Why wasn't Mr. Mustache pulling the cart?

The light turned green on Pulaski, but I couldn’t get through the intersection while an old woman was struggling to pull her overloaded wagon across the street. She was moving a half mile an hour, maybe less, pulling on the handle and advancing about a foot with every yank.

It was painful to watch, but I was on the hunt for an available men’s room at the moment and I couldn’t be distracted from my mission. Ten minutes later, I’m back in the car, driving down Foster, and I see that she’s gained about 200 feet.

I park the car, grab a can of oil from my bike bag, and walk over to ask her if she needs help. She accepts right away, of course, so I oil the axles on her cart and give it a pull. The thing is overloaded with about 50 pounds of groceries and the wheels are ridiculously small, so the whole thing is absolutely too much for her to handle, except she has no choice.

She tells me she does this once a month, and I guess that’s when the SNAP benefits come in for her family. She says she has four kids and the food has to last until another month rolls around, so I start doing the math.

At 50 pounds in the cart for her and four kids, that’s roughly five ounces per person per day. Even if everyone is on a diet of lard, that’s only 1,500 calories per day for each of them. Not quite starvation, but nowhere near ample, either.

Now that I’m yoked to the wagon, her gait improves, but she’s still a bit unstable and I notice that she has that crook in her arm that you often see with stroke victims. I think about asking, but then I figure I’m not gonna be here that long and she doesn’t owe me the story of her life. As we cross over the bridge, I’m thinking about giving her some money when we finish. I’ve got about sixty bucks on me and I can spare it, but it would probably mean a lot to her.

But, then, we get to her apartment building and there’s a man outside. Grown man, nice mustache, smoking a cigarette, and he starts going through the cart as soon as we get to her walkway. Maybe he’s one of the four kids she was talking about. Maybe he’s her boyfriend or husband or something.

Whoever he is, he absolutely looks like he could have pulled the damned wagon from the grocery store.
I think of asking him why he let her struggle with the load on her own, but I don’t know their household situation. Maybe he has some hidden deficiency that makes it impossible for him to help. Maybe he got home after she left and he didn’t realize she was trying to do it all on her own. Or, maybe, he’s just a bastard who expects her to do all the work while he stands outside in the sun, smoking a cigarette. I’d go with option C, but maybe I’m just cynical about these things.

I decide to let it lie, and I also decide to keep my sixty bucks for another day. Whatever the situation is, I’m absolutely not buying this guy a pack of smokes. The woman thanks me for my help, the guy says nothing, and I head back to the car.

Life in the city. You can’t beat it.

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