My Life in Pants: Yolanda and the Burger King Monopoly - A Poem, a Story of Truth and Reflection

Yolanda and the Burger King Monopoly

It was at the change of a decade,
The 1960s were leaving us soon.
My family was becoming more affluent,
A little higher up the rung of middle class.
But to the eyes of us children,
Not too much changed,
From what was now to what was past.

My family drove to pick her up,
A new member of our family.
A maid, a cook, a cleaner. A servant.
Yolanda was her name.
She was given to us by her family,
That young timid and shy girl.
Her wages were theirs, her work, ours.
I learned this much later in my life.
She spoke no English.
We spoke no Spanish.
In life and experience, we were worlds apart.
And that distance between us was everything.
We as children, we didn't see a distance,
We didn't know what we know now.

She cleaned, but not well.
She cooked, but not like we had imagined.
Hot dogs and beans on fried toast.
Foreign food? Not what we expected!
But this was her life, her meals, her ways.
Not ours.
Our expectations. Ours, not hers.

One afternoon, she watched us play.
Monopoly, a game of money and chance.
Bright bills scattered across the floor.
A fortune, in the eyes of a child.
A fortune, in the eyes of Yolanda.
Her amazed and concentrated look,
We children, we did not notice.
We did not see, in her eyes, that gleam.
We laughed and told her it was all real.
For it was real to us, for our game.

She cooked our lunch,
We ate and laughed,
Then went out to play,
Leaving her to her work,
Very alone in her solitude.

Later, she was gone.
Vanished.
A suitcase missing.
A paper bag missing.
Then the Burger King called,
not too far up the road,
asking my mother about a name.
Did she know Yolanda?

Burger King, just up the road,
Far away enough to her,
but not far enough from us.

She had bags in hand,
crying at the counter,
Wanting to flee,
But she was too scared,
And yet resigned.

The paper bag?
The Monopoly money from our game.
A game to us, a different life to her.
Her people's money, just the same,
Multicolored yet plain.
Money she had never seen up-close before,
Only hungered for from afar.

She had taken the chance,
She had left us, run away,
She was going home, a hero,
Rich from that American family,
So wealthy their kids toyed with it.
Too rich, while her family was poor.

Burger King does not accept Monopoly Money.
It never did. It never will.
Not even from children.

Yolanda was not with us long,
And as children do,
We probably cruelly teased her after her theft,
Not understanding that she was but a child too.
Still a child. Older than us, younger than we knew.

Her story we told over the years,
Laughing at her misery.
To us it was but a tale to be told,
But in my later years, I know now,
That my childhood experience,
Was never hers.

At Yolanda's expense,
I no longer laugh.
And I never will again.