Count your blessings

Yesterday afternoon was pretty much the first really nice day since Mom got here, so we went to Pike's Place Market to walk around outside and enjoy the sunshine. It was packed, since it's prime tourist season, but we were lucky enough to get a parking spot smack dab in the middle of the market walk.

We hadn't walked very far before we observed some lady, she looked to be around 40 I think, dressed in shorts and a t-shirt....start digging in the trash for food. She didn't look like the typical Seattle homeless person, she looked relatively clean and well-fed, but she literally dug through about a foot of trash before coming up with a paper bowl half full of lo-mein and then started eating it.

After I got over my initial revulsion, I started to wonder how you get to that point where you're DIGGING through trash for food...it's not like it was just sitting on top of the trash (ala George Castanza and the eclair), it was buried underneath a whole bunch of other trash, and she STILL ate it. Is that better than panhandling? If I was starving and those were my only two options, which would I choose? But there's also shelters and food kitchens galore in this city, so I can't imagine that one would be reduced to trash diving unless there was some kind of mental illness in place...right?

In any event, it made me sad, and it lingers in my memory. Seeing something like that really does make you feel lucky for what you've got.