BENEATH THE SKYLINE

SAVING MOMENTS

Deborah Good

Sit down and watch the world. Yes, there. See that empty patch of grass? Fold your legs beneath you, lean your weight back on your palms, and pay attention.

A woman named Lois writes a letter from prison, reminding me to "stop and smell the roses." We’ve heard the advice countless times before, but it means something more when coming from behind bars. From where she sits, my day of mundane tasks is a wealth of color and story and noise. For today, for Lois, I will do my best to escape my own thought life and fleshly walls, and really see the world around me in all its beauty, grief, and interconnectedness. I will try to pay attention to the little things.

Every day, I pass hundreds of people and forget that behind every face is a life story. I walk right by tiny wonders—a child talking to a lollipop, a ladybug on a fence post, a textured cloud, a funny-looking dog.

I read the paper, jump on the subway, buy a pair of jeans, visit a prison, and neglect to see the troubling fibers that connect them: The woman arrested on the news will spend years of her life in prison, working for a pittance, making the jeans I might buy someday (note: the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution outlaws slavery "except as punishment for crime"). An Iraqi man in Fallujah dies wearing those same jeans, while the money spent on missiles and jails is not subsidizing the public transportation system I take to work. And I will pay more for my transpass next month.

"Will you wake?" asks Reverend Parris in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. "Will you open your eyes?"

I like waiting at the Nineteenth Street trolley stop. It’s a small, quiet station, down one flight of stairs from the busy city overhead. There’s not much to look at but the four sets of tracks and the dark, steel beams that stand between them. The tracks closest to me are for trolleys. Just beyond those lie tracks for the subway trains, which don’t stop here; they only pass through. I sit on a bench and half-heartedly open a magazine.

Then, it comes. I hear the subtle roar building to my left, growing louder and louder as it nears, until I almost cover my ears and cower against the wall. The train roars past, metal wheels against metal tracks, all the wind and noise echoing through the long tunnels and against beams and walls. It is a frightening and awesome experience. My hair tussles in the artificial wind. Trash jumps around on the tracks. For those few brief moments, I feel like I’m 12, riding my first roller coaster. Then it is gone.

My freshman year of college, I took the Myers-Briggs personality test. Four letters—INFP—and the computer printed eight pages about me (Introvert-Intuitive-Feeling-Perceiving). I still remember one section of the printout because it resonates so well with me. INFPs, it said, vacillate between two primary desires. Some days, we are monks. We dig up our insides like gardens. We sit by ourselves on the porch and write. We leave parties early to be alone. Other days, we are explorers. We create new projects, foster new ideas. We busy ourselves with hard work. We want to change the world.

I am monk and explorer. At times I have tried to chart this: I mark my calendar with Ms and Es and look for patterns. E. B. White writes, "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."

But both sides of my personality have a downfall. They are both self-absorbed. Whether I’m busy with self-reflection or with work, I can easily forget to look around me.

The news this morning was enough to make me set all reading aside and spend my train ride in prayer. I still believe—and hope with my whole being—that the arc of the universe really does bend toward justice, as Martin Luther King observed in 1967; that all war and terror, all lynchings, beatings, and sexual abuse, all starvation, illness, and injustice, are really aberrations from the way of eternity.

But days like this make me doubtful. After a week of reports about tortured Iraqi prisoners, the media turns our heads, hoping to re-enrage us with pictures of Al-Qaida’s beheading of a man from West Chester, as though this gruesome tragedy will somehow justify our violent occupation. How long will we take an eye for an eye?

Meanwhile, a high school senior hangs himself in a school auditorium, the twenty-fourth Philadelphia public school student to die this year. And a woman I first met in a local prison is "back on the street" less than one month after her release. Because society has given her so few options, prostitution seems the best way up. I have heard that six months in a cell are enough to cause brain damage.

I find myself hungrier now than ever for those small moments of wonder that I would otherwise fail to notice. Hopeful moments don’t erase the terror of the world, but they do creep into it, like tree roots into a boulder, creating tiny, life-filled cracks.

My coworker Will discovers the small packet of "Dairy Fresh" he pulls from our refrigerator is, in fact, non-dairy creamer. We smile. The stress in the office eases one notch.

My cousin gets a bonus at work and decides to spend part of it on me: I get tulips delivered to my door after days of rainy weather.

A friend of mine tells me a story: A wonderful man we knew died unexpectedly Tuesday night in a hospital bed. On Wednesday morning, Josh went to work—standing on South Street, inviting passersby to give money to support his organization.

A young woman approached him. "How are you today?" he asked her.

"To be honest, I’m kind of sad."

"I’m kind of sad too," he replied.

"Really? Why are you sad?"

"I’m sad because a friend of mine died last night." He looked at her. "Why are you sad?"

"I’m sad because my boyfriend doesn’t love me anymore."

And right there on South Street, two complete strangers decided to give each other a hug. They stood in the middle of the sidewalk, holding each other, for a good minute. Later, she returned with a flower ("I thought you could use this") and walked on. He never even asked her name.

I wonder if all the world could be like this: Engaged enough to notice and share our grief, selfless enough to comfort each other. I need these stories, lest I forget that good and love still exist in the world.

I want to live deeply. I want to embrace my days rather than watch them march by unnoticed. In her poem "When Death Comes," Mary Oliver writes, "When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."

Like Oliver, at the end of the day, "I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world."

—Deborah Good, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, works for The Other Side magazine (www.theotherside.org) and is discovering glass bottles and fence posts as she digs up her backyard to plant grass. She can be reached at deborah@theotherside.org.