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Welcoming A Season For Believing And Giving

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 21, 2007

Years ago, late on a Sunday afternoon, I found myself sitting in my favorite cafe in the North End of Boston, calculating whether to buy another cappuccino or save the few dollars I had left in my pocket to buy subway tokens for getting back and forth to work that week. Post-college, I was broke, as usual, and relying on cigarettes and coffee to keep the stomach from rumbling too much.

Suddenly, this big Italian, an older guy who worked the counter, approached my table. I'd been ordering coffee from him for months, and with his jet-black hair, crooked smile and bellowing voice, he had the charisma of an aging playboy, and as I soon learned, the heart of an earthly angel.

He asked if I'd "watch the shop" while he stepped out. "Sure," I said, figuring he was going out to buy a pack of smokes.

He returned about 30 minutes later carrying a large brown paper sack and disappeared behind the counter. Before too long, though, he approached my table again - only this time carrying a tray piled high with a plate of pasta, chunks of peasant bread, and a hefty glass of red wine. He set the tray down in front of me, and shrugged. "You look a little hungry," he said, then walked back to his stool behind the counter, sat down, picked up the newspaper, and never gave me a second glance.

I was stunned. But not so stunned that I didn't scarf down every morsel. When I finished, I left my few measly dollars on the table as a thank you, and, belly full, pockets empty, headed home.

I've never been an overly religious person, don't go to any formal church and have long questioned how God exists in a world so full of suffering. But that day, as I walked home through the darkening city streets, I felt wonder at the simplicity and grace of what had happened:

I was hungry. And I was fed.

Surely, it seemed easy to believe, an angel had interceded between two mortals, between heaven and Earth.

That man's act of kindness - whether guided by an angel or not - nourished me on a day when I didn't know when or where my next meal was coming from. He didn't just feed my stomach; he fed a part of me I didn't even know was hungry.

And despite the cruelty and indifference in the world I've seen since - the arrogant impatience, the lies, the outright meanness, the disappointing characters of men and women - I still, perhaps naively, believe in the fundamental kindness of people.

And, when we act in kindness, music begins; a drumming beat reverberates through and out of us toward others, traveling through time and space like some kind of ephemeral sounding of the heart, thrumming at a frequency we can hear only if we are willing. Truth is the frequency on which kindness travels, and, it is truth - acted upon - that sets us free.

We can't know the distance a kindness, once made, will travel. How it will be received and passed on, transmuted and re-gifted, countless, needful, hopeful, times, over and over, ad infinitum.

We can't know. But we can believe.

Mary Catherine Coolidge is a freelance writer, living and working in Sarasota.

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