Leave The Past Where It Belongs

     I was puttering atop the cracked pavement that ran through South Sioux City as I was flanked by a trove of Mexican restaurants and fast food chains, sprinkled with a couple thrift stores and auto body shops thrown in for good measure.  My sweet tooth had been tugging incessantly at my jaw for some time now, and the sun was doing my already chapped skin no kindness that day, baking me into a fine piece of leather. Involuntarily, my eyes darted from side to side, trying to pin point at least one building with a sign proclaiming fresh, cold ice cream.  After some fruitless meandering my eyes, stinging with sweat droplets, eventually honed in on a diner sitting far from the other businesses on the street.  After pulling up and parking at the curb, I booked it to the entrance to escape that merciless heat.  Yet as I touched the handle of the door, pulled halfway, I caught a sign in the window out of the corner of my right eye and, almost comically, did a double take and paused for a good few seconds.  My sweet tooth wailing away, I pushed my initial gut feeling to the back of my mind and stepped through the entrance.

One word: Subtle

     The first and, for a time, the only thing to greet me was the concussive blast of the A/C that my dripping forehead thankfully swam in, and the shirt on my back began to peel itself away from the accumulated sweat . Wiping my feet on the mat, I scanned the dining room, starting over the two gentlemen separated by two bench seats as one of them worked on some steaming coffee while the man to his left played with his chicken steak, making it dance around his plate.  My eyes hovered over a solitary man by the window while he labored on a phone call with someone he had no interest in talking to; his thick plastic cup of ice water sweating profusely and puddling into a ring on the table.  I guess I focused a bit too much attention on these details, seeing as how for the first fifteen minutes after I had entered that no one came by to seat me.  I could clearly see movement in the kitchen, and there were surely people passing back and forth past the opening to the kitchen.  I shuffled my feet, ready to pick up and step back out onto the toasty sidewalk when a blond woman poked her head around the corner that led to the bathroom and took a few almost defiant steps towards me as she laid down her serving tray on a neighboring table.  "The kitchen's closed today."

Abrupt. Curt.  Staccato.

     I had been wearing my best smile that day only a few seconds earlier, but I promptly exchanged it for an almost pleading scan around the dining room, followed by a lingering gaze at the stained white apron appearing in the slit to the kitchen, flanked on either side by two hands that were prepping lunch plates.  I didn't meet her eyes at first.  The embers of discomfort tickled my throat as I mumbled some verbal acknowledgement...but it felt wrong not to prod the bear.  "You sure about that?"   I made another visual pass over the customers, hoping that she'd follow my gaze and seal my point , but she had already forgotten about me.  "Yep, sorry."    She walked off on a mission, completely blanking out this short conversation she just had with me, and left me standing under the bitter air of the A.C as I tried to re stitch what had just happened.  After a few seconds, I lost my customary smile .  My jaw was set in a grimace as I raised my eyebrows and backed out of the place, the hunger pangs in my sweet tooth a fleeting memory as I collapsed back onto my ride, feeling suddenly alone in this street.  "Are you kidding me?"  I half laugh to myself as I pull away, still processing what was to be my first run in with someone stuck in the past.

 

      You can't help but register a barely tangible feeling of disconnect when in places like Sioux City.  Roaming through the streets you half expect to see some scattered tumbleweeds to lazily careen across the streets as you pass building after building that is either vacant or occupied by a seemingly derelict business.  The downtown is like any other: rife with bar life and a smattering of late night burger joints, occasionally dotted with real estate offices and public attractions like museums and art galleries.  When we arrived in town, we were hungry and on the prowl for anything that could shed light on the hunger situation in the area.  We craved to see a flourishing farmer's market that stretched for blocks, or maybe a handful of farms in partnerships throughout the city to spread their earth born wealth of resources.
     Curiously, however, we found a town that is comprised of some parts that are stuck in the past, oozing with racial indignation and petty feelings of superiority over the minorities of the area.  Not to say the entire city is like that; but at this point there is a lingering cancer located in the crevasses of this city, and it troubles me.  How can we even hope to solve problems as encompassing as hunger if we can't live in relative harmony with each other, instead of regarding each other in an almost acrid air just because the cover of my book is in a darker shade; that my ink stems from a more exotic background?  It's disheartening to have to stand back and let events unfold, hoping that the world would erase these ancient horrid artifacts of a time when equality was parceled out to a select few and retracted from the oppressed multitudes, much like a bully tempting a baby with a lollipop. 
     It's in these instances where I long for the chance to look these people in the eye, get down on one knee as I squeeze their shoulders and say, " Grow up."  No venom in my bite; no chastising of a ruler toting nun; just two words a man says to a child, to save them from wasting his or her life with such frivolous and outright discriminating ideologies.  It's a future that I still have hope in, however, despite my fuming.  And yet, if we are to tackle even an epidemic like hunger and expect any form of tangible change, then the other aggravating strands that stubbornly cling to our progress from an unfortunate past must be severed.  In this country overflowing with potential to change for the better, it's a shame when almost absurdly comic levels of discrimination get in between me and my chocolate dipped waffle cone.