Growing up in Los Angeles (Part Seventeen): Stained Glass on the Ground

Part 17: Stained Glass on the Ground

by Armando Ortiz

One day Pedro was on the second floor of the church sweeping and picking up debris. After a few hours of gathering pieces of drywall and splintered wood, he decided to take a break in one of the rooms. He went inside and slightly opened one of the windows that faced the alley and noticed that the kids were all in a circle. There were two kids in the middle of the human circle punching each other. The memory now is quite vague but it certainly was a fight, because at the end one of the contestants was bloodied and crying. It makes one wonder how the actions of others have a more profound effect on the viewer. Those kids probably were not aware that they were being watched, nor were they aware of their reality. To them it might have been a fight, just a fight, where there was a winner and a bloodied loser. 

Maybe it is one of those things that one will never really know. A lesson that is being acted out in real life. How many life lessons had he participated in unconsciously that taught someone else or left a lasting impact on some random person without him knowing? He couldn’t remember who had won or if the two had been too bloody to be able to point out who was the victor. One thing is for sure, at that moment the tears that flowed down the cheeks of the two kids, blended with the blood, creating a gorier scene that looked like condensed raspberry syrup, resembling the very pieces of glass that he’d come across outside the church grounds, Pedro never forgot the scene.