THE BOY IN THE WINDOW

BEFORE THE WINDOW

When I was born, my mother and I lived on Irving Street with my aunt, uncle and three older cousins. Irving Street was a middle-class neighborhood filled mostly with Black families, with a few white families mixed in. We were not rich, but even as a child I understood that where you lived could affect how you saw yourself and what you believed was possible.

After my father left, we moved around. Mill Creek Projects. Back to Irving Street. Markoe Street after the fire. Eventually, for a period, I found my way back to Irving Street again.

Markoe Street was where I came to understand poverty—not as a word, but as something you could see, smell, taste and feel. It was the kind of poverty that got into your bones and settled there. It was also where, at eight years old, I was given the title “man of the house.”

I was still a boy trying to understand what being a boy meant, and somehow I had already been told I was supposed to be a man.

So when my aunt and uncle allowed me to stay with them on Irving Street during part of my junior-high-school years, I felt as though I had been given a reprieve.

I did not live like a king there. Many nights I slept on the floor on a makeshift cot. I would wait until everyone else had eaten before I ate because I never wanted anyone to feel I was taking advantage of their kindness. Nobody made me feel that way. That was something inside me.

Sometimes my cousin Rob—my big brother as far as I was concerned—would come home late, find me sleeping on the floor, wake me up and fuss at me for being there. He would make me get into his bed, then disappear somewhere else to sleep.

It wasn’t the bed that made Irving Street special.

It was the environment.

I felt differently there.

So when I was told that I had to leave Irving Street and rejoin my family, who had moved into MLK Plaza, I was devastated.

I felt as if I had been sent back to the very thing I had been trying to escape.

And that brings me to the window.

By then I was around thirteen years old. I had already been working at Philadelphia General Hospital since I was nine. Every day I traveled through a city that seemed to contain two completely different worlds.

I would walk Broad Street toward Walnut Street to catch the 42 bus west to Philadelphia General Hospital. That same bus could take me toward Irving Street and my aunt’s house.

During those walks I watched Center City move around me.

On one side of Broad Street was the world of business—office buildings, professional people, men in suits, briefcases, people I thought of as the movers and shakers.

On the other side was the great retail world of Philadelphia—Wanamaker’s, Gimbels, Lit Brothers, Strawbridge & Clothier and the crowds that came downtown to shop.

Somewhere along the way I began calling Broad Street my Yellow Brick Road.

I was the kid walking between two worlds.

That dream had actually begun years earlier. When I was seven or eight years old, I already knew what I wanted to be.

I wanted to be a businessman.

I wanted to wear a suit.

Carry a briefcase.

Work in an office.

The only businessmen I saw doing that on television were white men.

I noticed.

But I never allowed that to change the dream.

The problem was that by the time I sat at that bedroom window, I understood enough about life to believe that the dream was almost impossible.

I had no college degree.

In my mind, college was the minimum entrance requirement for the world inside those Center City office buildings.

How was a boy from the projects supposed to get in there?

So I sat at that window.

Day and night.

Sometimes crying.

Sometimes angry.

Sometimes simply staring.

Why me?

And more importantly:

How do I get out?

The picture you see today exaggerates how much of Center City I could actually see. My real view was much narrower.

A slim view.

Almost, you might say, a slim chance.

The building immediately in front of our apartment blocked much of what lay beyond it. Looking in that direction, I saw the projects, poverty and the environment I desperately wanted to escape.

In hindsight, I sometimes think that blocked view was telling me:

Because through the narrow opening on the other side was the business district.

The impossible side.

And there, among those buildings, was one of the tallest and most recognizable office buildings in Center City at the time.

The IVB Building.

1700 Market Street.

At night, the illuminated IVB sign was clearly visible from my bedroom.

For years, while I sat in that old kitchen chair wondering what my future could possibly be, that sign shone back at me.

I did not understand it.

I did not know why that particular building occupied such a clear place in my view.

I was simply a boy looking through a narrow opening at a world I wished I could somehow enter.

But I will forever say:

It was a sign.

Because years later, somehow, I got through the door.

And 1700 Market Street—the building that had been shining into my bedroom while I wondered how I would ever escape the projects—became the center of my professional life.

I would spend approximately 32½ years there.

I affectionately call it Touche University, because inside that building I learned, grew, adapted, failed, succeeded, mastered new technologies, took chances, accepted opportunities and built a career I could not have imagined how to reach when I was sitting at that window.

Eventually, I would work from the 24th floor.

And from those windows I could look back toward MLK Plaza.

I could not clearly identify that tiny bedroom window from so far away.

But I knew where it was.

Think about that.

The boy had once sat on the 11th floor of the projects looking toward an office tower and wondering how he could possibly get there.

The man was now standing on the 24th floor of that very tower looking back toward the place where the boy had sat.

I can’t make that up.

And I will not call it coincidence.

I believe Allah placed me exactly where I needed to be.

At the time, I hated being moved into the projects. I thought I had been pushed backward.

In hindsight, I believe I had been positioned.

That apartment.

That floor.

That side of the building.

That window.

Had we lived on another side of the building, my view would have been different. Had we been several floors lower, perhaps I would not have seen the skyline at all.

Instead, I was placed where a narrow opening allowed me to see the very environment I had dreamed about since childhood.

While I sat there asking Allah for a way out, my way out was already sitting directly in front of me.

I simply didn’t know it yet.

That is The Boy in the Window.

But there is another picture.

In that picture, I am no longer the boy sitting still and wondering how.

I am the grown man traveling that same symbolic Yellow Brick Road.

And there, sinking into the proverbial quicksand, is the younger version of me.

The poverty.

The projects.

The fatherless boy.

The eight-year-old “man of the house.”

The kid who believed the life he wanted might be impossible.

The boy in the window.

The older me reaches back and grabs him.

Because the journey was never about abandoning that boy.

It was about becoming the man capable of pulling him out.

That is From Quicksand to King.

And the “King” was never about money, a crown or believing I was better than anyone else.

The throne represents becoming the man I believe Allah intended me to become.

The first picture shows a boy staring at a future he cannot yet understand.

The second shows the man that boy became reaching back to bring him forward.

One is the dream.

The other is the journey.

Together, those two pictures tell my life story.

The boy looked out of the window searching for a way out. The man eventually discovered that Allah had placed the way forward in his view all along.

And if tomorrow never comes, I can look at those two pictures and say:

I made the journey. I pulled that boy from the quicksand. And I found my way to my throne.

The Boy in the Window

From Quicksand to King — The Journey to My Throne

That boy sitting at the window is me.

The picture is a recreation of the bedroom I had while living in Martin Luther King Plaza in South Philadelphia. The bunk beds on the left were there. The window was there. The only thing that is not quite right is the chair. What I actually sat on was an old kitchen chair that somehow found its way into our bedroom.

That chair became my place.

I sat there during the day. I sat there at night. Sometimes I dreamed. Sometimes I wondered. Sometimes I cried.

And more times than I can count, I asked the same questions:

But the story of that window did not begin at the window.

It began years earlier.

When I was born, my mother and I lived on Irving Street with my aunt, uncle and three older cousins. It was a middle-class neighborhood made up mostly of Black families, with a few white families as well.

We were not rich.

But even as a child, I learned that sometimes where you live matters as much as how you live.

After my father left, life became a series of moves and adjustments.

Mill Creek Projects.

Irving Street.

Markoe Street after the fire.

Back to Irving Street for me.

And eventually, Martin Luther King Plaza.

Markoe Street was where I came to fully understand poverty.

Not poverty as a statistic.

Not poverty as something somebody talked about on television.

I mean the kind of poverty you could see, smell, taste and feel.

The kind that gets into your bones and settles there.

And it was on Markoe Street, when I was about eight years old, that I was given a title that would follow me for much of my life:

“Man of the house.”

Those words carried more weight than they might sound like they should.

I was the oldest of four children.

I had three younger siblings behind me.

So when somebody told an eight-year-old boy that he was now “the man of the house,” I did not hear it as some cute compliment meant to make me feel grown.

I heard responsibility.

Somehow, in my young mind, being the man of the house meant I was supposed to look out for everybody.

My mother.

My brother.

My sisters.

The household.

I was still trying to understand how to be a boy, and suddenly I was carrying a title that belonged to a grown man.

That is why I sometimes think of it as the “man of the house curse.”

It made me responsible early.

It made me observant early.

It taught me to carry weight early.

But it also meant I began carrying burdens long before I understood how heavy they were.

And while I was worrying about everybody else, there was very little room to ask the question:

Who was carrying me?

That is part of why Irving Street meant so much.

When my aunt and uncle allowed me to stay with them for about two years during my early junior-high-school years, I was overjoyed.

It was not because I was suddenly living like a king.

I wasn’t.

Many nights I slept on the floor on a makeshift cot.

I often waited until everybody else had eaten before I ate because I never wanted anyone to feel I was taking advantage of their kindness or overstaying my welcome.

Nobody there made me feel that way.

That was something inside me.

I did not want to upset the apple cart.

Sometimes my cousin Rob — my big brother as far as I was concerned — would come home late at night and find me sleeping on the floor.

He would wake me up and fuss at me.

Then he would make me get into his bed while he went somewhere else to sleep.

To this day, I don’t know where he went.

But that memory stayed with me.

Because Irving Street was not about the bed.

It was about the environment.

I felt differently there.

I saw something different there.

I could breathe differently there.

So when I was told I had to leave Irving Street and rejoin my family, who had moved from Markoe Street into the Martin Luther King Plaza projects, I was crushed.

I had spent much of my young life trying to get away from poverty.

And now, in my mind, I was being sent right back into it.

I would continue running back to Irving Street whenever I could, almost as though it were a place of salvation.

But home was now the projects.

And that brings us to the boy in the window.

THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD

By then I was about thirteen years old.

I had been working at Philadelphia General Hospital since I was nine.

That alone probably says something about the childhood I was living.

Each day I traveled through Philadelphia, moving between very different worlds.

I would walk Broad Street toward Walnut Street, where I caught the 42 bus west toward Philadelphia General Hospital.

That same bus could also take me toward my aunt’s house on Irving Street.

So I spent a lot of time traveling through Center City.

And I watched.

I have always watched.

As I walked north along Broad Street toward Walnut, I began seeing the city almost as two separate worlds.

On one side was the business world.

Office buildings.

Professional people.

Men in suits.

Briefcases.

The people I thought of as the movers and shakers.

On the other side was the great retail world of Philadelphia.

Wanamaker’s.

Gimbels.

Lit Brothers.

Strawbridge & Clothier.

People shopping, moving through the stores, participating in another side of city life.

Somewhere during those daily walks I began referring to Broad Street privately as my:

Yellow Brick Road.

I was walking straight through two worlds.

And neither one looked like the world I returned to every night.

That dream of the business world had actually started years earlier.

As far back as I can remember, I said I wanted to be a businessman.

I wanted to wear a suit.

Carry a briefcase.

Work in an office.

I did not know what kind of businessman.

I did not have a career plan.

I just knew what that world represented to me.

The only problem was that almost every businessman I saw on television was white.

I noticed that.

A young Black boy in 1966 or 1967 Philadelphia could look around and see very little evidence that the dream he carried was meant for him.

But somehow, that never stopped me from dreaming it.

By thirteen, however, I knew enough about life to understand how improbable that dream seemed.

I had no college degree.

And in my mind, a college degree was the minimum ticket required to walk professionally into one of those Center City office buildings.

So I could dream about it.

I could watch it.

I could walk beside it every day.

But how was I supposed to get inside?

At the same time, I was becoming increasingly aware of the environment around me in the projects.

The things I came to think of as the project mentality.

The crabs-in-a-barrel mentality.

Households without fathers.

Dependency.

The attitudes and behaviors that, in my young mind, seemed capable of convincing a person that where they were was where they were always going to remain.

And because I was living in an environment I understood as redlined, simply moving beyond those invisible boundaries could become an event in itself.

I remember police questioning me:

Where are you going?

Where are you coming from?

So imagine that boy.

The oldest of four.

Already carrying the “man of the house” weight.

Already working.

Already understanding more about poverty and responsibility than a child should have to understand.

Already dreaming of a life he could see but had no obvious credentials to enter.

And then put him in that old kitchen chair.

At that window.

That is the boy in the picture.

THE VIEW WAS THE MAP

Our apartment was on the 11th floor.

And where that apartment was located mattered.

The direction the window faced mattered.

The floor mattered.

The exact position of that apartment mattered.

Had we lived on another side of the building, I would have seen something entirely different.

Had we been several floors lower, perhaps the skyline would have disappeared altogether.

Instead, from where I sat, I had a narrow view toward Center City.

And I want to make something clear about the picture.

The recreation exaggerates how much of Center City I could actually see.

My real view was much tighter.

Much narrower.

It was almost a slim chance of a view.

A large building directly in front of us dominated much of what I could see.

That building blocked almost the entire retail world from my sight.

That side of the view showed me more of the environment I already knew.

Projects.

Poverty.

The world I wanted desperately to escape.

Looking back now, I sometimes think that building was there almost as if to say:

Look the other way.

Look toward what seems impossible.

Because through that narrow opening on the other side was the business district.

The office buildings.

The life I had been dreaming about since I was seven or eight years old.

And among those buildings was one of the tallest and most recognizable towers in Center City at the time.

The IVB Building.

1700 Market Street.

At night, the illuminated IVB sign was clearly visible from my bedroom window.

For approximately five years, that sign shone into my room.

Think about that.

I would sit there crying.

Wondering why me.

Wondering how I was going to escape the projects.

Wondering how a boy without a college degree could ever get into one of those office buildings.

And night after night, the building that would eventually become the center of my professional life was shining back at me.

I didn’t know it.

I couldn’t possibly have known it.

To me, it was just part of the skyline.

But today I will forever say:

THE SIGN

Years later, somehow, I got through that door.

And once I got in, I knew one thing:

Because I knew what it had taken just to arrive.

The boy who once believed he did not possess the minimum qualifications to enter that world found himself building a professional career inside it.

And not just for a little while.

I would spend approximately 32½ years there.

At 1700 Market Street.

The same building whose sign had shone through my bedroom window while I sat wondering what my future would become.

I affectionately call that place:

Touche University.

Because that is where I learned.

That is where I grew.

That is where I adapted.

That is where I discovered abilities I did not know I possessed.

That is where I learned new technologies, accepted opportunities, survived mistakes, solved problems, built relationships and ultimately constructed a career that the boy sitting in that project window could not have explained how to reach.

At one point, I was working on the 24th floor.

And from those windows I could look back toward the projects.

I could not clearly see that exact bedroom window from that distance.

But I knew where it was.

And sometimes I would look.

The perspective had completely reversed.

Once, the boy had sat on the 11th floor of the projects, looking toward 1700 Market Street.

Now the man stood on the 24th floor of 1700 Market Street looking back toward the place where that boy had sat.

The same skyline.

The same city.

The same two locations.

Only the perspective had changed.

I can’t make that up.

And I refuse to call it coincidence.

In my heart, I believe it was divine intervention.

I believe Allah placed me exactly where I needed to be.

At the time, I did not want to move into those projects.

I thought I was being pushed backward.

I thought I was being returned to the very environment I had spent years trying to escape.

But now I see it differently.

Maybe I was not merely being moved.

Maybe I was being positioned.

That building.

That apartment.

That floor.

That direction.

That window.

Because while I sat there asking Allah:

My way out was already directly in front of me.

I simply could not recognize it yet.

Allah had not shown me the route.

But He had placed the destination in my field of vision.

Night after night.

Like a beacon.

Like a sign.

And that is why The Boy in the Window means so much to me.

It is not simply a picture of poverty.

It is not simply a picture of a child dreaming about something better.

In hindsight, that one picture contains almost my entire life.

On one side was the life I knew.

On the other was the life I thought was impossible.

And sitting between those two realities was a boy who had no idea which one would ultimately become his.

That is perspective.

The picture itself did not know the future.

The boy certainly didn’t.

But the man looking back can now see what the boy could not.

ANSWERS TO MY PRAYERS

The window did not stop serving me after I began working.

Over the years, I kept returning to it whenever I was searching for answers.

There were times when I sat there thinking about the next chapter of my life — starting a family, finding the right mate, trying to understand what kind of man, husband and father I wanted to become.

Later, after the separation from my first wife, I found myself back in the projects and back at that same window.

The irony does not escape me now.

This was the place I had never wanted to move into.

Yet from the time I first arrived there until I finally left that window behind in 1987 — back and forth through different chapters of my life — that chair and that view kept becoming a place where I could go looking for answers.

It was there that I began to stop blaming myself for a broken marriage.

It was there that I made the decision to stop drinking and drugging and to clean up my life.

I had been hurting myself because I did not know what else to do with the pain. Eventually, I made the decision that I was no longer going to keep trying to kill myself from the inside because a marriage had failed.

I had to repair me.

I eventually moved back into the apartment my ex-wife had abandoned, even though I had never stopped paying the rent. I was starting over. I was in a new relationship. I still had to deal with the broken marriage. I still had two daughters. None of those responsibilities disappeared.

But I was fixing me.

And I never looked back.

Later I would marry Deb and build a life with her. I even wrote a song for her called “Answers to My Prayers.”

Looking back now, I cannot miss the connection.

The place I never wanted to be became one of the places where I found so many answers to my prayers.

That window had been there when the boy asked:

Why me?

And it stayed with me long enough for the man to begin asking a different question:

Why couldn’t I become the businessman?

Why couldn’t I walk into that building?

Why couldn’t I rebuild after a broken marriage?

Why couldn’t I clean myself up?

Why couldn’t I repair my life?

Why couldn’t I have the family, the love and the future I had dreamed about?

The window never changed.

The view never changed.

TWO PICTURES — ONE LIFE

And then there is the second picture.

The man reaching down to pull the boy from the quicksand.

That picture is also me.

Both of us.

The boy and the man.

The younger me is caught in the proverbial quicksand.

And that quicksand is more than poverty.

It is the projects.

The absence of my father.

Markoe Street.

The eight-year-old “man of the house.”

Being the oldest of four and believing somehow that three younger siblings were now part of the burden I was supposed to carry.

The fear of becoming trapped by my environment.

The limitations other people saw for a young Black boy like me.

The limitations I sometimes saw for myself.

The belief that I lacked the education and credentials required to reach the world I dreamed about.

All of that is the quicksand.

And the grown man is reaching back.

Not because he despises the boy.

Not because he is ashamed of where the boy came from.

And not because success required him to forget him.

Quite the opposite.

The journey was about becoming the man capable of reaching back for him.

That is the meaning of:

From Quicksand to King

The “King” was never about money.

It was never about a crown.

It was never about believing I was better than somebody else.

The King represents the man who finally arrived at his throne.

And my throne is not a chair.

It is becoming the person I believe Allah intended me to become.

The boy in the first picture is still looking for the road.

The man in the second picture has traveled enough of it to reach back.

The first picture asks:

How do I get out?

The second answers:

Keep moving. I am coming back for you.

One picture is the dream.

The other is the journey.

One is the question.

The other is the answer.

One shows the boy staring toward what he believes is impossible.

The other shows what happens when that boy lives long enough to become the man who can pull himself from the quicksand.

Together, those two pictures tell my story.

A boy sat in a project window asking Allah for a way out.

He could not know that his destination was already shining back at him.

Years later, the man he became would stand inside that destination and look back toward the boy.

And somewhere along that Yellow Brick Road, he would finally understand:

The view had been showing him the journey all along.

That is The Boy in the Window.

That is From Quicksand to King.

And that is The Journey to My Throne.

THE PATH REVEALED

I have told you before that I believe Allah reveals these truths to me as He sees fit.

I did not understand everything that window meant while I was sitting there. I did not understand why I had been placed in the apartment I did not want, on that floor, facing that direction, with that narrow view.

The meaning was not revealed to me all at once.

It came in pieces.

Just as the path itself came in pieces.

I sometimes think of life as a chessboard. I do not always see the entire board, and I do not always understand why a particular move places me where it does. But I believe Allah sees what I cannot see.

So I follow the path laid before me.

And when another truth is revealed, I receive it for what it is.

That is how I understand the window now.

The boy sat there asking “Why me?”

The man eventually learned to ask “Why not me?”

And somewhere between those two questions, a life happened.

A life I could not have scripted from that chair.

A life whose destination, I now believe, had been shining back at me all along.