Because she was lovely. . . .

Her name is Karen Klein. She sat quietly, kindly, as several young kids called her a fucking fat ass, as she tried to behave like a decent human being; a monitor on a bus.

I could not watch the whole tape. I could not bear it. It made me ashamed to be part of the same human race.

She reminded me of my mother's mother: Big Grandma. "Big" because she was big, just as Little Grandma--her mother--was little.

I don't want to be a prig, or pretend that I was a good little kid, or even a good old man. I wasn't, and am not. I was a troubled kid, having my own reasons for being angry: having had an abusive father, never having been a good athlete when being an athlete was self-worth, for too long an unaware student, altogether too much religion, and socially awkward. (I believe that if someone had taught me to dance, instead of asking me to memorize the catechism, I might have had a chance.) And those kids, taunting that old lady, made me want to cry--as she did--certainly for her, for their foul, fucking mouths, and probably also for me, and for us all.

I have read that Karen Klein lives on perhaps fifteen thousand dollars a year. Someone, hoping to raise five thousand dollars, proposed that she needed a break from what happened to her, and people have, reportedly, given about half a million dollars to allow her to take a vacation, because was lovely through it all.

Recently, at "our" Coffee Shop, one of my friends said, of a former neighbor who stopped to say hello, that she was not only a beautiful woman, but a beautiful person; a lovely person. I started to drive home, asked myself what I was doing, and drove around the block and stopped at the Coffee Shop again. I told our former neighbor what had been said, because if any of us ever has that said of us, we should be told. She said, "I want to give you a hug." And she did.

I hope Karen Klein gets a lot of hugs, and that those kids are among them.

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The Sea is Rising

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