Help for family of seven, for food...

I am sitting in the Boston bus terminal, muddling through my readings for school and calculating, always calculating, the hours, the money, the weight of academic responsibilities. The heat below ground pulses and children chime in with the train's brakes to create a climate of immediacy. This place is alive, this home I have chosen to nurture my newest dreams. Out of unemployment and freelance wanderings I come to grad school in the big city.

Of course, Boston is only the big city to those of us who have once traveled from cities like Portland, Maine two hours south on her clogged highways to visit relatives and take field trips to learn about her revolution. Visions of tea parties and Christmastime window shopping dance in my head. My mother use to load up my siblings and I into the motherwagon and sail through a snowy traffic to Beantown, stopping only to visit Auntie Millie, who lived to be over a hundred and served us those sticky orange cheeseballs we loved. I think there might have been gumdrops too, but I am vegan now, and Auntie Millie is but a cherished memory of a ritual during those trips to look in the frosted windows of large toy shops, our annual brush with skyscraper adoration.

Despite the jovial urgings of my mother to get to the next display of mechanic nativity wonder, it was in the bus station and the busy lobbies where I first formed my opinions of city life: this was a bustling racetrack of adults that had no imagination or time for the inquisitive glances of a young girl from Maine. Back in my neighborhood in Portland, we knew all our neighbors, even some of their relatives. They took care of us after school, baked us doughy sweets, scribbled out cards. In the city, I needed to stay close to Mom. I remembered her face as she was driving, navegating the lanes. The closer the center of Boston came, the tighter the lines on Mom's face. If we got out of line, we would not make it. If I got out of line, I would not make it.

Traveling through Boston as an adult, I carried this feeling on the train, and in the streets with me. Here we go to Boston, here we go to Lynn, look out you little Sarah that you don't fall in. When I looked into certain programs here, I experienced a cold, lofty opportunism that made me want to run and hide under my porch. I didn't have enough degrees next to my name to warrant a meeting, and not nearly enough American Apparel leggings to even make an impression on the street. Expensive and ostentatiously intellectual, this city did not look twice when I boarded a bus and headed south.

And then something shifted. I applied to this amazing program for social work, I found a beautiful house in the greenest burrough in Boston, I began to find folks who did not consider activism what they did on their weekend and- mercy!

Here I am. In the bus station waiting for the red line. The heavyset woman on my bench, her nose dripping with what must be an oxygen-tank aparatus is holding a paper cup and calling out, "Help for family of seven....? for food?" The elderly black gentleman on my right is carrying a fishing line and shaking his head because he's heard it all before, and I look up from my studies and we share a smile. This city is asking the same questions.