WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2023
“This is a dark hour, Mother. In this dark hour, we look to you, and in the light of your countenance we entrust ourselves and our problems to your maternal Heart, which Mother Mary you know. Be tender to us and fortify our hearts to walk in the light of your Son.
A story by Garrison Keiller !!/1/23
An ordinary late October day and the world is dense with stately trees in variations of reds and gold and orange that Crayola never contemplated — no need to shop around for magic mushrooms or give up your life as a good citizen for something involving incense and flutes — just walk down the street ignoring the Halloween skeletons and let your heart be lifted. I’m descended from stoics, our emotional range runs from A to D, once or twice we’ve hit L, never W for wonderment but here I am in New York where something in the water encourages self-expression and I see a man on the subway platform do some little dance moves he’d maybe seen in the theater the night before. He’s not a dancer but he doesn’t let that stop him.
A short woman approaches and speaks something to me and I see she’s holding a cardboard tray of candies and a little boy clutches her pant leg and I remember reading about the Ecuadoran refugees who’ve come to the city, the women earning money just this way, and I reach into my pocket and pull out a twenty, which is a lot to pay for a small bag of M&Ms but how do you put a value on the look in the boy’s eyes. He is three or four and very keen. A train is coming into the station. This must be all strange to him but he isn’t frightened thanks to his anchor. He studies me, then the crowd emerging from the open doors, a man with a handsome dog on a leash, a guitarist playing into a little amp on the platform, and I board the train. But those dark eyes stay with me.
The classic story: the elders make a desperate choice to spare their children the grief of history and put language and life story behind and become as children themselves in order to start anew. So you learn as much English as you need — “Please,” the woman said, and then “Thank you,” and soon the little boy’s English will race on ahead of hers, but you will always address your Creator in the old tongue, and so, the next Sunday, leaving my Episcopalians I walk through clouds of happy Spanish emerging from Our Lady down the street, women clustered around the priests, children orbiting around them, men smoking.
Every year, a dozen persons or so are shoved into a moving train as it comes into a station. A few are killed. To install sliding glass shields to prevent this would cost billions and so New Yorkers make it a practice to stand back from the tracks, to be wary of weird or troubled persons and keep your distance, and to stand with others and not alone. Safety is in numbers: where there are others, there is civility. Garrison Keillor
The Vibrant Channeled Creator 