Breakfast, again.

Out the window, I see them coming. They’re a family of American Indians. The father walks up front, wearing a grave but stoic look that belies years of consternation and perhaps even frustration, lines well-worn into the flesh tanned too much by long desert days. A little on the heavy side, his body is like a thing he needs to handle, deliberately and carefully, each step well-measured, a slight wobble as he walks. His clothes fit on him like those sheets people put on furniture they don’t plan to use for a long time, forgotten in a room they hardly enter. He is worn and dusty.

Holding open the door, he lets the little wife come in. Though old herself, she’s what racist people like me might think would become of Pocahontas—a thing of beauty indeed. She too is old and tired, but her face has finer lines, a gentler droop to the extra skin that nature gives us as we age, and eyes that—silently—speak of endless mornings. It’s a mother’s work to keep the family together and it shows. She’s herding in the children behind her with nothing but a look and a slight frown. Her beaded outfit makes the slightest rustling sound as she walks past me, turning her head only a little to make sure the kids are coming close behind her.

The kids are coming close behind her. There are two of them. They, too, bring up my long-held racist preconceptions of what an American Indian kid should look like. I compare them in my mind to kids of similar age where I come from. Neither is a child, either—they’re very much into their late teens, precisely when people start to think they’re not kids anymore, despite their mother’s stern looks as they burst into giggles when a pretty girl walks by. I remember the “Indian” kids where I grew up, usually poor and neglected, dressed in torn clothes, selling stuff at car windows when they stopped moving. Oddly enough, in my memory they look now just like all the other kids, just like my kids, and I wonder how a culture made all of brown people figure out the intricacies of racism.

The two kids walking into Carrows have full heads of long hair, straight and black, really shiny, and I find myself a little jealous. The younger one wears it untied, draped over his back like a cape. He’s thin and has about him an air of rebellion—well within bounds I would say, as mom keeps a good eye on him. A worn Metallica t-shirt, blue jeans held close to his thin body by a belt with a big shiny buckle and the obligatory boots that look a little out of place. His face is way too gentle for the look; his skin is just too smooth and his smile far to ready to come out. He blushes.

His older brother is heavier, though hardly fat. He wears the typical t-shirt over jeans that hang a little too low, and then the worn canvas shoes every kid in this country owns these days—I should have bought into that company in the 80’s, darn it! Or was that too late already? He ties his hair tightly with a black thing like my daughter wears—a fancy rubber band. His face is less perfect than his brother’s, and I wonder if perhaps I have misjudged their ages and this one’s just going through puberty while the other isn’t. Or perhaps this is a family like mine, and this kid plays my part while the younger one plays the part of my older brother, whose smooth skin always got compliments from the older women in the family while mine went conspicuously unmentioned. Maybe because I am projecting, I ascribe to this one all my failings and to the other one my dead brother’s virtues. It is at the moment I find I like the younger one better—but before I get a chance to delve into my own self-hatred—that breakfast shows up and I have to stop typing this.