Poor and Me

It was summer of my 16^th year when Poor first started hangin’ round. I didn’t know him as one would an enemy or even casual acquaintance, just, one day he appeared, standing on my street corner in a black tuxedo, eating an apple and staring at me with blank and shining eyes.

Poor and I had never walked our hungry, tired, miserable asses up and down Broad Street like unwilling comrades at war, never shared a drink at the bar, or even bumped into each other at an acquaintance’s party or anything.  No, I never knew poor as one would an enemy or even prison guard.   The fact is, Poor was an abstract whose reputation followed quickly a sentence when talking about bio-dad and his family.  

Poor’s reputation was as far reaching and legendary as Dr. J’s shadow, there were even temples of worship assigned to him across city’s that no good republican Christian would ever visit.

             

We were raised to be fearful of, to have respect, sorrow, pity, and dread of this all powerful, Poor.  Yet, we never really knew him.  Like God, whose hands could be felt but never seen, and whose will could be done but never coalesced beyond the big black book on Sundays, Poor moved closer, generated by fate, as the other was begat by faith.

            

So many days passed before my sixteenth year, that I hardly noticed the day he started hanging around the corner of my clean little block, in my clean little neighborhood.  I just know that somewhere in my sixteenth year, Poor took residence in my house, eating my food and devouring my clothing.  Bursting my pipes and mommy’s bank account. One day I was buying shoes, and the credit card was rejected.  And then it dawned on me…Hey, I know poor!

             

Yet, even upon recognition, Poor wouldn’t go, wouldn’t let his hold of my family soften for even an instant, indeed, his grip became stronger and stronger until we were almost dead.  Our dread became a very palpable thing, like every thing my parents worked for had fallen and withered.  We became angry and afraid, clinging to each other for support we couldn’t even give ourselves, and Poor grew and grew until my whole block was covered by his shadow.

             

He stayed until my twentieth birthday.  My belly remembers how many nights it had to go without because of feeding that damned mooch, my skin itches at how many baths we’d had to take in tepid water from a bucket in the basement sink because Poor broke our pipes and wouldn’t let us get new ones.  My hands remember how he took our clothes down to one pair of jeans and two shirts split between my brother and I that we washed by hand in that same bucket of tepid bathwater every night before bed. 

I shudder when I think of how my children suffered at his deadly hands, shivering in the cold of unpaid gas bills, and reading in the darkness by flashlight. 

Then I turned twenty-one and Poor packed his bags and left me, left my family, and all we could do was praise God!  And eat, and drink and buy new clothing, and bathe daily, hourly in tubs of hot water.  Our jeans became blue again with their newness and our babies ate in warm houses and read in the light of lamps.  We again danced and sang and shouted in joy.  Poor had left us alone…for now….and soon we put him out of our minds.  Not very far from them, just out for the time being, for we had learned a valuable lesson, Poor eventually finds you and makes you work hard at being a family.