 pm last night, I walked TJ into Pacific Garden with 500 men, a pack of evangelicals, a 5 am wake up call, and a big neon cross twinkling JESUS SAVES in the city twilight.
TJ would help us fold boxes after our food pantry which serves 120 families each week in the neighborhood with strollers and mesh bags of old bananas and frozen peas. Last week a mother told me that I should stay away from her 6 year old son because he was bad, wouldn't listen to anyone, and that his ADHD meds had been stolen by some good for nothing. She went to have a cigarette and stand outside only to be ushered back in by Johnny, who cleans the tables for our seniors club and helps set up the food pantry every Friday morning. Johnny, who according to (un)reliable sources (but who's to say?) married is sister and is up to shady shit, but who knows what. I painted furiously the night I heard rumors from a girl who wears burberry but wraps her hips in tattoos and drinks in bed with the director's son. The son of a man who drives a truck delivering snail mail for the graveyard shift, the father who is on disability for high blood pressure, for sticking around too long in an organization with ghosts and leaking ceilings. The ceilings could fall down any second, but something seems to hold them up. Maybe its Ma Benton herself.
