00/10/31

I am a witness

I am a witness to ordinary days of ordinary folk. I am witness to the fact that ordinary people do extraordinary things and that extraordinary people for the most part have to shop for bread and wash their underwear just like the rest of us.

I write so that others know that we can all see the wonders that pass us and surround us every day of our lives if we just try to see them. I witness so much in a day that I can’t write a tenth of it.

I am witness to tragedy.
Today, before the sun rose I saw men risk their lives without a second thought for people they never met or knew. They did it in the same ways they’ve done for years. They are not heroes but ordinary folk. I saw a man stand and watch us fight for his business and livelihood, helpless to change the outcome. I watched him hold his wife as they watched their lives change before them, I saw the dread in their eyes.

I am witness to heroism.
Later in the day one of my men lifted a five-year-old into the driver’s seat of a firetruck and became a hero forever. In that flash he became a man that will be remembered, one that may have changed the course of a life with that moment’s choice.

Today, like every day I witnessed people walk past me on the street whose eyes have seen enough love, loss, death, birth, glory and tragedy to fill libraries with books if the stories were only written down.

I am winess to loss and gift.
Today I had a sandwich for lunch. The old lady who made it has made me many over the years. She’s a tiny old woman who laughs as I try out what little German and Yiddish I know. With her husband she runs a Kosher deli down the street.  Today she showed me the numbers on her arm that a nazi had tattooed on a child sixty years ago. Her gaze mirrored the sights that reeled past and brought tears from my eyes. She had given me a gift without knowing it, she fulfilled her responsibility to thirteen million dead by having the courage to say “I was there in Treblinka, it happened, I am a witness” She also made me a damn good sandwich.

I am witness to triumph and creation.
This afternoon I went to the municipal garage and shared a moment with Lou. Lou is a fellow who has a mental challenge. He is barely able to function on his own, but god, can he weld. He can write little more than his name and can read less, but give him a stinger and a grinder and he’s an artist, literally.

I share Jolly rancher candies with Lou, and when he sees me coming his tools are dropped and his face lights up like the arc he strikes. He’s a big man just like me and likes to wrestle for the roll of jolly ranchers I keep in my pocket. Lou had taken some old welding tanks and had been cutting and grinding them on his off time for awhile. No one knew what he was up to, today we found out.

As I climbed down from my van the air was filled with a wonderously loud ringing, a ringing like a chorus of church bells. It was different though, it had no rhyme or meter, it was like musical water.

Lou stood with an angle grinder clutched in his paws as a streak of sparks lifted from a dump truck box. He saw me and came over to wrestle for candies. I surrendered and gave him one and he popped it in his mouth with a look of ecstacy.

“What the hell is that sound?” I asked.

He looked sheepishly around, like it was a secret and beckoned me out the side door of the shop.

When I stepped outside I was awestruck, a crowd of workers stood where the autumn afternoon sunlight shone off an arrangement of cables and wires hanging fifteen feet long from the tines of a forklift. Lou had cut the bottoms off the old welding tanks and had lovingly fashioned an set of enormous windchimes. As the breeze blew across the open field behind the shop the sound was such that it wrapped around us and held us in warmth and wonder.

“It’s music” Lou said.

As a writer I am no more a witness than anyone else. The stories are everywhere, I just happen to write them down.
 

Email me