Worms

Worms

I remember a time when I was in the third grade back in Manchester, Connecticut, and I was a student at the Bowers Elementary School. The rains fell hard that day, and the earthworms came out of the ground in droves and cluttered the sidewalks around the school with their long brown bodies. There was a girl, I think her name was Lynn, who carried a small pail into the classroom filled with the worms she had collected on her way to school in the rain. She set the pail on her desk and cried. The teacher tried to console her, but she continued to cry as the teacher persisted in her effort to find what was bothering the troubled young girl. Finally, talking through her tears, Lynn said she had picked up the worms to save them; she felt that the worms were drowning, and people were stepping on them as they lay unprotected on the cement sidewalks. Most of us in the class laughed at her as she cried out her answer, and our reaction made her bawl all the louder. She sat with the tears streaming down her face, the bucket of worms on the desk before her, with the derisive laughter of her classmates ringing in her ears.
 
That moment comes back to me fifty years later as I stand in Los Angeles looking out from a long concrete ramp. The ramp leads out from the fifth floor of a parking garage across a deep divide to a landing where a shuttle bus will take us to our jobs in the financial district. Dawn is breaking and the sun shines on the new steel façade of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The hill I overlook falls away to the east, and some of the city’s many homeless lie scattered on the sidewalks below me. Some are in blankets, some sleep on a cardboard mattress. They are like Lynn’s worms on the sidewalk, these dark figures, with no one to come and pick them up, no one to put them in their pail to save them from life’s storms. Lynn cried about saving worms, but lurking underneath her tears was the pain and fear that came with an early glimpse into the nature of life itself, the realization that hardness and cruelty were a part of it.
 
There are no tears or laughter this morning in Los Angeles, just the growing hum of the great city as it comes to life. I move on.   

 
February ‘06