There is now a regular in the parking lot of my local grocery store who asks to clean my windshield. Unfortunately, I rarely carry cash, so I request that he ask me again another time. I try to look him in the eye, but sometimes he won’t meet mine.

There’s been a shift locally, with more people eager to do small jobs to earn a dollar or two. While some stand on street corners with torn cardboard signs, others try to sell bottles of water or popcorn to the cars that pass by them. They might aim to embody the American ideal of being continually industrious, even under the fierce sun that has inched us above 100 degrees for weeks.

But I don’t think we’ve cornered that market. I see that spirit in Mexico with my husband. We bought snacks from people walking between cars as we waited to cross the bridge back to the United States. We passed coins to men who watched our cars in parking lots and guided us back out into the busy streets, waving their orange flags.

It was only the windshield wipers that my husband raised a lone, wagging finger against. He told me the soap would be harsh on the car’s paint. But the women carrying the children would get money without hesitation; he wouldn’t take their offers of candy or fruit.

I am a beacon to most vendors. They wait outside my window, showing off jewelry or dolls, purses or sun visors. For too many years, I would stare ahead or down at my hands, unsure of my role in the interaction. It’s only through time that I began to look up and see. It was only after I could see that I could start processing the uncomfortable bits that kept my eyes down: my privilege, my ignorance, my impotence.

Years ago, we had left the kids and gone for a weekend trip to Guanajuato. I had suppressed missing my kids until we went to a seafood restaurant. It was on the second floor, relatively empty, which meant impeccable service from bored waiters. Our table was next to open windows overlooking the street, and I watched the business of the intersection.

The vendors sold cigarettes or packets of nuts or other assorted sundry that could be carried between the cars stopped at the light. It was the long brown hair that caught my eye first, just like my daughter’s. The little girl used the tire of the car to climb up and reach the windshield that she cleaned, nearly her entire body leaned over the hood. When she was done, as the light turned, she took money from the outstretched hand in the car and darted back to the median.

She couldn’t have been more than 6, about the same age as my daughter then.

She could have been my daughter, and my daughter could have been her. The simple place of one’s birth, where the motions of the universe placed you without your having any say, was a random chaos that felt then — and still feels now — stark and hollow. But that memory has become a tether, a way to remember the fluidity of the chaos and how we swim in it.

How we choose to see and process our chaotic world is still up to us. We decide how we interact with that chaos, whether we look up and truly see, and whether we keep some cash in our pockets for those who might need it more than we do.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Cassie McClure is a writer, wife, mother, daughter, fan of the Oxford comma, and drinker of tequila. Some of those things relate. Contact her at cassie@mcclurepublications.com.)