Bag Lady

I've been called any number of hurtful things in my life, and this one came from a fellow writer.

Just finished Maya Angelou's "Letter to My Daughter", and I highly recommend it. In it she describes, among other things, lessons in humility found in foreign countries where she did not know the customs.

I have slipped in and out of handfuls of cultures. Sometimes I managed to be invisible. Sometimes I managed to seem to fit in. Sometimes, when I thought no one was paying much mind, I gathered about me antique skirts, luscious vintage sweaters, sturdy boots, and a bag big enough to carry all the tools I needed to observe and record the world around me.

I would sit in cafes where the staff knew me by name, if not by profession, and where I had my regular table with just the right light for the sketches no one would ever see, the endless note books, reference books, legal pads, and of course - at that time - one really clunky computer.

In the middle of the city, I would fade into my corner and work, hour upon happy hour.

Until someone said "She looks like a bag lady traipsing around Capitol Hill".

Somehow, I was then less free. Less free to wander the parks. Less free to let my imagination wander. Less free to watch the world go by.

Shamed.

I put away my vintage. I moved off the hill. I ceased to wander.

A sweet woman, with a beautifully lined face and a quick, facile smile, told me that women regain themselves in their 40's. The world stops noticing their every move, and we are free, once again, to wander the streets.

Grace, humility, forgiveness, all those things that come on the good side of age, will go in my bag of all work and I will learn to leave the stingers behind me. I hope.

And still, there is a set of the teeth that Maya has that has often made me wish I was born with darker skin. Nope. Just a mixed breed, working class writer.

I think Maya grew up knowing something it has taken me a lifetime to learn.

God didn't make no garbage.

Not even me, Charles.

Not even you.