Day of Grace

The whole day was wrapped in beauty.

On my way to Union Station, I passed a man sitting on a broken down appliance box who was eating a piece of pizza and sharing bits of the crust with a little gathering of five or six pigeons. The sight of him sharing his meager meal with the birds made me smile and want to skip the rest of the way to the train station. There is beauty everywhere if we look.

“May I make a donation to your pigeon feeding fund?” I asked playfully as I dropped my contribution into his grimy hand.  He looked up at me and I saw sparkling blue eyes and a charming smile peeking out from under an overgrown grey and blond mustache.

“I love feeding birds, too,” I added as I walked on past with my little suitcase in tow.

“Thank you!” he called after me. “Thank you!” he said again.  ”Thank you!” he repeated.

Waiting with me for the train to Windsor were two bulky fellows with very strange accents and sweet, rather innocent looking faces. They ended up sitting directly behind me on the train.  I pretended to be turning my head in order to look out the far window, but really I was turning one ear toward them hoping to determine what kind of English theirs was.  There were hints of an Irish twang, then not. There were Scottish-sounding vowels at times, but mostly not. They did not sound like my cousin Father Roy from PEI, and I don’t know what Nova Scotians sound like. I could only understand about 20% of their strange gibberish.

A man two seats ahead of me on the other side of the aisle became rather vocal around Woodstock. He began to talk nonsense interspersed with the f-bomb. Occasionally he became very loud. I wondered if anyone would complain to the steward, whether he would be put off the train before his destination.  I decided not to let it bother me and returned to my library book.  I soon noticed that everyone around me was taking the same attitude.  We exchanged amused smiles and returned to what we were doing.

The loud man got off at Chatham. Then, to my surprise and delight, the two big guys behind me began singing softly. It was a catchy diddy about Newfoundland. Aha!

By the time we were pulling into Windsor, the elegant lady across from the big boys was pulling their story from them. They were on a job to drive someone’s vehicle back to St. John’s. They asked her about sights they might try to see on the way out west and back. She began a lengthy and very detailed lesson: they should see the Detroit River and look across to America; they were almost as far south as you can get in Canada; Paul Martin is from Windsor; when in Montreal, go to a deli and buy the famed smoked meat, and so on.

They thanked her for the “free” tour information. I said it was payment for the lovely song.

They talked about where all they had travelled and when she said that people in Newfoundland were the friendliest and most hospitable in Canada, they said that they had found the people in Toronto to be just as nice. They had arrived from the airport with no clue how to get to the train station, and the first person they asked had said, “Follow me,” and had showed them to the station.

Some days I am surrounded by gentleness all day.  Everyone is gracious. Everyone is smiling. Everyone is kind.

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