Dichroic Reflections

"it's always a perfect sky"

Yesterday, on the way to work, I heard a news story about labor camps in Florida that are disturbingly like indentured service, like the old mining towns ("St. Peter don't you call me cause I can't go / I owe my soul to the company store.") and another story on the London bombings. As I got out of the car, I thought, "What a hell of a world," and looked around for a spot of beauty to pull me away from despair. The problem is that I work in a complex of industrial buildings right next to Skthe back side of the city airport. Except for a few small scattered bits of landscaping in our parking lot, there is nothing but asphalt, cement, and manufactured products (cars, airliners, ugly buildings) to be seen. No planes were taking off on the nearby runway to lift my heart with their flight. I tried lifting my eyes to the hills, but that didn't work either. I can see Camelback and South Mountain from our lot, but while both can be beautiful to hike on, from a distance in July they are brown and bald and desolate, like the personification of despair in a Dantean landscape.

I pushed it all out of my mind as I entered the building for another long slow day in my windowless office. (I expect to be very busy soon, as the reorg takes hold, but right now things are very quiet. ) Later that afternoon, though, I went to make popcorn. As I stood by the microwave in a nearby office, I leaned on the window and looked out, as I always do, and I realized what I had forgotten in the morning. I looked out at the asphalt and the cement and the cars, but then I looked up, at the blue sky and the white clouds. I remembered something Richard Bach once wrote, in Illusions: Confessions of a Reluctant Messiah: "Is it a perfect sky? It's always a perfect sky," and something else he'd said in one of his essays on flying, that no matter where a pilot is, no matter how hemmed in city-ness and cement, at least she can always look up and see a free and unbound sky and know that her true home is right there. I'm not at the point in flying where I feel that the sky is my true home, but I've always loved to look at it. I don't believe there is anything more beautiful than the shapes and shading of clouds, unless it's galaxies; I don't have a very detailed faith, in the sense of believing I know exactly what God is and what She wants from me, but they keep me believing in a Great Artist behind the design of the universe.

This morning, the last thing I heard on my drive to work before I shut down my engine was a beautiful story from StoryCorps, from a bus driver who had gone out of his way to help a confused older lady find the friends she was to meet. He went into every restaurant on the block to look for them. When he had found them, he held his hand out to help her down. "I wanted to make her feel special, like it was a limousine or something. It's just a bus, you know?" He still remembered the feel of her hand and her comment that she was dying of cancer, but that he had made it the best day of her life so far. What struck me were the tears in his voice, as he said "I'll never forget her." He was the one who had done the kind deed, yet he was the one most affected by it. I'll wager she remembers the kind driver, if she is still alive, but he was the one who was so affected by the mitzvah he'd done that he had to tell the story to preserve it in an archive. And as I got out of the car and walked across the ugly parking lot, I instinctively looked up to marvel. Despite the pollution of the city, the blue was luminous, with a few white clouds to remind me of the monsoons that will be gathering in the next few weeks. It was another perfect sky.