I was over at "The Grove" after Church today. Tonight is to be the tree lighting for what I understand is the second biggest "holiday" (to be politically correct, which agitates me) tree after the one in Rockefeller Center in New York. I did ot realize that when I was looking for elusive parking.
I made my way to Barnes and Noble and picked up some DVD's one a to be present for a friend. I had my lunch at Patsy D'Amore, two slices, and a coke, and read Entertainment Weekly (I am not offended by the adaptation of Sherlock Holmes in the movie to open December 25; I eagerly await it). I ran a few other errands. The elevator coming down to the main level when I arrived, in one of the smaller, I thought, less known banks, had be empty; I hoped for the same going back.
It looked like I was in luck but I had to go to the machine downstairs to see what I owed, which turned out to be nothing. Turning around, the bank was still empty and an elevator was open, a man or two having just gotten in. It was a few feet only and all either man had to do was put his hand in the still fairly wide open door. I yelled "hold the elevator" and met the eye of one of the men. He looked at me steadily and I at him, as he let the door close before I could quite get to it.
My first thought, yes, it was my first, well maybe the second after an expletive. . . .was "Abandon hope all ye who enter here" a well quoted line from Dante's Divine Comedy, specifially the part where there is a tour of hell, where sinners reap the punishment of their less than stellar existences on earth. I try not to feel this way, and for most of the week, I resisted it, but we live in an all but hopeless world and society. Usually you see it in big things, the politics of the day, the loss of the idea of America as a society founded on a premise of Divinely inspired right and responsibility, but when you see it right in your shopping center, in a small uncivil exchange, it becomes surprisingly intolerable.
Not that I am so stellar myself. I have far to go to be a passable human being, but I cannot imagine that if someone was looking me in the eye and asking me to hold an elevator while he or she took a few more steps toward it I would disregard the plea so readily. This chills me almost as much as something that happened to me many years ago, in a supermarket. I had just walked in when I saw a man pulling a cereal box from a bunch of stacked ones. One fell to the ground and he started to walk away without picking it up and replacing it. I happened to notice and when he saw me watching him, he went back to the box and with what a remember as a defiant look in his eye (as opposed to the indifferent one from "elevator guy" today) he kicked the box with an angry fervor. Perhaps he thought I had disapproved of his unwillingness to pick up the box. Perhaps I did. But that my silent remonstration would cause him to act in what was an undisquised moment of violence, fortunately against the inanimate box rather than me, caused the hair to rise on the back of my neck then, and now, in recalling it.
I seem to be feeling apocalyptic today. Oh well, I hope, when the time comes I have not to answer for too many such moments in my life. I realize that it is possible there have been some. I hope not, of course, but we rarely see our own faults, sins, if you will. But, if there have been such moments, I hope one of those friends will tell me. And forgive me.
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