Other People's Mistakes

It's such a beautiful day out.

My father got back from Florida last night. He was gone for over three months so, being the good son that I am, I made sure I had time to go see him today. It's the first time in my life that I walked into a room and felt that my father was genuinely happy to see me. He had so many questions about what I've been doing while he was away...it only took me a moment to realize he was only interested in how much money I had made him. I'll take what I can get though when it comes to fatherly affection.

He offered to buy me lunch in the way that let me know he was really hungry and couldn't go eat unless I went with him, so I relented and we grabbed a bite to eat at the Empress down the block from my apartment.

We talked business the whole time and I was pretty eager to get home and watch some football by the time we were done. 'Course nothing can be so simple in Palomba-world...particularly not on such a beautiful afternoon.

I was walking up to my car when I saw this blonde girl leaning on the front of it. My first thought was that she looked like she'd been crying. My second thought was that she was awfully pretty. As I got closer though I could hear that she was still crying, and then as she heard us approaching she started crying even louder. Within moments she was hysterical. There was an old man getting into the car next to us, but he and my father hadn't noticed there was something wrong with the girl just yet. Then I saw she was bleeding.

It looked like someone had beaten on her something awful. Her arm was all bruised up and her elbows were scraped like she'd been thrown to the ground. The tips of her hair were caked with dried blood and she looked like she'd been holding in a good cry for a long time...and was letting it all out right now.

I wanted to help her. Make sure she was all right, it was all anyone would have wanted to do in the situation. But before I could take another step towards her she whipped around with this fire in her eyes and shot me daggers intended for any man not old enough to be her grandfather.

She hated me. Hated me with every ounce of emotion left in her. I've never seen anything like it. Here was this scared little girl who probably wanted nothing more than for someone to tell her it would all be ok...but the hatred she had for me at that moment was without bounds. It was like just by wanting to help her I was doing her some egregious wrong.

I've been looked at a lot of ways in my life, lots of horrible, horrible ways. But very little has come close to this. I don't ever remember anyone looking at me with such malice because of something someone else did.

What seems like a long time ago now someone looked at me like I was the bad guy. It twisted me, killed me, made me feel about as small as I ever felt in my life. In that second today when that girl looked at me...I was there all over again.

She brushed past my father and the man in the car next to us and ran crying into her mother's car. The car pulled away and as it did I could see the girl still crying, and the mother just shaking her head. The man in the car next to us made a comment about "stupid fucking kids" saying that the cops had just told him the gilr had gotten whupped on by her junkie boyfriend.

And all I could think was "stupid fucking people". This girl was just a kid, no matter what she'd done wrong she couldn't have deserved what had happened to make her feel that way, or feel the way she did about other people at that moment. She deserved better than scraped elbows and a bloody lip, better than the way her mother looked at her when she got in that car, she deserved coincidence putting someone better than me there...someone who would have tried to comfort her even after she looked at them in that way.

And it was such a beautiful day.