I Love My Job

The following work is NOT MINE.  It was written by Jesse Williams, who was my best friend and lost his life at the age of nineteen.  I post it here because I want to share it with others who may appreciate it, and a tiny spark of his spirit can live on. 




An old, old black woman, wearing huge black rubber boots, though the sidewalks were dry.  In her thin grey hair, a child’s yellow ribbon.  People who did not know her, or her children, or her children’s children, called her Granny, and she loved it.

A man with a malformed arm, the size of a child’s, with only three fingers, and they were beautifully formed, long and graceful.  I told him so, and he smiled at me.

A woman, who once had been beautiful, talking to a friend on a cellular phone.  She was a mother.  I thought perhaps her own parents had been cruel to her, for she constantly questioned her friend on her relationship with her daughter, asking always, “Am I mean?  Am I mean?  Am I mean?”

A woman who was divorcing her husband.  I made copies for her and she told me the story of her marriage, and her husband’s unfaithfulness, and of evil shylock lawyers and her house in Florida, and a multitude of other things, although she did not know me.

An old man, wearing glasses so thick his eyes resembled poached eggs, watery and blue.  His skin sagged and wrinkled; it looked like leather worn micron-thin.  I remember wondering if my skin would look like that, should I grow old.

A man who ran a zoo, and he told me about his new exhibit of penguins, with a light in his eyes that was clarity.  I took photographs of him and his wife, who smiled at the time she had been in Africa, and she told me about Kilamanjaro, and the light behind it.  I loved her, a little.

A young girl, in a Catholic school uniform, come to make a facsimile.  I have a tendency to curiosity that edges on voyeurism at times, and I read quickly.  She was sending notice of her pregnancy test to a man in Chicago.

A boy with Down’s syndrome, whose face was broad, with gimlet eyes and pointed teeth, who asked me my name in a terrifying slur.  He held my hand to his forehead, and said “precious.”

I love my job.