UNEXPECTED MOMENTS

I was standing in a train station Sunday night, waiting for the midnight train to London. It was freezing, and there were probably 50 of us standing around in the cold.

I looked over and saw a little old man in front of a vending machine, moving slowly, and choosing something. He dropped a coin, and bent over to pick it up--very slowly, with careful and deliberate movements. The skin on his hand looked fragile; almost transparent. And something in my mind clicked over, and it was my dad standing there; a few months before he died, when he was sick but still able to stand.

And my heart broke.

Those moments sneak up on me--when I see someone choosing fruit in the supermarket, and there's something about the motion or the curve of a shoulder--and I see not only my father, but the whole life of the person standing there. The quiet moments of solitude, the toast or the cups of tea, newspapers, the slow and deliberate walks to the store.

Sometimes it's not my father--it's my sister, Leslie, as a little girl, happy and excited about simple little girlish things, nothing but happiness and hope, before she learned that the world was a place that was too difficult for someone with a pure and kind heart inside of a body that never conformed.

There is so much beauty in this world, and I wish that I could be big enough to shield it so that it is never hurt and only knows the world as a place where there are simple little girlish things and toast and cups of tea.

I am so very fortunate.