City Garden Outing, August 8th, 2024;

"Gratitude:" October 4, 2025.

City outing, another late spring night, she’s heading to a friend’s birthday dinner.  Crowds of people form the sidewalks in front of theaters,  anticipating a Broadway Show.  Tourists flash cameras as she ducks selfies and group shots in front of Duffy Square.  She turners to the left as a line of motorcycles tare down Broadway,  horns honk and a few people swear with utter inconvenience.  She looks around and remembers these same streets she worked on so long ago.  Going out to a Thai Restaurant like the one she’s heading to to meet her “crew” would be a place only rich people could afford,  even making the kind of money she now makes in a job she now loves was a wish far off in the distance.  She passes by a McDonalds,  the same one she use to eat at to get their dollar meals, while a full combo was an extreme treat in those days.  She walks down town, through  a busy 7th Avenue,  past the shiny buildings,  she used to smoke outside and wishing for a better life.  Where she could pop in a store to grab a treat without it breaking the bank.  Or live in an apartment of her own, without ten roommates in a cramped house in New Jersey.  But rather a place of her own in Queens.  And now she has all that she longed for.  Spotting her friends outside the restaurant, she felt a wave of gratitude.  Looking briefly up in the sky, high above the glows of the New York skyscrapers,  she whispers to her 25 years younger than she is now self “We did it.  We made it”.