| I was on the highway, carting my ass to school the other day, when I drove under a bridge/overpass situation. As I approached it, I could see a familiar figure leaning against the rail, waving. Out of habit, I honked my horn, and the tall, thin black man waved back at me with even more enthusiasm, if possible.
As I continued on the highway headed towards hours of sciencey lectures so densely packed with bastardizations of my beloved English language that they caused me to doubt I could ever really string a sentence together in the first place, I heard my fellow drivers toot toot their horns as they, too, drove under the overpass. It made me smile.
The man on the overpass is kind of famous where I live. He's in his thirties or so, lives near the bridge with his two sisters, and has an IQ somewhere in the sixties. We first became aware of him through "the Community," as my mom puts it. She spent a good chunk of her life working at a home for the mentally retarded, is still fairly involved with her former students, and this young man was someone she came across quite a while ago.
He's a sweet man, pretty independent, capable of most things save living on his own, and his absolute favorite activity is standing on that bridge and waving to cars. That's the greatest joy in his life. He does it every day, in all kinds of weather, from sun up to sun down, almost. His sisters like it because they always know where he is-- they can see him from their house actually-- and nobody else ever thought much of it until a couple of years ago.
Some woman who lives in my city wrote in to the paper to complain about this man. Apparently, she'd been speaking to the police for several months, trying to get them to stop the man from standing up there and waving. It was distracting, she said. Dangerous, she said. Unbecoming, and awkward, she said.
The police told the woman that they were sorry she felt that way, but the man wasn't actually committing a crime, and there wasn't anything they could, or would, do. She bothered them for weeks, dragging her grievances higher and higher through the ranks, until she spoke to the chief who said that she should call them when something illegal had taken place, and until then, they didn't really have the time for this.
You'd think that would stop her, right? Well, that and an overwhelming sense of shame for being so ridiculous and stupid. You'd be wrong.
She started a petition, wrote to newspapers, essentially created a campaign whose sole purpose was to systematically deny someone else their dearest joy. She raised quite a fuss and got some attention for it but mostly because she was embarrassing the shit out of herself.
Finally, my city decided that we'd had enough. Mustering every bit of civic duty and liberty we could scrape together, in one fell swoop, in a ridiculous sort of unity that I've never seen before and haven't seen since, the city and its inhabitants responded to her high-pitched, narrow-minded, and cold-hearted request to remove a sweet, gentle, harmless man from his post on the overpass.
How?
The city named the bridge after him. It was tributary. He could stand on it all he wanted and wave till his arm fell off. It was his, after all. He belonged there.
The fallout was incredible. People were thrilled for him. You could occasionally, as you were driving by, see someone up there chatting with him, shaking his hand, maybe trying out a wave or two of their own, sometimes laughing so hard- giddy with the discovery that Hey, this really is kind of great. There was more honking than ever now, gentle beeps to acknowledge and celebrate that for once, Nice Guy Finished First.
The letters to the paper included lots of suggestions for what the woman could do with her petition, perhaps places she could stick it, and more than one person said that if she still found the waving man distracting, perhaps she was in no condition to be driving. A good point, I thought.
All this came back to me while I was dragging my butt to school, and it made me really happy, and very proud of my city. Because, though it happens rarely, sometimes the stars align and the moons are lucky and somehow, for a brief little blip, people just get their priorities straight, and show the best little part of themselves, all together, at the same time.
It's enough to make you want to wave joyfully at all of them, isn't it?
-Where ever there is a human being, there is a chance for kindness. (Seneca)
Labels: childhood, on the homefront, that's a nice thing |
What a cute story. I love hearing about acts of human kindness like this that put that mean woman in her place. Yay!