Sunday Morning Worship Service
I arrived for the 10 am service and sat on the often irreverent, moving pew of the underground train. Shifting from the #1 to the #2 I had decided to make the trek to the Brooklyn Book Festival nearly an hour away. I thought of being in church and how nice and needed it was. Still, I was in the company of others. The difference was that we were united only for the purpose of transit and that none of us were worshiping in the same way or the same thing(s). No one even seemed to notice the Hasidic Jew across the aisle reciting perfectly memorized verse from the Torah.
Flashback-Setting: Cairo, Egypt
A woman in a full burka is sitting across from me in one of the oldest parts of the city. Her gloved hand fervently flips pages of her Koran. She is also muttering but more quickly, more, yes, militantly. She caught me staring for a moment and my senses translated her returned gaze to a glare. I looked either down or away. It's my short sleeved shirt, I thought. She probably thinks I'm a whore.
Back to New York City. I looked at my bare, still, unwed, hands, if idle hands were indeed the devils playground, then I was definitely sinning.
I looked at the old man two seats down. He was slumped over and his large lower lip swallowed the upper. His clothes were faded but not tattered, and his hair straight, a bit overgrown, and half combed. I imagined him alone in his living room the way I imagined my grandfather reading his morning paper in his sitting room each morning. Blue robe revealing the incision across his cancer survivor breast, coffee thermos on the small hexagonal topped table beside him, and light from the two large windows peaking in or soaking the same room that held the artificial tree at Christmas. The amount of light he let in would depend on his mood but he would always be reading the
Independence Daily Reporter or devoutly marking letters on never ending, interlocked words of crossword puzzles. Always with graphite, never ink, and always in the same capital letters. My grandmother's chair would be empty and he would never sit in her seat.
Did this man have this room too? Or was this train that space for him? I wondered about the old in New York City. Where do the spirits of their loved ones sit?
The cadence of the clicking tracks were lulling me to sleep. Stop after stop....after..stop.
The man next to me was also lulled. Hispanic and wearing a U.S. Army hat, he unconsciously slouched a bit into me and his head kept attempting to fall on my own slouched shoulder. I wondered if he'd been in Iraq and what visions were happening in his head...The landscape of war? For those brief moments I didn't mind being the shoulder he could lean on.
stop after stop..
"Life changes fast" wrote Joan Didion in her memoir,
"Life changes fast
Life changes in the instant
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
the question of self-pity."
That night I asked her to sign a copy of it, "The Year of Magical Thinking." So frail. So brilliant. All I could say was, "Thank you. Thank you, it was wonderful." I suppose I would have at least said beautiful if I could revise that one sentence, but that instant, extraordinary as it was, was gone and I was moving again.
Back on the train I felt overcome. Giddy, I told a friend that it was like the night before Christmas and this is still true. The pew on my return ticket was more crowded, and though I had made fun of a couple reading as excitedly as if they were putting on fanny packs and getting cameras ready for Disneyland, I now did the same. A duo came on the train and sang an old barber shop style tune...praising the city and the country, they caught my mickey mouse ears at the right time and I tithed a tiny dollar into one of their goofy hats.
"Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
stop. stop.137th. Yes, this is my stop.
Go
d
Bless!
Amen!
