This is for all of the lonely people

Cast me not away from Your presence,

and take not Your Holy Spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation,

and uphold me with a willing spirit. Psalm 51:11-12

And Jesus said to them, “I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?” Luke 6:9

Isidore the farmer founded no order, nor did he write a single book. He was a simple farmworker who spent his life tilling the land, mostly for the same wealthy landowner. With his wife, Maria, he had a son who died in childhood. Isidore knew the hardship, toil and sorrows of life. It was said that angels could be seen assisting Isidore in the fields as he plowed. Though he had very little wealth, he became known for generosity and hospitality, especially to the stranger or the lonely. He died on May 15, 1130, and was recognized as a saint by Rome in 1622.

I really don’t remember much from high school classes; they are sort of a blur of me sitting in the back chatting a lot with my group of boys, getting A’s and never once doing homework except for the time when I got a B because the teacher was so mad that my parents pulled me out of school for six weeks to travel around Europe in a VW bus. I mostly have tiny snippets of memories from my first year, like when the Spanish teacher pulled me into the hall and told me not to become lazy like all of the other students in the class or when I first stepped into my Physical Science class and knocked over a test tube of hydrochloric acid that ate a hole right through the lab journal and all the boys at my table called me “Danger” the rest of the year. My freshmen English teacher might have been some type of hippy. I remember that she had Simon and Garfunkel lyrics up all over the walls. I remember marveling that my new best friend Marcia Grant wore the same 501 jeans every single day. And she marveled that I wore socks over my stockings because I was a dork from Tennessee. Mostly what we did in her class was independently read books and fill out worksheets on them, and I read a book a day, all of the teen classics like I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and The Catcher in the Rye. But we must have written sometimes because Marcia remembers that I was a writer even forty years later and I remember the moment when I sort of got what writing was about. We listened to that America song “This is for all the lonely people thinking that life will pass them by…” and were supposed to write a response to it, and I very cleverly had a lady sitting on her front porch listening to the radio, and the next stanza an old man was sitting in his dark living room, and he was listening to the same commercial and murmured that he “must remember to pick up some new light bulbs,” or something like that.

But mostly my heart was pierced by the image of the old man alone in a musty house with maybe a cat or maybe an empty dog collar. And a radio.

And the thing about riding my bike to school is that I am going a little slower through life, up and down Broadway, and I notice them everywhere, pushing their walker down the pitted sidewalk with a plastic bag of groceries, dozing off at a bus stop, sifting through recycle bins for aluminum cans, and that refrain goes around and around in my head.

Yesterday I went to yet another in-service training at what used to be Duffy Elementary with all of the other Magnet Coordinators and Curriculum Service Providers and the MTSSF people and the IDIS people that I don’t even know what those initials mean and we folded papers into Four Squares and using different colored markers and sticky notes as we discussed “Uncovering the Potential of Curriculum” and “Collaborative Reflection on CIPDA.” Seriously. And then they decided to cut the meetings short in honor of “Teacher Celebration Week,” so I got to return to my world of rock-throwing-but-I-didn’t-hit-anyone and tripping-people-by-mistake-but-they-got-a-bloody-nose kiddos, but I hadn’t planned on lunch and 7-11 was on the way so I stopped there to get something. Man, had I ever actually entered a 7-11 before? Talk about lonely people.

I wandered around and found warm pizza slices 2 for $2 and stood in line with my credit card. I smiled at the guy in front of me who was buying some cans of either beer or energy drinks, I didn’t particularly notice, chose not to bag my items, and went outside to sit on the sidewalk by my bicycle and eat the not-so-bad pizza. I had been on a blood test fast and I was hungry. Relatively, right? First world hungry problems, not like my truly hungry Guatemalans and Hondurans.

I looked up to see the guy with the bag of drinks as he was about to get into his pretty new blue Honda Fit car.

“Thank you for smiling at me.”

“You made my day.”

“I will remember that smile for a long time.”

Then he got into his car and drove off.

I remembered other smiles I had seen that day. The receptionist at Health on Broadway downtown smiled at the pretty-sure-he-lived-in-an-alley-with-his-grocery-cart guy who just had an MRI and he was all happy because the tech said he had a cracked something and he could have surgery and get rid of the pain.

The lady skootching over to make room on the bus stop bench for the other lady with a kid in each arm.

The guy who stopped and knocked on the window to see if I was okay because I had pulled my car over in the parking lot to answer Mary Anne’s text bout Pippen because I really try hard not to text and drive.

And I even smiled and murmured “Thank you” to the lady leading the in-service. She did the best she could do with a tired, texting bunch of busy people who desperately wanted to be elsewhere.

Today we honor Isidore, who nine hundred years ago smiled at the lonely people, a smile that said, “I see you. I see you, child of God.”

This is for all the lonely people.