Playing in the Street

 It was a still, hot afternoon as I drove home from my church in Texas, a few miles south of my home in Oklahoma. I had the air conditioning turned up high to get the interior of the vehicle cooled off to comfortable level.

As I was driving through an old residential area, I came to a stop sign. I applied the brakes and stopped, looking both ways past the trees and bushes for cars crossing in front of me. However, this day I saw no cars.

What I saw was worse. At first I was confused, then I was shocked into sadness. A young woman was standing in the middle of the road about two houses down on the right. She wasn’t doing anything, just standing there, looking up and down the street.

A second later I noticed a small child, just a baby actually, playing at her feet in a chuckhole in the old cracked pavement. A trickle of water from somewhere, maybe a leaky pipe nearby, had filled the crater in the road, and the child was splashing and enjoying relief from the heat. 

I was raised in poverty by a single mother, but this was poverty far beyond anything I ever saw. Obviously their house had no air conditioning, and maybe the water was turned off until they could raise enough money to pay the water bill and get it turned back on. This mother needed to keep her daughter safe in the heat, and so she did it the only way she could figure out how.

I didn’t stay stopped long. I drove on by and I had a bit of trouble seeing for a mile or so. I felt immense sadness and more than a little guilt that I could be living a comfortable life in retirement, while such abject poverty was so near to me. 

I think sometimes my empathy and compassion cause me more pain and suffering than I should have. On the other hand, the Buddha promised that life is suffering, and the goal of life is to study constantly to find wisdom and understanding, which will lead to less suffering and peace in your life. 

I can’t get the picture out of my mind. It’s going to be a long night, I fear.