Fast from Ignorance

I sit in my car wrting a small thank you note.  As I write, a young college-aged man walks behind the van and opens the door of the white car next to me, gets in, sits, looks around the car frantically, gets out his phone, makes a call, gets no answer, hangs up in distress, and just waits.

With my card finished I wonder what to do. Clearly he knows I am here. Clearly I can see he is there. Yet should we just go on, each of us leading our own lives seperated by a sheet of metal and glass while each of us could be in direr need of the other. I sit and contemplate it for a minuet.

I am not just a man, vastly lost in this world
Lost in a Sea of Faces
Your body’s the bread, Your blood is the wine
Because you traded Your life for mine

Just one in a million faces

I turn off the engine, turn off the radio, look at him and wait for eye contact as I slide over to the passenger seat, and open the door. He looks at me and opens his as well. I parked too close to open the door enough to even stick my head out but I ask him nonetheless, “Do you need anything?” Quickly and sternly he answeres “No.” And even though neither of us believe him, we shut our doors.

What more can I do? As I back up, I see an “Obama ‘08″ sticker on his bumper and a nursing school university frame around his lisence plate. There is much more to his story, I am convinced….

And it just makes me wonder how many people go though life alone with everyone around them pretending like they don’t see them. Like “Ryan party of one” at the Roadhouse Grill a year ago, or the man I made eye contact with as I turned left from Nelson onto Brockton today, or the woman wearing two jackets but still cold pacing back and forth and looking around outside of Taco Bell as our family sat inside, separted only by a window, warm and full. Or the girl I walked in front of, each of us alone as we hurry off to classes in different directions. What about them? What about me? 

Can we stop isolating ourselves? Can we step out of our comfort zone, our car, our house, our seat, to say hi to someone or smile at someone or be kind to someone we have never seen and may never see again? Can we do that? Because America, people, the world, has become too isolated, too self-centered, to do that… And I’d like to see that change.

———————————————————————————