Knockin' On Heaven's Doorway

At first, we walked by him the way so many people do, as if we didn't even notice him. I saw him, knew he was there, but couldn't tell you anything about his face. And I heard him too, but I couldn't tell you what he said. I kept walking, holding my bag of leftover pasta from a favorite Italian restaurant, continued to talk to my brother and daughter as if nothing had happened, as if we hadn't just passed a man bundled up in a doorway on a busy Chicago sidewalk.

My daughter suddenly stopped, almost as if she had been hit. "No, I'm not!" she said. To herself maybe, or just to the air. Certainly to nobody in particular. She turned and marched back to the faceless and voiceless man, handed him her bag of leftovers. "I'm not going to eat that," she said to me, "I'm just not," when she joined us again. She pulled her coat more tightly around herself and kept walking. We followed her lead. I felt silly, still holding my bag of leftovers that would, no doubt, go uneaten.

The man had yelled something as we passed, not in a threatening way, just louder than his initial mumble. You gonna eat that? is what he had said. All I had heard, at first, was random sound, meaningless letters floating in the air like scrambled refrigerator magnets. Only my daughter had paid attention. You gonna eat that? I realized why she had looked as if she had been hit. I had heard it too; I had simply chosen not to listen. I will never forget the look on my daughter's face as she stopped so abruptly and did what she knew was the only right thing to do. It was as if everything, finally, made sense.

She is a third of the way through her twenties, a decade during which so many of us live in fear. The pressure to be a grown up is overwhelming, as is the uncertainty about where life will take you. We are consumed by the possibility of ending up unattached while everyone around us pairs up. We just don't know what's going to be, and it's scary. Sure, I know it sounds a heck of a lot like me, about a third of the way through my fifties, but starting fresh the second or third time around is a little less daunting than facing adulthood for the first time, when you can't even rest on a few laurels. My daughter, though, seems to be figuring it out. She has a good head and a good heart and a reliable moral compass. She will find her way.

An acquaintance asked me the other day (when I was no doubt moaning about some wildly trivial indignity, like being stuck in the cold for spring break) whether there was anything truly hard about my life. Compared to the man in the doorway, no. Come to think of it, compared to most people, no. There's no shame in wanting more, but no, at least at the moment, no matter what yardstick I use, life for me is not particularly hard. 

As we walked away from the man, bracing ourselves in our warm coats against the punishing wind, I glanced back at him. He was silent now, and he most certainly had a face. He was still staring at my daughter, the neatly tied bag of food still resting in his lap. He said nothing, but he spoke volumes. I think it wasn't really about the food. He had been seen; he had been heard. And maybe, just for a moment, his life seemed a bit less hard.