Write for God

At the Abbey of Gethsemani, photo by Br. Paul at monks.org

“God is alone — but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion.”

Henry David Thoreau, one of my favorite authors, knew much about solitude. His two years at Walden Pond were but part of a life spent marching to his own drummer.

I have been thinking of Thoreau’s writings on solitude because I’m in a rare position today. It’s a work day, but not a workday.

Instead of sitting in my noisy office downtown, I’m at a satellite location where the center manager has found me an empty room with a phone, a computer, a door and privacy. Other than being hospitable by greeting those who work here,  I’ve spent most of the day by myself doing reports. 

I feel a bit like Thomas Merton in his hermitage with a day ahead of me and a mind free to wander. Thoreau equated solitude with God and the Devil with legions, and Merton was happiest when he wrote on the rough-hewn desk in his little block house in the Kentucky knobs.

The day I visited Merton’s hermitage, I sat at his desk and imagined the silence that must have enveloped him in the woods a mile from the Abbey of Gethsemani.  Merton’s brother-in-spirit, Thoreau, said he often had the most company when nobody called.  Silence is the music of the soul.

The ability to enter the silence and to rest in God there comes easier to some than others, but it can learned. Throwing off distractions such as chatter, TV commercials, mindless music and traffic can open the soul to deeper conversations with the eternal.  What some call “loneliness”  others call holy solitude.

I have friends who would have a hard time working alone for a day, much less a week or a month. They need constant connections to others at all times. Silence scares them.  I love them the way they are, but I also need “aloneness” sometimes.

Once in a while,  I get the chance to be by myself thinking, writing and imagining kingdoms in the bare walls of a borrowed office. I’m appreciating the gift of having only God for company today.

Stephen Covey's time management quadrants

Each time I thought about posting on this blog, something always came up that seemed more pressing. When I worked in crisis PR, we would call those tasks “putting out fires.”  Sometimes days were infernos that required picking which fire was the worst emergency, an oxymoron but also a reflection of our busy schedules.

In Covey training talk, I had a lot of Quadrant I tasks and nary a Quadrant IV on my to-do lists. (For those not familiar with Stephen Covey’s time management system, tasks are divided into four slots, with I listing “urgent, important” assignments that are “do it now or else.” Those in IV are “not urgent, not important.” Good luck finding those in the workplace these days.)

I’ve been putting out many fires since the last time I posted here, but I was shocked to see that the previous entry was in February 2010. Since we’re now in the early days of September, it’s been just a bit more than half a year of my efforts to post and moving on to something else instead.

Times flies when you’re having fun, but is also flies when you are juggling too many responsibilities at once:  The past six months have all been Quadrant I days that weren’t much fun. I gave in to my own despair and laziness at times, and that didn’t help me, either.

I’ve managed to read plenty of books and see a few films on DVD for enjoyment. Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy–the Swedish books whose titles begin with The Girl Who–and some excellent nonfiction books have made their way to my book bag.  I read some James Ellroy, Dennis Lehane and a few other mysteries that weren’t quite as good.

It’s been a hectic few months because my workday includes a long commute and extra hours in the office. My husband calculated that I’m away from home two-and-a-half additional hours a day now, which doesn’t leave much time for writing or quiet reflection.

Forget about reflection while commuting:  This morning, I witnessed an SUV cracking into another when the first driver was in a big rush to pass a slower truck. It didn’t look like anyone was hurt, but it was typical of the behavior I see on the roads in the Tampa Bay area each workday.

Driving 24 linear miles takes me just over 45 minutes because I sit in gridlock for about half that distance.  Others more easily annoyed do stupid things like pass trucks and hit other vehicles  because they can’t wait. Other than stewing or listening to music, there’s not much I can do when every other car seems to have an aggressive, impatient driver behind the wheel.

Arriving home to change, eat and use the rest of the night to write is not always doable. I’ve been trying to fit in some writing on a bigger project, but it’s also been a slog. Reliable public transportation would be most welcome, but Tampa Bay is a sea of one-person vehicles on roads that are strained and over badly designed highways.

It’s time that I made my writing and my family the real Quadrant I tasks. Consider this a valediction to putting off what really matters.

Sea World trainer Dawn Brancheau and Tilikum, the orca that killed her.

A six-ton killer whale at Orlando’s Sea World theme park killed a trainer this week. Minutes earlier, trainer Dawn Brancheau and Tilikum had been putting on a show for the tourists who keep Sea World’s doors open.

In the 31 years I’ve lived in the Tampa Bay area, I’ve never visited Sea World. The thought of watching sea animals jumping through hoops for someone’s amusement makes me ill. Avoiding the dolphin and bird shows at Busch Gardens means more time riding rollercoasters, my real passion. (No animals are harmed when you soar upside down on the awesome Montu coaster.)

I’m not an animal-rights activist per se, but animals are not our toys. They share our planet and deserve to live in their natural surroundings as God made them to do.

Circuses, zoos and exotic animals as house pets are nature inverted for man’s pleasure.

The orca dragged the trainer by the hair and drowned her, just as it had killed two other humans during what could only have been a miserable life. A killer whale is a large animal made to live on the open seas, not to spend its existence cooped up in a small tank.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) condems shows like Sea World’s and it’s easy to dismiss the group because of the stunts they pull to get their message across. In this case, they’re right.

Now Sea World is facing a public relations disaster and a young woman who loved animals is dead–all because an animal acted like an animal instead of like a human. An aerial shot of Tilikum’s tank illustrates just how small a space this 12,000 lb. animal had as living quarters.

If we kept a human in a cell of the same proportions and then pulled him or her out to tap dance several times a day, we couldn’t expect that human not to lose a semblance of humanity. In Tilikum’s case, an animal acted like an animal and a family has lost its daughter.

In recent weeks, a chimp at a primate sanctuary near our home attacked a young woman who was cleaning cages. Shawn, a chimp born in captivity, mauled and bit the volunteer because the animal reasoned that the human was invading her turf. Once again, an animal acted like an animal and someone got hurt.

Our son had been volunteering at the same primate sanctuary until recently because he finds chimps interesting. He wants one as a pet, he told us. (Fat chance of that in my house, but there’ll come a time when our son will move out. I shudder to think of what a chimp and my son in the same house would mean.)

My husband and I have told our son that chimps aren’t pets. These intelligent, active animals weren’t meant to perform for us, to wear children’s clothing or to be kept in cages.  Chimps and killer whales were created to live in their natural surroundings as animals and not to become our toys.

Some of the primates where our son volunteered ended up at the sanctuary because they became someone’s unwanted pet. Some had their teeth pulled or were castrated to make them more docile household pets. If that isn’t a sin against nature itself, I don’t know what is.

Orcas and chimps were meant to be undomesticated. They enrich our planet and we can learn from them without paying admission to have them amuse us in cages.

Free Willy? Free Tilikum and Shawn and all creatures, great and small, as in Cecil Frances Alexander’s poem, All Things Bright:

All things bright and beautiful,

All creatures, great and small

All things wise and wonderful,

The Lord God made them all.

 

Each little flower that opens,

Each little bird that sings

He made their glowing colours,

He made their tiny wings;

 

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

God made them, high or lowly,

And ordered their estate.

 

The purple-headed mountain,

The river running by,

The sunset and the morning,

That brightens up the sky;

 

The cold wind in the winter,

The pleasant summer sun,

The ripe fruits in the garden

He made them every one.

 

The tall trees in the greenwood,

The meadows where we play,

The rushes by the water

We gather every day,

 

He gave us eyes to see them,

And lips that we might tell

How great is God Almighty,

Who has made all things well.

The latest iPod Shuffle is less than two inches long.

Back when I was running a lot–in what seems like a galaxy, far, far away–I used to strap on a Walkman cassette player to log my miles.  Back then, my cassette player was the latest technology; now my kids laugh at the idea of someone actually listening to cassettes.

As time went on, I discovered mp3 players that fit on an adjustable armband, an advance that did away with the ratty neoprene belt that had a big pocket for the cassette player.

Flash forward another decade and, all of a sudden, I’m taking walks to build my endurance with a music player the size of a kid’s barrette clipped to my shirt. My iPod Shuffle is less than two inches in length and takes up less room than a pack of gum in my hand. Will wonders never cease?

The cassette player would build in a break in my runs at the halfway point when I ran out of tape on one side and had to stop to turn over the cassette. The mp3 was an improvement, but it was either too loose as I began to perspire or too tight when I set off on my run.

The Shuffle is perfect–a little universe of music that I can hold in the palm of my hand like the world in a grain of sand that William Blake could see. I could run for a week without stopping and not exhaust the music in this marvelous stick. The controls are built into the earbuds, so there’s no fussing with anything on your waist or arm. In sonorous accents, male and female voices intone the title of each song and its artist with the press of a button.

I walked on a gorgeous Florida noon hour listening to Elvis Costello, Cuban folksingers Celina y Reutilio, The Doors, the late Joe Strummer, Van Morrison and a banquet of other artists. My hands were free and my waist was unencumbered. The breeze, the sun and music were all that mattered.

The Shuffle was my little bargain with myself. I told myself I would get it if I promised to start walking and then jogging again. I waited for a sale and got one as cheaply as I could by hoarding a gift certificate I’d received.

I gave myself a Shuffle because I would transform myself into the active me, the one that once ran a marathon and had more 5K and 10K t-shirts than I could store. The me that lifted weights and did elliptical workouts. The me that could shop in the junior racks and always find something to wear in my closet. The me that was me.

Life changes added pounds and kept me home. Unemployment, a husband and daughter with brain injuries and financial difficulties kept me in stasis. It’s no accident that Queen’s I Want to Break Free is on my Shuffle now.

I can visualize the miles I want to log again, the regular breaths and footsteps I remember as the rhythm of the days when I was fit. I used to know where to find water and restrooms anywhere in town.

There was a time when I was “the girl running on County Road 1″ to people I would meet later. To a little old man in the gym, I was the young lady who was stronger than I looked. There were the guys in Brooklyn who told me to say hello to their grandmothers in Florida when I ran there in my hometown track club singlet.  To my former boss, I was a “mean runner” who looked all business when he spotted me on the road.

I’m older and much wiser now, I hope, and being mean or lifting too many weights isn’t what I want these days. I would like to be more fit and healthier so that I can enjoy my children and grandchildren as I age. I’d like to take my toddler grandkids to the park and chase them if they decide to take a powder toward the swings or the street. I want not to be among the 62 percent of Americans who are overweight or obese because we live in the richest nation on earth.

I want to be active so that I can catch the next technological marvel that adds music to a walk or a jog. If the Shuffle is that small and portable now, I can’t wait to see what I’ll be walking with when I’m 80–if I’m blessed with the grace to be kicking around at that age.

My great-grandmother and great-aunts lived into their late 80s and even their 90s, or long enough to see a few generations ahead. Thank God for that Canary Islands hardiness they had and that I might have inherited, too.

As the miles are strengthening my legs and the tunes are mellowing my mood, I’m looking forward to a season when my own renewal will match our church’s Easter rebirth–one step and one song at a time.

Paul Newman in "Hud"

My oldest grandson is three, but he’s already familiar with books. Thanks to his Mom, who graduates with an education degree in a few months, JJ already knows about storytelling.

When he received a book as a gift recently, he opened it and said, “One upon a time” when he located the first page.  It’s funny that he can’t read or even get the classic story opener right, but he knows that books are where stories live.

In January, I attended Writers in Paradise, a top-notch writing conference in St. Petersburg, FL. Everyone there talked about stories–either those they were writing or those they enjoyed.  Most of the writers who were registered seemed to be working on mysteries, the ultimate genre for rewarding setups and endings. The lecturers were published writers who had written in many genres, not just mysteries. 

Dennis Lehane, a well known author who was one of the organizers of the conference, called us “aliens.”  (He meant that in a good way, of course.) All of us who assembled to improve our writing live in a world that doesn’t really care about well crafted sentences, poems and language the way we still do. Lehane told us to enjoy the week when we would have the privilege to hang around others who are like us in a world that is unlike us.

The tiny bursts of language in text messages are indicative of how writing and films have changed. Short-attention spans rule the day. My husband and I were watching one of the best films of the past 50 years, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, when our text-happy 14-year-old daughter said something odd. The film wasn’t interesting she said, because “it was just people talking.”

(She missed the spectacular napalm burn, the enemy fire on the PT boat and the soaring Ride of the Valkyries helicopter attack, but caught the scenes between Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen in a dark room in ruins.)

Beautifully crafted words have become “just talking” as thoughts are compressed into texts and every camera movement in films and TV becomes a jumble of quick cuts.  Staying with a monologue, lingering on a carefully composed shot and the great faces that Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond mourns for are missing in most films these days. 

(Norma’s character makes the point that the silent era didn’t need dialogue, but Sunset Boulevard’s dialogue is among the most memorable in films.)

In the past few days, I watched a Paul Newman film I had never seen. Martin Ritt’s Hud is a gorgeous character study of a selfish cowboy, his adoring nephew and the old rancher who heads their family.  There are marvelous scenes between Newman and Patricia Neal, the housekeeper who is at the center of the men’s triangle of pain.  The novel it was based on is by Larry McMurtry, a master at telling tales of the American West.

Hud’s dialogue contains big issues and small actions. The camera has the confidence to rest on the type of faces Norma Desmond said actors used to have. The director has enough confidence in the script and his actors to let them be.

Hud and Apocalypse Now are stories–well told stories that resonate and delight. People talk in stories like these. The  “one upon a time” that my grandson is now discovering is how we comprehend our world and ourselves. Story guru Robert McKee summed it up best:

“It is no accident, if you go back and survey history, that in those periods of enlightenment when people were more civilized than in other periods, the quality of the storytelling was very high. Is there a relationship between empty, banal, false, happy-ending storytelling and crass, uncivil behavior? Absolutely.”

What a three-year-old’s need for a story and the lack of story in so many of the works produced today mean for the future of writing is beyond the imagination. Those of us who still care about words are indeed the aliens that Lehane was referring to.

If civilization is related to storytelling, the sad lack of stories in most mainstream works is a bad omen.

Laura Taft, a victim of domestic violence (From the St. Petersburg Times)

An infant and his mother are dead. The suspect is the baby’s father and a six-year-old has been left behind to sort it all out.  Someone was remiss in telling a judge that the man was the suspect in the five-week-old infant’s death and that the baby’s mother had an injunction to protect herself from her partner’s abuse.

Laura Taft, a young Tampa Bay mother, and her baby are dead. The district attorney whose office dropped the ball claims he’s dumbfounded at how temporary freedom was handed to a former convict whom police suspected of one murder before he was let out to allegedly commit a second.

One of my co-workers heads a local task force that seeks to hold batterers responsible for their actions. The group’s Web site has links to shelters, emergency numbers and information on how to file for an injunction to protect yourself from an abuser.

The head of the task force told me how she remembered seeing a brief in our local newspaper about the infant’s death days before the mother was stabbed to death. The item mentioned that the baby was under the care of his father and alarm bells rang in my co-worker’s head. Babies who die while tended to by men always raise red flags, she told me.  I mentioned that our four children had been lovingly cared for by their father since birth.

That would make my husband exceptional, she said. The facts are that men caring for babies, especially if they’re not the biological father, are looked as suspects first when babies die. She had learned that during a career helping victims of domestic violence.

A small mention in the newspaper about a dead infant and the father caring for him piqued her interest. Her  instincts were on target when the police report later named the father as the suspect in the infant’s death. Broken bones in babies who can’t roll over yet are not the norm. The father violated the injunction after the baby’s death, the mother called the police and the father was arrested.

In court, a prosecutor didn’t mention the father’s previous time in jail, the injunction or his being a suspect in his child’s death. The batterer was released on a piddly bail of $1,000. As my co-worker said, $100 paid to a bail bondsman will cover a bail of $1,000.

“What bothered me was that the woman had done everything right,” she said. “She did all the things we tell women to do to protect themselves and she still had to die.”

We could say that the prosecutor failed or that the law failed. That would be easy, but it wouldn’t tell the whole story.

In the past 18 months, I spent some time in the same court where the batterer appeared. My former boss and I were there to monitor the court’s actions against a former employee who had embezzled a large sum of money from our institute.

We witnessed the huge caseload that the prosecutor had each day we sat in court. The files were wheeled in on metal carts like the ones we push in the supermarket. Files upon files and forms upon forms told the story of each person who came before the judge.

Deals were struck by overworked public defenders and overworked prosecutors on the fly. Cases were decided within minutes and then everyone moved to the next sheaf on the metal cart.

“So this is justice in America,” I thought as I sat in court. It all seemed a bazaar transaction with a seller and buyer haggling over the price of an eggplant. The employee who stole about $22,000 from our small not-for-profit had her punishment bargained to a year and a day in jail.

She served about nine months of her sentence handed down for stealing donations that had been sent in a dollar at a time by senior citizens who believed in our mission. In the court where she appeared three times, her crime was considered small potatoes.

I’m sure that the man who was in court for violating an injunction was small potatoes, too.

To prosecutors and public defenders who carry towering caseloads, a lapse in judgement wouldn’t be unheard of but, in this case, that mistake had fatal results.  Caseloads continue to grow and budget cuts are forcing courts to do more with less. A woman and her baby are dead and the six-year-old sibling is sorting it out.

Justice, it seems, isn’t fair to anyone in America, whether you’re the victim, the community or a little boy without a mother, father or baby brother.

Ash Wednesday begins our Lenten season.

“Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” (The Sh’ma Yisroel, a sacred prayer and the traditional last words of Jews)

The Lenten season began during Mardi Gras, the eve of Ash Wednesday, when Florida executed Martin Grossman for a murder he committed 25 years ago when he was 19 years old.

The Vatican; Florida’s Bishops;  a host of rabbis that included Grossman’s spiritual advisor; Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and more than 50,000 people who signed a petition opposed the execution.

Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, likes the moniker “Chain Gang Charlie” because it polishes his tough-on-crime veneer.  I prefer to call him “Show Pony Charlie” because every move he makes is calculated to help him prance and preen on the political stage. He’s facing a tough race for a Senate seat now and executing Grossman was a way to harden his tough-guy image in the polls.

Grossman’s last words before the state’s chemical cocktail murdered him were the Sh’ma Yisroel, which is found in Deutoronomy 6:4. Before that, he apologized to the family of Peggy Park, the woman he had murdered. The family had been waiting to see Grossman die for a quarter of a century and, when the execution was over, one was quoted as saying that his death had been “easy.”

Witnesses to executions are often let down by the process, which seems tame in comparison to what their loved ones suffered. Seeing the murderer suffer somehow justifies the use of the death penalty to some, not the actual judicial procedure of depriving the murderer of life. Suffering must come with what they call justice.

Mark Heath, M.D. is one of the medical professionals who has spoken most eloquently about the three-drug poison the state uses to murder on our behalf. Heath has termed the three drugs a “chemical tomb” that masks the suffering of the victim of the death penalty. The first drug sedates the person, the second causes paralysis that prevents muscles and organs from functioning and the third stops the heart.  It is the second drug, pancurium bromide, that fools witnesses into thinking executions are an easy process. Shelters don’t use the drug to kill strays because its use is considered inhumane.

The state uses the first and second drugs to spare witnesses the sight of a human being writhing and screaming in agony, although botched executions have occurred in Florida as a result of death by the electric chair and death by lethal execution.

In Martin Grossman’s case, the victim’s family weren’t privy to what was going on inside his body as drugs killed him. It’s ironic that drugs had played a role in Grossman’s murder of Peggy Park. As a teen in trouble with the law over drugs, Grossman killed Park, a wildlife ranger, when she found him in an isolated area and tried to arrest him. Grossman killed her to avoid going back to prison.  

And so Lent began in Florida with a state murder whose warrant was signed by a politically motivated governor angling to win a Senate seat. The family that had waited for what they called justice found that his judicial murder didn’t entail suffering in their eyes. Words of mercy and forgiveness from rabbis and the Pope were dismissed, as were the voices of those who opposed the execution.  This shameful episode should focus our prayers even more on ending the use of the death penalty in America.

As our season of penance and reflection begins today, my prayer for an end to the death penalty will continue to rise like incense to Heaven.

The Lord is our God, the Lord is One.

Mavis Staples’ tribute to the great Mahalia Jackson

I know a man, rich as a king/Still he just won’t give his neighbor a thing.

In her Mahalia Jackson tribute album, the always amazing Mavis Staples covers some familiar gospel songs.  If you want to hear a marvelous voice interpreting gospel songs that send shivers up your spine and need only Lucky Peterson’s piano or organ as accompaniment, you can’t do better than this classic.

One of the selections is A Rusty Old Halo, the spare spiritual that imagines what the afterlife holds for a rich man like Dives:  “a rusty old halo, a skinny white cloud, second-hand wings full of patches, a robe that’s so wooly it scratches.”

We collect treasure in Heaven when we share what we have during our lives. Hoarding here doesn’t build any real estate up there; it won’t even buy you a new set of wings, as the song says.

For every greedy opportunist who infuriates me, I find a beautiful soul who is trusting, loving and caring. My boss told me today that she will feel fulfilled if she can see universal health care in our nation before she retires. She’s been waiting since her career in American public-health medicine began 24 years ago. As a transplant from Europe, she can’t understand why everyone in the United States isn’t able to see a doctor.  I think this community-minded doctor will find a shiny halo at the end of her life.

There are people who volunteer at my church’s St. Vincent de Paul Society and quiet heroes who serve the needy all over town. My husband is part of a network of Christians and non-Christians who devote their time and energies to protesting war, militarization and injustice.  Some serve time in jail for their beliefs and others give their all online to serve the Lord. They’ll all find fat, happy clouds in Paradise.

Talented doctors, nurses, therapists and techs worked tirelessly to save our daughter’s life after a 2008 car accident that left her comatose for five weeks and recovering in therapy for another five. With skill and love, they brought her back to us. Each day before and after our experience at two hospitals, they have continued to heal other children so they can return to their families. Fluffy, new wings await all of these people.

Countless women for untold generations have cared for parents and children–unnoticed and uncelebrated. My grandmother served everyone first and still saved food for neighbors less fortunate. My great-grandmother raised 13 children just about on her own and taught all of her kids to work.  My mother has cared for the old people in the family, helped nurture my four children and still volunteers to teach children in a shelter for abused women. They are unknown in a world that values celebrity and glitz above goodness and modesty. The softest, most comfortable robes await these lovely ladies in the next world.

It’s not difficult to imagine what you can do now to store up your treasures in Heaven. Take a tip from A Rusty Old Halo: 

While you’re on Earth, shine like the sun

Right in the corner wherever you are

Doing the best that you can do

That way you’ll show them

That Heaven’s in you.

Tom Waits, circa 1974

“Hot and sunny” usually describes Florida but “cold and wet” have been the weather report since 2010 arrived. The black beret I save for the chilliest days has had a workout lately, as have the gloves and scarves we bury in the hallway closet.

Call it La Niña or call it “God’s in control of the weather,” but it’s been very un-Florida in Florida for weeks. This morning, my husband emailed me an appreciation of sunshine coming through our bedroom window after I’d left for work. On most Florida days, the complaint du jour is to curse the relentless sun and to scurry into the air-conditioned wombs of our workplaces and homes.

My 24-mile commute to work was sunny and cool, which lifted my spirits to start the work week. The Elvis Costello compilation that’s been in the CD player for weeks got reprieved and I drove into downtown St. Petersburg accompanied by The Heart of Saturday Night, a Tom Waits album from 1974 that has some real gems. New Coat of Paint, San Diego Serenade and Shiver Me Timbers could make anyone’s commute more enjoyable, although Waits’ jazzy growl isn’t to everyone’s taste.  It suited my mood perfectly this morning. (You have to love a guy whose name sounds like a sentence in a Hemingway novel.)

I thought of the line, “Where the clouds are like headlines on a new front page sky” from Shiver Me Timbers and I was grateful at that instant for the sun through my windshield. Since Florida has been as dark as some Tom Waits songs, finding a bit of pleasure in one of his songs brightened my ride.

On a sunny morning after days of clouds, I arrived at work relaxed and awake. Listen to Shiver Me Timbers here:

Chili dogs taste better in grills where they've been served for decades.

Let me tell you about the last greasy spoon and the last grill guy with a heart in America.

In a time of mega food corporations and generic burgers that taste the same from Timbuktu to Tallahassee, there’s a little place across the street from my office where the menu hasn’t changed in 50 years and the guy behind the counter trusts strangers. Honest–they exist.

Meetings and rain changed my lunch plans today. Instead of going out before noon to a restaurant further away for my Friday lunch out, I had to find the closest eatery as raindrops began falling. I crossed the street to the lunch counter where the menu has a few basic grill items and the decor is not much to look at.

A grilled-cheese sandwich, bowl of chili and soda later, I went to the register with my debit card to pay for my $5 lunch. Since I don’t like carrying cash, I had a total of 37 cents on me apart from my bank card. The grill guy handling the register actually said hello and asked how I was before I began using the debit card to pay for my lunch.

After trying to swipe three times without having the transaction go through, I thought I had no alternative but to find an ATM on foot in the rain or to ask the man behind the counter to hold my driver’s license until I could bring back the cash. The burly, bearded grill cook asked me where I banked. When I told him, he said, “Sometimes we have a problem with those cards.”

Out of solutions, I told him I was willing to keep trying until the transaction went through and that’s when he said something extraordinary:  “Do you work across the street? Just bring back the $5 next time you’re back in.” With that, he wrote my first name on the folded receipt and stashed it behind the register.

He didn’t ask for my ID or my firstborn’s birth certificate, but I insisted on having him write my full name and office number on the slip. He obliged and I left a Mom and Pop restaurant having had lunch without paying. A patron who was heading to my office witnessed the transaction and it must have amazed her, too. We crossed the street together as we chatted. Kindness and trust, it seems, are contagious.

Could I have been a scammer planning to bilk a little eatery out of a grilled cheese and chili? Perhaps. Did it occur to the grill guy that I could  walk out and never return? A possibility. Was he the kind of person who still trusts strangers and who believes people are decent enough to pay their debts? Of course. I felt like a bit player in a Frank Capra movie and Ward Bond was behind the counter.  

The little grill across the street may not have greatest selections on the menu or the most healthful food choices, but I walked out with something better:  an example of the trust that still exists in the most humble places in America. And that nourished me more than the meal.