Face Like a Fist

I encountered someone the other day whose facial expression was one of utter and abject defeat. I was struck by it, not so much that I felt compelled to stop and her ask why she looked the way she did, but with the relaization that had I done any stopping and asking, she still wouldn't have told me. 

We see (and yet don't see) people like this everyday and I'm not sure in the all the years I've been back in the Land of the Round Doorknobs that I'm not seeing more of them now than I did when the wheels went down at JFK on Columbus Day all those years ago. Now the hardness of this world slowly grinds your dreams away and as the day dawns we realize there are two things we will do all alone, be born and die. 

We are social beings who form acquaintanceships, friendships, alliances with others of our kind sometimes so the days don't seem so long or the nights so lonely. I can still remember the total joy of holding my new-born son practically directly over my head with both hands in the delivery room. He was, moments into his life, my deal with God though my perception and belief in the latter (or should I capitalize Latter?) has shifted in the course of the last three and a half decades. 

My faith in my son, and later, at her birth, in my daughter, is unwavering, complete and all-encompassing. As I told them at various (and countless) times as they were growing up, things they do I may (and do) find hateful or hurtful, but that will never change how I feel about them, ever. 

The look in this woman's eyes haunts me as it was beyond weariness and wariness. It was cold and abiding hatred-somewhere, somehow the things we could and should do for one another, even as casual strangers, did not happen for her. The rest of us have been weighed and found wanting and I wondered, for the amount of time it took me to pass her by and watch her eyes take my full measure and then dismiss me, how we two could share the planet, and in our case, the same city of residence. 

We struggle to survive in our lonely life rafts oblivious to the vastness of the great ocean we actually share, striving to make a mark, a sound or a difference as the pageant and parade threaten to pass us by while we work to right the ship of our lives. We end up with Nilsson's anthem, though never a hit, and discover it's so easy to sing along with even when we don't know the words. 
-bill kenny