My friend K in NYC sent me this amazing response. (Since allowing comments means getting meaningless ads from people I turned that feature off; she sent this to my e-mail and granted me permission to post it here.)"I discovered this truth through personal experience and I thought I would share the story with you:
"A year after I moved to New York my apartment burned. I lost everything except one cat (black of course). A former work friend, R, who was touring with a dance company heard about it the next day and, because she had been involved with a fire 4 years before, called where I was staying and offered her apartment which was sitting empty while she was on the road. Then she told me who to contact and what to do to get Red Cross and city and all those things rolling to help me get a new apartment. This was fabulous. I stayed at her place for a month, went to the Red Cross and got clothes and a voucher for help with apartment rent, etc. I moved into my new place and really didn’t see R very much. Years later I had moved into the apartment I’m now in and it’s across the street from R. New York being New York I never see her."One day I was walking past her building thinking about what a wonderful thing she had done all those years ago, without being a close friend or asking for money or any of that, and how I really should just call her up and thank her. Then, low and behold, there’s R coming out of the subway right in front of me. I stopped her. She looked very distracted, maybe even upset, but she recognized me and stopped for a moment. So all I said was, “I was just thinking about everything you did when my apartment burned back in the 70’s and how I never would have made it without you. You letting me stay in your apartment and everything you told me to do. I don’t think I ever thanked you half as much as you deserved.” She looked at me weirdly, sort of humphed, thanked me for thanking her, and walked away. I thought, “Well, at least I thanked her, which makes ME feel better, even though she doesn’t seem to care.”
"That night when I got home there was a message from R on my phone machine. She apologized for the way she acted on the street. She’d simply been stunned by synchronicity. She had been coming from the bedside of a dying friend who was passed talking. She had sat next to him thinking, “I can’t do anything for him. I’ve never been able to do anything for any body. What the hell have I ever done to help anything in this life….” And on and on—and was still thinking that when she got out of the subway, only to be hit in the face with old time gratitude for something she didn’t even remember doing because she’d been on the road and had never seen me in her apartment, or had to deal with any of the stuff that had happened around my fire. To her it was a forgotten phone conversation, over in less than 5 minutes, before she had to get back to work.
"Anyway, sorry to go on this long, but there you have my story…well, R’s story. I somehow felt forced to share."I LOVE your blog and will make it a regular web stop! The pictures are great—loved the pumpkin!"
Photo is from the Internet...a copy of the New York Street set at Paramount Studios. Why use the real thing when you can use a set?
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