I began to look for grace in the news. Nitwit celebrity Paris Hilton was affected by poverty in India and began giving cash to people on the streets of Mumbai. A social conscience? Hooray. Maybe not a nitwit.
A guy who’d never remembered my name before today remembered it. I gloat.
The lady behind the convenience store register caught me leafing through a tabloid. When I started to pay for it, she looked both ways and then whispered to me, “You don’t have to buy it. You can read it and put it back.” A moment of perfect understanding. And grace.
In Washington, two prominent senators of opposing parties co-sponsored a hospitality suite in a search for better understanding and communication.
More politics? In Rio, businesspeople and poor folk samba together in the streets. Said one Carioca, “We invite all the problems to a big party and we let them dance together.” In the next few years Rio will host both the World Cup and the Olympics. Maybe we’ll all dance in the streets.
And movie critic Roger Ebert, despite losing his lower face to cancer, was moved to write, “We must try to contribute joy. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find out.”
Grace was suffusing my being.
Normalcy returned with a close call on the highway evincing faces knit with rage and bellows of rancor. Here was a recognizable reality, and there was no grace. I began wondering how much grace was feasible for me.
Does one’s capacity expand like a glutton’s stomach? Might behaving too well somehow distort “the real me?” Then again, what is “the real me?” Time to find out, I decided. Enough being a work in progress. So I said a cordial “Good morning” to a sidewalk stranger, just for the hell of it. He looked at me askance for a moment, and then he grinned. “Good morning,” he said.
I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
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