8:00 am, the day after Christmas. I'm sitting in the car in Spanish Harlem waiting for my wife to finish with her patient. She's a visiting nurse down here...a job I wouldn't - no - couldn't do. It takes a special person to leave the comfort of their suburban bed at 4:30 each morning, drive an hour in the dark to run around the project apartments in this place.
I don't usually play chauffeur, I do have my own job, but we're expecting a blizzard today. If I drive, she doesn't need to find an open meter for parking at each patient and can make her calls while I navigate the roadways. This means she gets done and out of the city quicker...and hopefully before the snow hits.
So here I sit, playing with my new Droid Incredible while she finishes inside. In case it hasn't come through by now, I hate this place. There are many reasons. I'm not a city guy. Far too many people in one place for my taste. Also - It's a hard and dirty place. A special kind of dirty. It's the kind of dirty you can't really call benign neglect. More like the dirty you get when all the smooth polished edges have eroded/corroded to rough black smudges. The kind you get when no one trusts anyone around them. The active neglect of fear and survival.
To be fair it's a lot better than it was a decade ago - both aesthetically and substantively. But to someone who prefers the quiet solitude of the woods, it is about as repulsive a place can get.
Many of my wife's patients have never left the city. It's not for lack of ability, although clearly sometimes there are financial reasons. For the most part, I blame self confidence and, unfortunately, awareness of the world beyond their neighborhood. People seem to suffer from an pandemic of small dreams. I say that with sadness, not derision. For being trapped, as they are for all intents and purposes, in a 1 square mile area.
I feel sadness that it would never occur to many here that exploring beyond their own neighborhood much less their own country is even possible. Apparently, one person marveled that my wife lived so FAR away, while a train could deposit her at our doorstep in less time that it would take her to do a grocery run at the store down the block.
It is Christmas - not Thanksgiving - but I feel the need to express thanks for not only ending up on the sunny side of the economic divide, but more thankfully for having the ability to dream big...and forge my reality from those dreams.
I am proud of the work my wife does here. She's ridden in urine filled elevators, braved becoming a possible victim of crime, treated sometimes thankless patients and dealt with the bureaucracy of working for a healthcare agency for many years while I typically sit at a desk in suburbia. So who am I to complain about driving here one morning.
Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5
