I avoided the glares of my extended family while we waited for the parade to start; it would be two more hours.
I’d dragged them out early and bleary-eyed. To make amends, I plopped my then-2-year-old son in a wagon and set out for coffee. We’d gone a half-mile or so along the crowded parade route when the wagon lurched and my son popped out backward. He toppled to the asphalt like a weeble-wobble doll, only he didn’t bob back up. What he did was scream. And scream.
I ran for him, tripped over the wagon and fell myself. When I finally scooped him up, I stood in the center of the street, bleeding and surrounded by hundreds of chair-sitters staring shock-eyed at the two of us. Not a single person moved to help. I couldn’t make a dent in my son’s screaming; I was terrified I’d broken him. In moments I would fall apart myself.
Then I heard screeching even louder than my son’s. “Baby! Hi, baby!” A high-heeled woman waving 10 very long and very shiny fingernails tottered toward us. “Hi, baby! Hi, Hi, baby!” My son stared, cry-drooled, gulped.
And then she was upon us showing him each of her painted nails, dotted with diamonds, her baubles and her rings. She peek-a-booed him and shook her earrings to a jangle-jangle tune.
He was so shocked and taken in that he forgot to cry. While he touched her nail with one tiny finger, she leaned in close to me and said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with these people. Just ignore them.” She didn’t stop her shower of attention until my son was too mesmerized to remember he had been hurt. Then she righted the wagon and sent us on our way.
I don’t know why no one else helped us. Maybe they were afraid of losing their seats. Maybe they were disapproving. Maybe they were embarrassed. Maybe they were too comfortable and helping would have meant coming out of their bubble.
Oh, how often I’ve been in that same bubble. Sometimes we are too tired to help. We are too busy to help. We disapprove and judge by not helping. We hope someone else will help. We don’t want to be involved, slowed down or pulled in. We want to stay anonymous, duck our heads, go away. And with that, I hope, comes the small gnaw of shame.
We are each capable of such immense good that rising to shine in our very best light should be an ordinary, everyday feat. But being nice and decent and kind is not always considered ordinary.
Surely by now you’ve all heard the story of the Mexican bricklayer Jesus Cordova. He was walking from his village in the northern Mexican state of Sonora last month to enter the United States. He did not have legal papers. He found a scared 9-year-old American boy on a desolate road in southern Arizona. The child and his mother had been in a car accident. The mother was still alive but soon died. Cordova gave the boy his coat, built him a fire and stayed with him all night until, finally, help arrived the next day.
This story catches our attention. Why? Is it because Cordova helped when no one but a child was watching? Is it because Cordova surely knew if he helped he would be detained and returned to his home in Magdalena de Kino, but helped anyway? Or is it because Cordova is a Mexican? Or, more specifically, a Mexican person attempting to enter the U.S. without legal papers?
Let’s be sure this story grabs us for the right reasons. All people are lit by the exact same amount of God. What we do, or don’t do, with that light is another matter.
What is extraordinary about this story has nothing to do with Cordova being Mexican, or an immigrant with or without papers.
All people are lit by the same amount of God.
This story is about the good each of us is capable of doing for another and one man who decided to help. Hopefully someday such goodness will seem ordinary, as well it should.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
