Morning at the Bus Stop

There's a storm brewing on this dark morning, I can hear far off thunder and the crack of lightning as it cuts across the skies. It's a bad day to be a stray cat.

At the bus stop, an old woman in a torn sweater shields herself and her belongings with a tattered black umbrella. Traffic breezes by and takes no notice of her, plowing through the already flooded streets and sending a heavy spray of water in her direction. She scowls and shakes her fist at the drivers, an impotent but unmistakable gesture of anger at their lack of consideration. As I sit at the red light and watch her pull off one then both of her sodden boots and pour out the rainwater, I wonder at her persistence, she is a tiny thing laden with plastic bags and a shiny black purse, a frayed scarf wrapped around her flyaway hair. I don't know exactly why but I imagine she can curse like a drunken sailor on shore leave. There's something about her leathery, wrinkled old face and the set of her jaw that suggests she will take no backtalk - she may be small and old and drenched to the skin, but she carries her burdens willingly and I suspect she's independent minded and formidable.

The world is not, as I thought when I was much younger, such a carefree place where all dreams come true, all endings are happy and everyone is equal. Nor is it as dark a place as I once imagined, where everyone in power is corrupt and war-hungry and everything from ethics to children can be bought and sold. Only a handful of us are completely good or completely evil or completely useless, all the rest is a shadowland of bartering and trade offs, trying and giving up, doing your best or your least, seeking or hoarding fairness, kindness, concern. We are made in God's image, but built of fragile threads and thin wire, complications and contradictions in different packages with different labels - defined by our individuality and our commonalities. Now and again I wonder if God is not fundamentally a satirist with a slightly twisted sense of humor, if we are not an amusement park for a cosmically bored creator. Sometimes I wonder why I bother to wonder.

The old woman at the bus stop is gone, replaced by three hip hopping teenagers in low slung jeans and headbands and floppy Keds. They are joined by a very pregnant young woman carrying an infant and all three jump up and offer her their seat on the bench.

I imagine this would make even a satirical God smile.