They say how people treat you is their karma; how you react to it is your karma. Today may not have been a good karma day for me. So be it. I have ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows more to go. On the upside, my little one made me a bouquet of paper flowers. I reacted pretty well to that.
My car trunk is brimming with things I don’t need.
My baby is no longer a baby.
My house is cluttered.
My neck is bare on this blustery morning.
I’m on my way to purge the trappings of a babyhood gone by.
Along the way I meet a woman with a beautiful scarf.
It is so beautiful I stop to tell her how much I like it.
So she unwinds it from around her neck, unfurling its swirled colorfulness. It’s like a great butterfly flapping about in this autumn landscape.
Keep it, she says.
Oh, no, I couldn’t, I reply.
You must have it, she insists, it complements your dress.
We dance this way a few times before I lift it from her open hands.
An unexpected outcome.
Awkwardly I cradle its cottony softness. I listen as this woman tells me the story of the scarf.
She created it and many others. She sells them. She has so many scarves, giving one away is nothing.
What’s your craft, she asks, because these days it seems everyone has some special gift.
I’m not sure yet, I admit.
We part with a handshake and a promise that I will visit her store. As I walk to my car I slip the wings of turquoise, indigo and emerald over my shoulders. The colors caress my neck and cheeks as the wind tugs the scarf’s fringed ends.
On the way to the community outreach center in a scrappy part of Detroit, I steal glances of it in the mirror while stopped at red lights.
As I heft the stroller, car seat, safety gates, and bags of odds and ends onto the curb, the wind slaps my hair and face. I pull the scarf tighter around my neck, up to my chin.
It’s not that I needed another scarf. I have a closet full, a veritable rainbow of neck coverings. But I don’t have a scarf like this one.
This is an extravagance. This is a serendipitous scarf.
I start thinking about giving spontaneously. It’s one thing to hand off used items to charity. It’s quite another to relinquish something new and hand-made. I consider the idea that I am free advertising for her work. I also acknowledge that I meet creators of beautiful things all the time and I don’t walk away with freebies.
I think some more about how much easier it is to give than it is to receive. Or is it the other way around?
It’s hard to receive randomly, to quiet the barrage of inner questions that follow the gifting moment.
I wonder what of mine I will give to a stranger.
My trunk is empty.
My heart is warm.
My mind is racing.
Too little, too late.
Or, I did all I could and it wasn’t enough.
Or, this is life sometimes.
Take your pick. My head is spinning with these three phrases, deciding which one to apply to my Saturday morning. Here’s how it went: A friend and former co-worker arrives at my house so that we can carpool to the nursing home where another former co-worker and friend is in hospice care. It’s been a long few weeks trying to find this dying friend. Just when I had given up hope of seeing her, I received an e-mail with her address and the advice: Hurry.
That was Wednesday. Thursday and Friday were impossible. I had no child care and serious commitments all day. Saturday was the earliest I could make it.
Saturday was too late.
With the best of intentions we arrived early to a quiet facility along a busy road. We worked our way through the maze of hallways and nurses stations asking all along the way where to find our friend. Finally, at the end of the longest hallway on the top floor, we entered the hospice wing.
A nurse spotted us standing in the empty waiting room.
“Who are you here to see?” she inquired.
We told her.
Then came the look. Then the news.
“No one called you?” the nursed asked, noting that others had also showed up to visit our friend who had died the night before.
“Know that she passed on peacefully and surrounded by loved ones,” the nurse said. “She was never alone. Not for one second.”
After all that her family endured watching a mother, a grandmother, a sister slip away, the best final chapter of such a tale of suffering would be that she was enveloped in love and kindness and compassion. It was exactly how she lived her life. What she gave out in generous portions in life: care, comfort, kindness and joy she received back doubly in the end. I’m sorry her exit was so painful.
Now, please excuse me, I have a long letter to write.