Posts
Talk about a way to invest one's daily trivialities with meaning and hope! Pema Chodron tells us that anything that is with us as we stand in our sacred space (i.e., our life at any moment) is there to teach us what we need to know.
I'm jumping up and down with the excitement of this idea.
The day after our recent great snowstorm, I came to the front window and was confronted with a mystery. Beside a snowed-in car stood an older woman bundled in parka and hood, her walker at her side. She was motionless—maybe the cold had turned her to ice.
Ten feet away was a young man wearing light cotton pants, a light V-neck sweater, and street shoes. He was pacing, pacing in the middle of the street. The two of them did not speak to each other. The young man showed no signs of cold—no hugging himself for warmth, no stomping his feet to improve the circulation.
I watched this vignette for five minutes, shamelessly staring as they continued: the woman motionless beside her walker, the young man pacing restlessly.
Finally a taxi showed up and the woman crawled into its warmth while the cabbie stuffed her walker into the trunk and the young man watched. The taxi left. When it was out of sight, the young man turned and walked through the snow into one of the triplexes. His mother was safely on her way to some urgent appointment or to her own home. But I still wonder why they didn't speak to each other.
On another winter day, bitter cold but no snow, I was walking west in the Village. Ahead of me was a mother pulling a wagon; her six-year-old boy walked just ahead of her. In the wagon were her groceries for the week (she had just left No Frills) and, right at the front of the wagon, her four-year-old daughter.
The wagon had raised wooden sides that held in the groceries. The daughter's arm stuck out to the left so she could hang on to a doll-sized stroller that she had probably insisted (her defiance just short of a tantrum) on bringing along.
(It will be in the way. You'll forget it. I'll tell you right now I'm NOT going back to the store to collect a toy stroller that you were too careless to hang on to. And so forth.)
Daughter had sworn to pay attention and to hold on to her doll stroller for dear life. And there she was in the wagon, the dolly's stroller trundling along beside the wagon attached only by her little arm and her mittened hand.
In the stroller lay a doll. A standard twelve-inch baby doll, the kind with a soft cloth body and plastic arms and legs and head. I know these details because the baby doll was starkers! Yes, in that freezing, below-zero weather, the doll was wearing nothing at all. Not even a diaper. Not even a muffler around her little neck.
I knew it was a doll. But seeing her sprawled in the tiny stroller chilled my own heart. How could the little girl bear to see her baby doll so cold?
It made me want to knit a little snowsuit for her like the white wool snow suit my Aunt Lil knitted for me when I was a year old. The leggings were flared in the seat to allow room for a diaper (cloth, of course). The hooded jacket closed with a zipper.
I have no actual memory of wearing this snowsuit, but it warmed every one of us down the line, getting more yellowed with every child. In a home movie shot the winter I turned one I'm wearing that white snowsuit.
That nekkid baby doll taught me something. I'll let you know when I figure it out.
In both of these cases I was left with my conjectures. But I'm sure that each of those moments taught me something I needed to know.
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment