impact

I work for a charity in the South Bronx. Most of my job is stringing together words, and shaping and polishing other people's writing. Sometimes I go to meetings where people ask questions about the words we've written, and I do my best to answer, or punt to someone who can.

The chief impact of my work is financial. I bring in money to help pay the salaries of other staff, who go out into the world and have real impact. On good days that equation is enough to justify my work. On bad days I wonder if it isn't circular, if I'm not changing the world at all, but rather just being a guy who polishes words and thanks people for their contributions and does his best to sleep at night.

My relationship to the South Bronx -- like my relationship to many things -- is one of distant love. I walk around in love with the neighborhood and the people I don't know and the Spanish they speak that I rarely fully grasp. Then I retreat to the top floor of the tallest building on the block and polish words, looking out at the people on the street below.

From that view you can't see much of people's faces but you can see their postures, how they walk, and you can infer what you like about how their lives are going. It's hard to assess direct impact from that height and maybe it's just as well.

Last year someone gave me a coat at random, a nice winter coat with a lot of pockets. It was a generous thing to do and the coat fit me perfectly. I could've afforded it I guess (one of the real impacts of my work to polish words). But it's a nicer coat than I would've purchased. I'm just not a very stylish person.

Tonight I left work late to meet my family in Manhattan for a late dinner. I was wearing the coat for the first time this year. It's one of those rare coats that makes sense in fall and winter, somehow it just adjusts magically to the temperature. It's a comfortable coat.

The walk to the subway is short, but tonight on my way down the hill a woman stumbled from my right to land face-first on the curb. She broke the fall a little with her hands and a lot with her mouth and forehead. It look liked she'd blacked out. She struggled to get up but she crumpled on the sidewalk. Someone walking by said drugs in Spanish and kept going. A couple of us stopped.

The woman was bleeding from the mouth and couldn't really right herself (though she kept trying). One of the people who stopped called 911. We tried to convince the woman that she should stay lying down, because she looked pretty bad. She really would've rather left, but she couldn't. Still, it looked kind of sad to see her lying there on the cold sidewalk, so I took off my coat and put it under her head while the same few of us waited for the ambulance to come.

It wasn't drugs, or if it was it wasn't just drugs. The woman said she was diabetic, trying to get as comfortable as she could, bleeding from the head and mouth with a coat for a pillow on a busy street, barely able to express herself.

Maybe she still has the coat with her at the hospital. Maybe I'll find it on my way in to work on Monday, crumbled in a ball and in real need of a wash, but I doubt it. Sometimes the world passes you objects and sometimes it asks nicely to have them back. Sometimes the way the world asks isn't as nice as you'd want.