Having made the effort of washing up and dressing up to drive into town, I don't just rush back after whatever it was I needed to do there. Oh no, I stand back - or, more often, just sit back - and watch the passing parade of humanity.
There are the young kids who, looking still bright-eyed and hopeful, work behind the SUBWAY counter, doing what perhaps took them no more than a day or two to learn; and then there is the elderly man, looking broken and apathetic in his hi-vis vest with TROLLEY SERVICE stencilled on its back, who collects empty trolleys in the carpark.
What will happen to those young kids if they get stuck in their mundane job for too long? What did happen to that elderly man who, almost at the end of his working life, still collects empty shopping trolleys? They all had drawn the winning ticket in life's lottery by having been born in this lucky country. How and why had they wasted that opportunity?
I can relate to the small Nepalese man who, always smiling, constantly sweeps the long concourse of the shopping mall, and the other migrant, a Pakistani perhaps, who wears a SECURITY jacket and patrols from one end to the other. They're both still at the start of a new life in a new country, and cheerfully accept their first steps towards a better life as I did sixty years ago when I drove a delivery truck for three short months.
I am sure they know, as I did then, that this will not last, and that they can work their way up and look forward to better things to come, but what about those native-borns who already speak English, who already had years in which they could have got themselves set up and learned the skills and gained the experience necessary for a much better job?
I feel like apologising for them by saying "There but for the grace of God ...", but then I remember the German saying that I grew up with, which all my life has reminded me that "Jeder ist seines Glückes Schmied".
