The Connect

Recently I contemplated one meaning of connect: “to arrive just before another leaves.” 

I thought about the opportunity implied in this meaning: to seize the moment in its fullness before it, too, disappears. And this brought to mind something that happened outside my local food store a few months ago.

Over the winter, I became acquainted with a woman who sat near the store where I buy bargain-priced groceries. She usually sat on the curb amidst roaring traffic just to the side of where crowds jostled around the great bins of oranges and apples, broccoli and onions—all dragged out each day to crowd the narrow sidewalk. 

It was a difficult place to wait for strangers’ kindness. 

I’d developed a habit of stopping to chat with her and came to look forward to the quiet pool of our greeting, a relief after the onslaught of shoppers and their frantic search for the best buys of the day. After stopping to talk, it had become a habit to hand her a five-dollar bill before we parted. 

And then, one day, in her place sat a huge ramshackle man with a ragged beard. 

At first glance, I could not say if he was young or old. His head was bowed. He sat cross-legged, looking at the sidewalk, the ubiquitous cardboard coffee cup placed before him. Taken aback, I slid into the shopping crowd, gone before he had a chance to sense my reluctance and gain my attention to connect. 

And then there it was: a five-dollar bill received as change after paying for the groceries. Random, half-formed hesitancies tightened my grip on the bill. Trump’s war on the economy. The cost of food. The stretched pension. Feeling disappointed, I recognized I did not want that huge boulder of a man sitting in the lady’s spot.

But just as I was about to pocket the bill, a practice came to mind. 

The practice of giving from one hand to the other. 

When I left the store, he was still there. He looked up as I leaned down to put the five-dollar bill in his cup. Gazing up at me, a gentleness washed away that brutal corner with its awful traffic and shadowy rush of souls. “Thank you,” he said. 

A little taken aback, it took a while to gather my wits before launching myself around the corner to the empty block where my car was parked. Not until I had put down my bags of groceries beside the trunk of the car did I see it.

Lying as if carefully placed beside the car. 

Lying there in vivid contrast to the muddy ground. 

Like a footprint in a rock. 

A blue five-dollar bill. 

And for a moment, the dull grey afternoon in the dull grey concrete city lit up. 

Staring down at the miraculous appearance of that five-dollar bill, I knew, I just knew something magic had been conjured by the gentle panhandler. 

And with it, the greater enchantment of the insight he passed on to me.

I saw the illusion. The illusion of ownership. When we are really just giving from one hand to another. 

And I saw the gift of arriving before the other leaves.