Tag: food

A Steinway afternoon

Despite the diversity of New York City, Steinway street is different for me. It feels as if God is showing me a map with a red arrow and a clarifying “You are here” hovering over Steinway Street. This is very well what my life might look like for the next year while I’m in North Africa.

What are these people really like? What are their hopes, longings, and hurts?

  • A woman escorting her aging mother to the doctor.
  • A Lebanese man selling pastries.
  • A man with a leg injury, lingering outside of the mosque.
  • An middle-aged Egyptian couple–he sipping coffee and she rattling Arabic, hoping for someone to see her beyond the Alzheimer’s.
  • A young lady with heavy, dark makeup–guarded and watchful.
  • A sales clerk turning every hopeful conversation into a potential sale.

“They don’t know! They don’t know You.”

TELL THEM.

Celebration CELTA

Spicy chicken and Mexican coke tingled my tongue.

This was the last day, our last moments together. We had made it, all ten of us. Four weeks of labor, laughter, and tears were suspended in this memory: a memory that would never change by an updating database of other times together. Spain, Vietnam, United Arab Emirates, China. We were going places and would never see each other again.

Ashley and I ducked out of the dim pub and into the scorched air of a summer afternoon in downtown Phoenix. I pulled my sunglasses out of my backpack as the misters under the awning created a sheen over our hair.

“It’s sad to think we won’t see each other again.”

“Yah.”

When we reached the corner where she would walk one way to the parking garage and I would walk the other way to the metro, we hugged goodbye. There were so many things we could have said. Indeed, we said some of them, but nothing sounded as final as reality.

As I stood on the platform awaiting my train, I wondered, “Is this the end of an adventure or the beginning?”