POTENTIAL

I work as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant by the pier. Today, as I stood at the counter, a little boy stepped on his tip-toes, to rest his chin on top of the tile. His eyes looked up at me, "Bonita!" he said, in a voice, so harmless and sweet, "That means you're pretty!"

My brother and I like watching videos of the PS22 Chorus, a choir of public school 5th graders from Staten Island, NY, that, under their quirky and hip director, cover everyone from Björk to Michael Jackson to the Velvet Underground & Nico, becoming a quick YouTube success. We watched a video of them singing Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" on ABC's Good Morning America, and a chubby kid with a unibrow belted out the solo with perfect pitch. But the part that got me choked up was when they showed a long shot of the building, and a group of adults, assumably their parents, were shown standing outside the window, waving and clapping their hands. A silhouette much like the soloist raised his hands in the air with pride as his son impressed the world on national television.

And these kids seem to enjoy singing every song so much. The boys dance and clap and most of the girls bob their heads and do the "christina aguilera hands" with shut eyes. And the choir is made of diverse ethnicity, which, makes me romantically assume and imagine the story to be like Freedom Writers, or Stand and Deliver, keeping kids off the streets by having them sing pop songs in a choir room. And these kids are so talented, and ardent, and uninhibited, and I just smile inside at all of their potential. They are still just children!

But what makes me most uneasy, is that potential is only a seed, still needing hard work and water and cultivation in order to breed success, and it is only too easy to get burnt out, or lazy, or settle.

My best friend growing up, still, in my opinion, is one of the most brilliant, funny, and creative people I know, who used to sell elaborate hand-drawn mazes on sheets of torn-out notebook paper for $2 in the 1st grade, and now lives in the basement of his sister's apartment, fiddling around on guitar, generally being a mooch and a loser. Maybe he'll get everything he wanted, and without expending too much effort, but I have friends, who were the biggest deals in High School, who sort of fade into the background in college, and seem to have little direction or idea of what to do with themselves. Some of my mom's friends from college are still yet to settle down, still chasing childish dreams, dating people my age, holding on to the idea that they're just about to catch their big break. Which they might, but, not to be a nay-sayer, their chances are pretty slim.

And I wonder to myself, again, where the balance is. Where so many unexplained things have very sound results, like we never really understand why one accidents ends one way and another a different. Just because we are capable, doesn't mean we always achieve. Yet we can still move forward, slowly, the one foot the other, because possibilities are endless, life is not perfect, but our hearts are BIG.