Conversations In Passing

Yesterday, walking towards Pulaski to catch the bus, I was stopped in my tracks by a teeny-tiny little girl on a Big Wheel. She was adorable, maybe about two or three.

Looking at the house I was walking past, she informed me "Nobody lives there."
"Really?" I asked, and she nodded.
"Where you goin'?" she asked me.
"I'm goin' to my momma's house," I told her.
"Where your momma's house?"
"Well, it's kinda far, so I have to take the bus..."
Suddenly from the porch came another voice--a woman smoking a cigarette, evidently the little girl's mother. I hadn't seen her.
"You live around here?" she asked.
"Yeah," I said. "Just the other side of Kildare."
"You do drugs?" she asked.
"No," I said, and didn't add not anymore.
"That's good," the woman said. "You live with your family?"
"No, just me. And my boyfriend."
"Your boyfriend black?"
I nodded.
She took a long drag off her cigarette. "That's why, then."
"Actually, he came along AFTER I decided I wanted to live here. Mostly I just like it here."
"Well, that's good...I don't discriminate. Fact is, most of y'all treat us better than the black folks treat us, sometimes."
I laughed. "Honestly? Sometimes I think y'all treat us better than the white folks do. There's some times even -I- don't like white folks much."
"I heard that," she said.
I was getting ready to move on when she said, "You got kids?"
"Nope," I told her.
"Kids are a gift," she said. "What you waitin' for?" she asked.
"Really? I have no idea," I said.

THIS, should you wonder, is why I love my neighborhood. People will stop you on the street and ask totally inappropriate questions in a totally comfortable, natural way. I'm all about motivation when it comes to asking questions, which is why I'm okay with this--in this case, she really wanted to know. No artifice, no dissembling--just a rapid-fire series of highly-personal questions interspersed with her opinions of the answers. What's not to love??