12 – Minor Miracles – A Well-Lit Path

12
Minor Miracles

The commuter train pulls away from the platform, and before we roll out under what will eventually be winter-leaden skies, we first creep along beneath highway overpass, suspension bridges, massive concrete tunnels-not-tunnels, that form a pragmatic monument to decades of construction.

(They are monument to equally massive amounts of collusion and kickback, of course: major works seem to be twin brother to power grabs and inelegant behavior.)

Out under the sky, such as it is, and we muscle past hundreds upon hundreds of working-class houses; how many years and generations of individual effort, one family at a time, lifting a roof overhead, aging, passing on, passing away, have grown Boston out of its nutshell center to become this sprawling mangrove of communities, co-depending (as we all do, as we always do), and linked by these railways and roadways and waterways in a daily tide of human endeavor.

It’s not only the concrete, of course. How many words have been written in the human book of knowledge; how many sweaters have been knitted and how many days have they been put on against the chill, then taken off to dive beneath a quilt? How many sacks of flour were ground into how many stacks of pancakes, and how many oranges squeezed into trucks to be juiced way up north; how many sports events ending in victory and defeat, how many lawsuits raised and resolved, how many hopeful politicians becoming cynical in the end, how many wars begun for obscured motives (all of them), and how many songs of heroism written for the fighting pawns who died nobly for ignoble causes?

How many homes exchanged for new homes.

Well, the seasons come and go, and the Acts of Humankind pile up like leaves in the forest, mostly forgotten (in this day and age, covered over even as they occur, by the next Events of Dubious Import but Great Media Value), mostly trodden upon, as the next generation and the next and the next live out their highly cherished times. All the noise, I suppose, comes to silence, sooner or later. The silence of the surface of Mars, or of the airless moon: then it is just birdsong and waiting for another uprising.

All those leaves, I hope, become fertile soil for something grand, sky-reaching, and with luck less involved with its own grandiosity. And these factories I am passing, one after another, this urgent reaching for… what?… may make way for a more relaxed being.

… and there’s this morning’s coastal weather report.