A Defiant Answer to the Spirit of Lack
An add-on to: “Growin Up Brooklyn”
Today I made spaghetti. Not the quick kind that I make when I’ve been gone all day and I’m out of time. Today I made my special recipe that is worthy of royalty.
This variation calls for lots of fresh vegetables, ground turkey, Italian Sausage, spinach pasta and a slow cooking sauce process. A good 45 minutes of chopping, preparing that adds up to lots of time to think. While I meditated on my process, my thoughts were drawn back to when I was a child growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y. The year was 1969 or 1970 and a new family had just moved directly across the street from us. This family consisted of a mom, and her three small children, they were of Puerto Rican descent. I befriended her kids who were actually younger than me, but they were cute and friendly, so each day I would throw candy and treats up to their window from the street. Some days, (When I wasn’t on some childhood mission and their mom got home from her work early.) I would walk the kids to the park or just engage them in play in the middle of the street.
About two months after they moved in, the mom invited me to eat dinner with them. She could not speak English all that well, but her oldest child did the translating. The dish that night was spaghetti. She sat us kids down at the table and after a while I noticed that she was taking an awful long time trying to figure out how much to put on each plate. My attention went back to my playmates when suddenly the mom appeared at the table with the biggest smile I had ever seen. She placed each plate in front of us and we dug in! I could tell that she was really pleased with the job she had done and our grateful (and hungry) response.
I had taken a good three or four bites before I noticed the ingredients. It tasted great, but it was nothing more than a watery sauce and a couple of hard boiled eggs chopped up in it. Still it was good so I cleaned my plate, shared pieces of broken slices of bread with the kids and was sure to say thank you before heading home.
The next day I told my mom about my experience and she told me that the lady did not have enough resources to afford any meat or extras for her meal. Yet she invited me in knowing that my parents owned the building that we lived in and the laundry business that we ran out of the building. Well, that certainly knocked the wind out of me. I suspect that my mom sprung into action on their behalf. I noticed that I would often see her and my mom engaged in quiet conversations outside of the local grocer or vegetable stand. My mom was good at hiding money from my dad all over the house in order to help people in the neighborhood out.
I responded by doubling up on the amount of treats I would throw up to their window each day. I also told my best friend Maria Valle about it, so she began throwing snacks too. Call me slow, but, it was years later that I realized that; if she could not afford a full blown spaghetti sauce, then she could not afford to have me sitting at the table eating up what little they had. But still she had her daughter to call me from outside to invite me to her table. One day while trying to figure out how to divvy up meal for my six kids and several others from the neighborhood, I realized that the mom who had invited me in had “A Defiant Answer to the Spirit of Lack.”
I don’t remember their names, but I am so very grateful for the life lesson that they gave me. Today, I cannot make spaghetti without thinking about and saying a tearful prayer for them. Today my answer to the spirit of lack has become second nature. Instead of holding on tighter I commit an act of abundance and allow the cards to fall where they may.
PEACE,
Sistah Nedra aka WoodStockGranny
Written on 09/13/09
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