Self Reflection © Carol Bergman 2025
Can you feel me hugging you Bryan? I am always going to be hugging you.
-Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy; A Story of Justice and Redemption
A young woman wandered into the café. I was immersed in reading my notes, a writer at work in the midst of a distracting buzz, my attention laser focused, the woman in my peripheral vision. I looked up and she was standing at my table, invading my personal space, and holding up her phone.
"Would you have a charger?" she asked.
I was disgruntled by the intrusion. It's never happened to me before in this small, quiet, homogeneous, gentrified town. I stood up and grabbed my small backpack off the chair. I'd had my phone stolen recently and I wasn't up for another theft. This young light-skinned Black woman looked like a waif. She was wearing a low cut sleeveless summer dress down to her ankles, running shoes that looked too big for her feet, her hair tied up neatly with a ribbon. Within seconds we had profiled each other. She was hitting on me—sweet older woman with whitening hair—and I was reflexively protecting my possessions.
What was her story? What was my story?
"Are you a student?" I asked. That was one of my more innocent assumptions.
"No. I've been out at Bethel but my friend let me down and I can't stay with her."
Bethel, the site of Woodstock. A lot of folks wander through New Paltz searching for Woodstock. She'd found the empty field where it all happened, way back when. Now she was here, the only Black person in this too-expensive café. Situated on the environmentally protected rail trail, it attracts a lot of tourists with fancy bikes and helmets.
"What were you doing there?" I asked the young waif.
"Trying to save our democracy," she said.
"Thank you," I said. I purposely didn't ask if she had a place to stay. It was obvious that the phone charger request was a gambit. But the saving our democracy project, however real or imaginary, pleased me. This young woman couldn't have been more than 20 and where had she come from and where was she going to sleep? And did she have a grandmother who would always hug her?
"Did you ask the baristas if they have a charger?" I asked resisting my inclination to ask her to sit down, listen to her story, and buy her a cold drink. I wasn't in the mood that day, my work had been interrupted, and for goodness sake isn't there anyplace safe where we can rest and recover from the woes of our beleaguered nation? Apparently not.
If I wasn't going to invite the young woman to sit down, there was nothing more to say. I gathered my papers and slid out of the café into the sultry air.