Everyday Mercies

Apologies, first of all, to readers of the Aggieland Star-Ledger who had difficulties finding this blog.  Your editor made the foolish mistake of typing an “@” where she should have typed a “.”  Congratulations on finding it, anyway!

A couple of days back, I was thinking more along the lines of an essay called “Everyday Tragedy,” but then mercy struck, and I don’t mean the bright and beautiful McGee daughter.  My mother always used to say, “be grateful for small favors,” though she generally changed it to “flavors” by way of irony.  The “small favor” or mercy, if you will that changed the course of the week – and maybe my life – happened on Wednesday, on the way back from the airport.  But more on that in a moment.

Living in this beautiful, gritty megalopolis, we are aware that tragedies are certainly happening daily.  We watch KRON-4, our favorite purveyor of weather and news and advertising every morning for an update.  There is the same wise-cracking, sports-loving anchorwoman, Daria, who was there when I watched regularly in 2001-2, and George the traffic-guy, and Marc the co-anchor and former weatherman.  (Actually they all seem to be former weather-folk:  James, the other local news-guy really lit up when he did the weather for Erica this morning, and Marc confessed to majoring in meteorology…) 

Anyway, we get our daily dose of burglary, murder and traffic mayhem from unexpected and expected spots, all over the Bay, and then our parents will frighten us with health setbacks, and I think – well, here we go again!  We will drive home to Texas in January only to find that one parent or another is deathly ill and one of us must fly back again…  My father, for example, has become vaguer than usual this week, and we wonder how much longer he will hang on.  Then there was the tremendous back-up on the highway outside our window, complete with helicopters and sirens, and the grim rumble of a thousand vehicles idling, going nowhere for a very long time, coupled to the knowledge that somewhere up ahead on the road, a tragedy must be unfolding.

But Wednesday changed all that sort of thinking.  Wednesday, we escaped being on the KRON-4 News by inches.  Wednesday, we looked up just in time and one of us yelled just in time and we did NOT collide with the back of that stopped truck, in the lane directly ahead of us.

It was a gorgeous, clear afternoon with unusually interesting clouds and a double rainbow, and we were pointing out the sights to two scientific visitors from France – had just waved towards the Campanile, as a matter of fact – when that particular Highway 24 exit lane from Highway 580 decided to put on its brakes.  Another lane was open and we veered uneventfully into it, but not before all the other possible outcomes had raced before our eyes:  ranging in seriousness from inconvenienced visitors to expensive car-repairs, hospitalization, and death.  But nothing, nothing happened; we didn’t even have to skid to a scary halt; the folks in the backseat seemed unaware of the danger, probably thought we were over-reacting. 

But all day it echoed around our minds, along with deep gratitude.  How sweet is life without inconvenienced visitors, expensive car-repairs, (another) hospitalization and (more) death!  Fathers rally yet again – yes, we know it will not be forever, but for now they do – and considering the size of this Megalopolis, there is a remarkable degree of mercy happening daily.  Most houses don’t burn down, most people don’t murder one another or embezzle the government, and most cars don’t crash.  It’s anything but a small favor; it’s a mercy!