It's Sunday, and I'm heading to a downtown coffeeshop generally populated by quiet folk getting work done. I, too, need to get some work done. The sun is bright and the wind is brisk, and it's Sunday, so there is free on-street parking, which is a nice variation from the dungeon-ality of the public garage so I emerge from the car directly into light, walk through light, and try to simultaneously absorb the beautiful day and prepare my mind for the darker diligence of the cafe and the lecture I need to write.
An older woman, slight, stands on the sidewalk. Her head is bent, she's wearing all black, and a few wisps of iron grey hair dance outside of the sheer black scarf she's got over her head. She's all alone, and facing the building on my left in some sort of quiet contemplation. Drawing closer, I see it's the cathedral rectory. Is she praying? She appears to be praying. Why is she outside the rectory and not in a church, or inside the rectory talking to a priest or something? I think about how, if this were Bavaria, there'd be a church open for her to reflect in and she wouldn't have to stand out here in the cold. I wonder if she's praying for forgiveness, or if she's praying for the well-being of the local bishop.
The sight of her apparently steeped in some sort of unidentifiable ritual appeals to my sense Romantic fancy, but she's also an anachronistic, geographically-displaced mystery to me here in the pragmatic Midwest, where I've yet to uncover any sort of mystical local lore or myth, apart from an almost-rabid devotion to sports and the fact that People Actually Do Stuff On Easter.
I feel a strong desire to murmur some comment of acknowledgement of benediction as a pass her. Completely innappropriate, as I don't believe in Catholic God, and I'm just assuming that she's even involved in some kind of spiritual act - I mean, she COULD just be looking at the architecture, or studying a certain configuration of light upon the blades of grass in the lawn.
But the moment makes me wish for a world less devoid of ritual and contemplation, a world where it would be possible to expand one's own positive and healing energy towards complete strangers who seemed in need of it... in a way that was sheerly compassionate and humane.
It makes me sad that in becoming part of Middle-Class White America, my ancestors relenquished rituals and other aspects of their specific ethnicities. I wish for peculiarity and a sense of belonging.
I cross the street, and the sun glints on a shard of a green Heiniken bottle. It's like an emerald, like a sign of Shangri-La, like a glimpse of innocent whimsy. I think of the tales of America that circulated amongst potential immigrants in the Old Country- riches abound- all you have to do is stoop and scoop and put them in your pockets. Why is paradise always imagined in terms of precious jewels and wealth? The colored glass in the sun is vibrant, glorious, an intense speck of color against the detrius in the sidewalk crack. I don't stoop to pick it up, but somehow it's the perfect compliment to the pathos and mystery of the old praying woman. Not opposite, not simile or metaphor for, not synonomous symbol, just... compliment.
