How Was Your Day?

It's a question oft asked me by my son when I get home late at night. The question diminishes the day's fatigue and frustrations. It marks my own special place this part of the world. I know I'm home.

I was fortunate to have been raised in a home full of life and love. We were quite a big family of six children. We were not impoverished, but we didn't have a lot either. Just the right balance between wanting and having. It's the balance life should have. Too much of either one leads to misery.

One of life's saddest sights for me is homeless people sleeping wherever and whenever they can. I live in a predominantly working class neighborhood, with a smattering of new affluence here and there. Often on my way home late nights, on foot, I pass by children, old men and women, and sometimes entire families, camped out on a sheltered part of a sidewalk, or in front of shuttered shops, with flattened cardboard boxes as their makeshift beds.

I'm tired at the end of my workday. I grumble sometimes. My life lacks a lot of conveniences. And there is the matter of my decrepit dreams, which I've begun abandoning, not out of a lack of determination and commitment, but because life continues to be unfair, keeping many things out of my reach and control.

A meal awaits me at home after a long day. A sagging mattress is ready to receive my fatigued body, and a lumpy pillow, willing to cradle my head. I'm wealthy by the standards of those who sleep on cardboard boxes.

I still weave dreams in my home, but they're more like daydreams now, without conviction and resolve, as if just to while my remaining time. I've grown tired of the fiery, almost rabid dreams of my past. Successive failures and the ensuing hopelessness have doused the fire. I now live between my dreams' demise and a clouded future. I prop myself up with bits of pleasantness I manage to scrounge from here and there. And with some random, leftover hope, I try to muster courage to craft better tomorrows for those whom I love.

And so I respond to my son's question, "My day was okay, my son. It was fine."