Lucky numbers

I press a ripe raspberry against the roof of my mouth till it bursts. These raspberries grew in Mexico, were harvested by Mexican field laborers, slapped into clear plastic clam-shell containers, loaded onto a truck, and driven by a tired driver sipping coffee to stay awake while crossing the heavily-guarded border into the USA. In South Dakota, black gold is pumped into leaky pipelines where it runs all the way to Texas, polluting rivers and poisoning land till it is transformed into fuel for trucks hauling raspberries from Mexico to Oregon, polluting the air. I am part of this. 

This morning while a queue of unhoused people stood waiting for morning services at the Salvation Army, coffee and doughnuts after, Sue joined me at my place for a breakfast of cold cereal and raspberries. She made a sketch of the landscape outside my 10th-floor windows, a sprawl of apartment buildings and construction sites below a hillside spiky with spruce trees and cell phone towers.  Next to Sue’s sketch book, on the table by the raspberries, was Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.

Here’s Laurie Lee, arriving in London at dusk in 1934: “The sky was different here, high, wide, and still, rosy with smoke and the westering sun. There was a smell of rank oil, rotting fish and vegetables, hot pavements and trodden tar; and a sense of surging pressure, the heavy used-up air of the cheek-by-jowl life around me--the families fermenting behind slack-coloured curtains, above shops and in resounding tenements, sons changing their shirts, daughters drying their hair, waistcoated fathers staring at their tea, and in the streets the packed buses grinding nose to tail and the great night coming on.” 

In 1934 the system was unsustainable, the income gap between rich and poor was staggering, and Laurie Lee was on his way to Spain and Franco. All our long lives, Sue and I have heard talk about revolution, about income disparity, about climate change and corporate greed. This way of life is unsustainable, we say. It is. Our sons change their shirts, daughters dry their hair, and we stare at our tea. We write, draw, make photographs, and are grateful for each other and the grandchildren who pick up the dice and roll them again, hoping for lucky numbers. We would give up raspberries if we believed it would help.