Slow on the draw

It was a national Hispanic boycott day and a sea of white faces in downtown Dallas, the absence of brown skin conspicuous. A co-worker read aloud a story about a finger fragment being served on a TGIF hamburger and quipped "that never would have happened if a Hispanic was working."  At Union Station, I waited for the red line train to take me north and two middle-aged Hispanics popped up in front of me in front of the pass vending machine.  They both wore white t-shirts and painter's pants and the contrast of their skin against their clothing was stunning. "Espanol?" one man asked. They wanted to buy a one-way DART pass for one of the men but didn't want to pay the Day Pass rate ($2.50) for the roundtrip ride, since they were technically doing a one-way. They wanted the disabled/elderly/child's rate of $1.00 and wanted to know how to get the lower rate. I got hung up on explaining in Spanish the distinctions between fares. The man looked at me patiently and said in heavily accented English, "Yeah, but we don't want to pay that fare. It's too much money." And for a minimum wage worker, an extra $1.50 is a lot of money. Had I been thinking instead of trying to piece together coherent Spanish phrases, I would have offered to pay for a pass for the 2nd man in support of the boycott. I don't know if they were striking today, or if they were some of the few who got permission to work, but they stuck out like a sore thumb and my mind was on language and communication vs. comprehension and understanding. But these men weren't asking me for money, they were asking how to navigate a system and asking why.