Megabus, Thanksgiving time, cozy as a cocoon. I slept in back, next to Vicky, much of the way to the city. I opened my eyes once in awhile -- to gaze at the wild snow-cloudy skies with rainbows in them and later note the video-game quality of road-travel after dark -- then closed them again. I like the lights I see inside. It seemed wrong to be sleeping, but so right. I woke up to eat my peanut butter & African pepper jelly sandwich while Vicky now was sleeping. I hoped she was really sleeping. I ate carefully, quietly. I didnt know Vicky by name yet but I knew she would be a person who would not eat until she had graciously offered the stranger next to her something first -- and here I was eating my whole sandwich. Its not that I would have minded sharing some of it away, really. Its just that I hadnt planned on it, and my sandwich was not neatly wrapped, and all in all, it was a little idiosyncratic as sandwiches go. I didnt feel up to explaining it to anybody. The whole business of all of that is so complicated anyway, I thought -- to one from my world, that is. The unreal video-game quality of heavy traffic going terrifyingly fast navigating by light blips alone, intensified. I didnt know there were so many hills between Syracuse and New York City. I should know this, Ive driven the route so many times. But it all looks different from the back center seat of the upper level of a double-decker bus filled with college kids, at night, in holiday season. It does. It looked like a roller coaster of red and white light floating up and down unbelievably steep hills of nothingness. Thats what the NYS Thruway looked like last night, and thats what it felt like too. Im telling you. Ribbons of red and white light is all you could actually see of all that metallic tonnage hurtling down roads with people inside, people you may or may not ever meet in person streaming toward you in buses and trucks and cars, and people ahead of you on the road traveling to the same destination you are -- who will be gone by the time you get there too. These were my thoughts between sleeping and eating my sadistically hot jelly and peanut butter sandwich all myself. There came from my side a quiet voice, a quiet hand holding an apple in the light-striped dark. The scene materialized as I had foreseen it might. I was being offered half of Vickys only apple. I finally learned at some point in my life -- from spending enough time with people from other countries, I believe -- to behave graciously when a kindness was offered me by someone I didnt know. Instead of behaving like a person who would not under any circumstances accept any portion of anyones only apple -- this passed for politeness in my mind at one time -- I learned to behave like someone who might very well accept it if it were offered to me, and enjoy it too. I learned to honor the offer, that is. I might still keep my own sandwich all to myself, and thats not civilized -- but at least I can pay honest homage to a kind offer from a stranger now, and that is. What I used to think was polite was rude. I had not only been rejecting the things offered to me, I had been rejecting the fact they had been offered too. This I thought was polite: under no circumstances would I ever take a bite of your apple, I am too kind. But to properly reject an offer of kindness, one must first let the offer in. This is the part I was lucky enough to pick up from living and working around people from other times and places -- people who had grown up with enough -- but little enough that none of what they did have had been forgotten, not one moment, not one bite. And not forgetting the things they had, theyd continued to be fed by them long after those of us whove had too much would have forgotten. Offering and accepting among such people is the most meaningful, and most civilized, of things. So, to be polite, or to be civilized, one allows oneself to be fed by the offer of the apple, so to speak, before declining the apple. One even considers accepting the apple, and perhaps does accept it. There is a rhythm to this sort of interchange that is different than the rhythms I had seen. That is how I first noticed and got onto it. And it opened my eyes to so many things: what it means to be truly civilized foremost among them... I know that much now, and I am grateful for the knowledge. On that score, at least, I have joined the ranks of the worlds civilized people. If I had not fully acknowledged the fact of Vicky offering half her apple to me before I declined it, she -- who had been traveling twelve hours already -- would have put her apple away for another five hours instead of enjoying it, slice by thinnest slice, in peace, as we traveled side by side through the crowded night. The younger college-age people within earshot around us, many of them from Vickys side of the world, withdrew themselves further into their handhelds shining brightly in the darkness of the traveling bus, while our conversation moved away from its beginnings to other things. They acted as if they were not listening, but I bet they were, to a quiet voice remembering what it had been like to be herself, in the world she had lived in, when she had been young like them. There werent as many tears --- fish from the river, chickens strangled before dinner, brothers and sisters sleeping eight each in two rooms -- as laughter in her remembrances. Descriptions she would try to give which ended in laughter, how do you explain to anyone now, here, a world so far away in time and space? Her own children, grown-up here, dont like to hear the stories and dont like to go back there to visit -- where everyone, to them, seems so poor. They dont like to travel with their mother, sometimes, either, who offers her food to everyone around her, it seems so poor. But you wonder, sometimes, what poor is. There can be starvation in plenty, too. But plenty is awfully hard to argue with.. Plenty is what we want, and I guess we still believe that what we want is the same as what we need.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 23:16:25 +0000
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