Margaret Eleanor

The moon hung low above the city lights that shone like stars of the Milky Way while the train gently rocked its passengers to sleep. All but Margaret Eleanor and myself.

While others shut the world out with their music, I immediately immersed myself in Elie Wiesel's vivid and compelling account of the Holocaust in Night. I moved somberly through the pages with Elie from Birkenau to Auschwitz to Buna when all of a sudden I was kindly reminded that there were others on the train. A sweet, old lady who had just successfully put her right sock on sighed heavily of relief. (It isn't exactly what people normally do on the train, but there are occasional passengers who don't often do normal things on the train.) When she didn't have to, she turned around to say that she liked my scarf. I was delighted although the scarf belongs to my sister. She took the time to say such words with her fragile voice. To most people, a thank you would have been the end to that conversation as we are advised to never talk to strangers. For us, it was just the beginning.

My eager thank you led her to notice my accent and ask where I am from originally. She then came to tell me how she's from Canada and frequently attended Catholic summer boarding schools in England. (What was this lady doing on a DART train in Texas!?) She saw my rental copy of Night and asked my view on the Holocaust. (Actually, if I heard correctly, she asked what I thought was going to happen in the Holocaust.) She asked what I was studying in school, and she thanked me for wanting to be a teacher. When she said goodbye, she genuinely told me (with a hint of nonchalance) to "have a good life." We both knew we would never see each other again.

A wise nun told me that God brings people into our lives to teach us more about ourselves and the world around us. It dawned on me how ordinary encounters are with people. Sometimes all you get is just that chance, and with others, you get a million second chance. Maybe it's because with some all you need is that one time, and others, you need plenty more. Nevertheless, they come into our lives as easily as the words hi and hello dissipate into thin air as soon as it is exchanged by two strangers. At some point, we'll realize that our life passes as quickly as my encounter with Miss Margaret Eleanor, but as Robert Frost puts it, it goes on. As soon as she left, the train went on.

The train slowly came to a stop, and I tiptoed into a sleeping world. No birds, no traffic, no other sound, not even the whistling of the gentle breeze, dared to interrupt a world at rest. Maybe this is why some people love driving down an empty highway at night. There's hardly any fear or guards necessary to be in the world when it is peacefully asleep. For the first time, I realized what my philosophy professor meant by "true openness" to the world because at that particular time, the world I lived in made me feel safe.

I looked to my left and there were the twinkling lights of the Dallas skyline. Right above downtown was the half-moon; I was both intrigued, amazed, and, most of all, humbled by how we'll only see one side of the moon for as long as we live. As if it had a secret we are to never know. Walking further, looking at the constellations of Orion, Canis Major, the Taurus, and the Pleiades reminded me of when I first learned about them in my Astronomy class. Even the sky was no longer a sea of strangeness, but one that has a warrior and his belt, the world's guard dog, or the seven sisters to rise and greet you every night. The feeling of being watched over and surrounded by familiarity consumed me and I felt like I really belonged to my city, my world, the entire universe.

I highly doubt that true openness to the world necessarily means talk to every stranger you meet or find a rather strange connection with stars. Rather, it is perhaps in realizing that our corners in this universe that we often find ordinary are filled with diamonds in the rough. Margaret's face may have been even more washed out by the color of her faded clothing, but her story illuminated her face despite the cracks that formed from the cold temperatures. The grays in her hair and the wrinkles on her face were her own lines in the book of her life that she's yet to write or maybe even never write. In first opening ourselves to embrace the ordinary moments, more importantly those that seem even less ordinary, we discover the incandescent beauty of this old world. We realize that despite the things that make our lives difficult and seem utterly unbearable, there are people like Elie Wiesel and other victims of the Holocaust who are rich with stories untold and even Margaret Eleanor who, even at her old age, is still only at the beginning of her life. We are not alone.

When you realize that there's more to this life than just you, you'll find not necessarily where you belong, but just that you belong. Mine just happened to start with a simple, "I like your scarf."