Lost and Found

At this pitiful moment while so many raise so much ruckus about what they malign as a handout, a hand out reached me. Timing was just perfect because here we are, or would be if it wasn't for global warming, when leaves and daylight and temperature all fall down. It's the time of fear-- the counter to spring, the season of hope-- traditional bonfire time when things from the past are burned. Signs of death are coming to the Halloween nearest you: the spider's web and hobgoblin, the haunted house and dancing skeleton. Color fades. And dreams that did not grow in the heat of summer dissolve in the icy winter dark. I suppose you could call that Nature's handout.

Anyway, this particular hand out really got to me because the other news has been as deadly grim as this season of dying. It has made us all afraid, very afraid, mostly of being afraid like this. There are so many things we have to stress over, like morning mouth and posting photos Google will turn into ads, we haven't the stomach for this stress of watching the entire country tank.  Like kids say about London Bridge, everything is falling down. Not just bridges and schools and highways and home prices. We have to throw privacy and decency and rules and truth on the traditional October bonfire. And of course, the common good was just tossed overboard in a revolting rage against taxation, which, as it turns out, is proving a very expensive tax on the rest of us. Bah humbug.

So the words of the email shone like summer sun. They came as a complete surprise. The sender was totally unexpected. A young Frenchwoman, a stranger, who spontaneously showed up at my house for two days in the full blush of May, wrote from Paris. Since she was here, she'd been thinking about my experience uniting people through food and the joy it brought everyone-- especially me. Evidently, long before her graduation last May from a New England college, she'd been searching for a purpose, a way to be of benefit to others instead of just to herself. Our conversation had narrowed her focus.

This is a young woman whose last name indicates noble birth, someone quite worldly who came from abroad with a native language and graduated from an elite American college. In May, hands were out everywhere to someone with that kind of resumé. In October, she threw all those assets of circumstance in a mental bonfire and joined a charitable effort that provides havens in hellish places, drop-in sites for dropouts and the scarred, lonely and penniless. 

Apparently, the two weeks of July she'd tested her resolve as an intern in a house among guerrilla war ruins in El Salvador ignited her commitment. She is now leaving Paris to start one of these places in another ruined country, Greece. For more than a year, she wrote, "I will be living with 4 other people... . We will be living in a deprived neighborhood in Athens in a 'Hearts Home'. I will not have internet or phone. I will simply share my company with people who may feel isolated or alone and offer my friendship to them. This may take various forms, most of which I am unaware of at the moment... .  "

Her email came just as I was being too keenly aware of fear. Tomorrow I have to do what's most impossible: get up before dawn. Everything depends on that. I must make a 2 1/2 hour drive to an airport located in a notoriously nasty traffic zone, and find the right parking lot in its dreaded maze in time to catch the one of two inconveniently scheduled flights that some days go to Newfoundland. That's the eastern most Canadian province, and happens to be the home of a place named Heart's Content. Newfoundland, as you can maybe tell by its name, was all the rage in the late 16th Century. People would kill to get there. But we've so moved on and life has changed so much, it's hard as hell to get to its one city, St John's, let alone get anywhere near Heart's Content.

I have to be in St. John's for a wedding. Not just any marriage either or I wouldn't be making this heroic effort. It's a good news occasion. The bride is a movie star beautiful young woman who little more than a dozen years ago was one of the forgotten "lost girls" of Sudan. As it happens, she has just flown from Juba, South Sudan to this boondocks of Canada to get married. It's a triumph. In Boston, lost Adeui was "found", fostered and mentored, and became the first professionally educated woman of the Sudan. She has a Bachelor's degree from Brandeis, a Masters Degree from the London School of Economics, and was back in her precarious new country helping to set it up. 

Adeui met the groom, Matt, at the London School of Economics. He was there in a course of study that would allow him to work in the development of east Africa. "Where are you from?" she asked him after class.
"Canada," he said.
"Where?" she pressed.
"Let's just say Canada because it's a place you've never heard of."
"Yeh, well try me. Are you from Newfoundland?"
"Oh my God! How would you know that? I mean how would you know about Newfoundland?"

And that's the beauty of this wedding. The Boston-based woman who fostered and mentored Adeui is half Newfie: her late father was from there. Half his family is still in St John's where Matt is from. They're all coming to this wedding. All coming together: north and south, black and white, haves and had not.  How could I miss it? Besides, after they put their hands out to each other at the wedding, the newlyweds are going back out in the world to put their hands out and help others. I just love the way this news lights up and dispels the dark and fearsome time. There's still happy magic in this world.


 



~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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