I caught God watching me. He wasn’t
being sneaky about it; He was right next to me, hanging out in the passenger
seat as I drove up Beacon Street on a weekday morning so indistinct in its
tedium that I almost didn’t take notice.
Every morning I thread my car
through a snarl of glassy-eyed commuters heading to work, all of us knitted
together by the dull resignation of gainful employment. At a busy
intersection near Fenway Park I pass an old, wilted gentleman who plants himself in the middle of Kenmore Square. When the ridiculously long red light
above his head instructs our vehicles to stop, he goes. He patiently weaves
himself between the myriad of hulking shapes and colors muted by the low-hung mist of
daybreak and exhaust. He moves slow and hunched over with one crooked hand
gripping the tip of a cane and the other shaking a large plastic cup in a
jingling plea for support.
He’s always there. He was there in
April when the pouring rain sluiced down his dark, leathered cheeks. He was
there in January when the countless layers of frayed clothing failed to fully contain
his tremors. He was there in July when the sun baked the already cracked and
brittle brim of his Celtics Championship cap that faithfully shadowed the
resolution in the sharp gaze he directed in silent greeting to each and
every car he passed.
I drove by this man for almost two
years and never once reached out to help him. Not when his stooped left
shoulder passed within inches of my opened window. And not when I watched
him pause to rest, dropping his chin to his chest, the faint
white fuzz of his scalp highlighted orange in the pulse of the Citgo sign.
In truth, I wanted to
put something in that cup. But if I did it once, would he make a wobbly beeline
for my distinctively battered Ford every time he saw me? What would happen if I
established eye contact, or smiled at him, or made small talk? Would I be
obligated forever? I drive by him every morning. What level of
commitment were we talking about here?
And so whenever I got stuck at that
infuriatingly long light, I’d keep myself busy by synchronizing the windshield
wipers in time to the Rolling Stones; or fiddling with the air vents so they positioned
the heat at me just so; or tugging the visor this way and that so my sunglasses
wouldn’t have to work so hard. Yessiree, my dashboard was chock full of
important, all-consuming, do-or-die manipulations that HAD to be executed the exact moment that man lifted up his eyes and pointed them in my direction.
Until the morning my son joined me.
We were vying for space in the only
available lane not eaten up by the yellow construction crews busily installing
craters where the rest of the street used to be. The sky glared solid white without
a hint of color or texture. It was the kind of sky that wouldn’t
let you look at it without blinding you in retribution. Not that there
was anything to see … not even the promise of a storm cloud. The thin light washed everything in blah. It was the alter ego of the golden morning light that set fire to the tips of the Cherry and Elm trees famously lining Boston’s streets. Now those trees looked flat, as if someone had swiped an eraser across them. That’s what I was thinking
when my son asked me a question. I was wondering where all the light went.
“Mom, can we give that man some
money?”
“No, honey, I don’t have any cash,”
I said automatically, barely absorbing the question.
“Yes you do,” he replied in his
sweet 10-year-old voice. “We have all these coins you always say you want
to use.”
He was right. Both our cup holders runnethed
over with sticky pennies, nickels and dimes that were, for the most part, superglued to my plastic car interior, or to each other with a miracle gunk that mocked all my weak and half-hearted attempts to pry them loose.
I looked at the shaking cup
clattering with coins. Is it an insult to give pennies? I turned to see my son
balancing two precarious handfuls of coins that somehow included a respectable amount of quarters. I lifted the console lid and saw an additional
grouping of silver in the corner along with the two “emergency” dollars my
husband insists we keep in there for whatever anticlimactic crisis might actually be resolved with a couple of bucks.
I shifted a broken Supertramp CD
case and a charger for a phone I owned four phones ago
and found an inch-thick layer of coins coating the bottom. Like the loaves and fishes my meager offering grew
and grew before my eyes. My son and I quickly gathered the goods and I rolled
down my window to get the man’s attention.
We made eye contact.
He held out his cup and I filled it
up with four heavy drops. He thanked me.
We made small talk.
He asked God to bless me. He leaned
in, gave my son a smile, and asked God to bless him too.
The street light had already turned green
but I couldn’t drive yet because he was still leaning in my car. Yet not one car in
the backed-up, rush-hour, construction-caked traffic beeped. Everyone patiently waited for him to make his way back to the median beneath
the suddenly intense blue sky that cushioned the yolk of a very bright sun.
I turned to my son and he was
smiling a huge grin bracketed with deep dimples. He lifted his dark
brown eyes and they were shining brilliant amber. Behind them I swear I saw a
wizened crinkle.
“See, Mom, that worked out well for everyone.”
It did indeed. And remember that commitment
I was so afraid of? Well, there is one. But it's one I should have realized long before. Now,
whenever I drive past that man, I make eye contact. I wave and say good morning and, on occasion, I add to his cup.
But always, always, I smile. And I get a smile back.
And I
remember the day I caught God looking at me right there from the passenger
seat beside me, and the very basic human lesson He and my son taught me: Kindness, charity, compassion and respect are everyday miracles that can be delved out in clumpy handfuls or delivered with a
simple smile and a bit of eye contact. And they're best served in front of your
children, who learn by example and are your biggest and best miracles of all.
