Beggars + Society’s Working Class = Heartaches

He gets dressed and is prepared to visit Mama’s house. Every time he has to return to the community in which he grew up, he has to fasten his sobriety out of fear that something may happen during the visit that may cause him to let it slip.

As he rummages his pocket and counts the billfold of money he has to give away, anger boils in him like Mama’s favorite Saturday evening soup. He reminisces  on the number of aunts, uncles, cousins and other relatives he grew up with yet none has ever inquired about aspects of his life; what kind of job he does or his health condition etc. All they want is money, as soon as you start working everyone wants money and they care not by what means you’re sourcing it. We’re all faced with that kind of situation. Now here he is faced with the task of financing strangers who pretend they are relatives and relatives who may as well be strangers.

His mother had already received her finances but in an effort to be ‘protected’ in his childhood hometown, he has to pay for ‘security’. And so he parcels out the stack of money into $100 notes careful not to make the mistake he had made some weeks ago; having opened his wallet in front of the mendicants, the Shearers and Manley’s glistened their radiant colors leaving him empty-handed upon his departure. The moment he entered the community the faces of pregnant teenagers, young men piercing their hand middles, old people and the very young lit up as they related stories of hunger, sickness and death plaguing their families. He had learn his lesson from this incident.

He got into his BMW X6 and drove to the community of Flectersland where he grew up for twenty-three years before graduating from university and securing a job as an electrical engineer. There were a couple of friends there whom he wished he could tell of his pending arrival. But he dared not. They would broadcast his coming and soon the entire neighborhood would be lurking in the vicinity of his mother’s little house, waiting to intercept him at a strategic point after he had parked his car at the top of the road and walked down into the narrow lane. He was annoyed that his mother refused to move from the community despite his efforts to persuade her into buying a home in Upper St. Andrew. But stubborn old people always refused to leave their “roots”.

As he drove into the area, he surveyed the faces of some of those he passed sitting on the ‘endz’ and among them were several relatives who never gave him a dime in his entire life on Earth. They hadn’t contributed a cent to his education yet when he sat comfortably on Ian Boyne’s ‘Profile’ to relay his story of struggles and triumphs, everyone huddled at a nearby shop in the community, chanting ‘a my boy dat’! Ole hypocrite dem!

Those community folks, relatives and friends (who didn’t realize the value of a good education) had never helped his mother to buy a Singer kerosene stove so she could provide him with a meal when the rains came and soaked both the wood and the outdoor fireside where they cooked. During his boyhood days in the 1970’s when he had to return from school to gather wood for the fire and catch water from a nearby spring, those same persons laughed; yet now that he’s working, they want to jostle with the taxman for the privilege of residing permanently in his pocket.

So many who’ve worked to escape the struggle can identify with this tale. And so many others who approach them like predators sit and wonder why they don’t come back to the foundation community often enough. Its because of you beggars who are parasites to their pockets.

Inspired by George Davis

I am Laydee Sharmz saying ‘who laugh last, laugh best’.