To all Ego Suckers - A story of Kindness Via Internet

[Tertiusgaudens Profile]

Beth’s blog, http://www.beth-kephart.blogspot.com

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It’s funny how the world seeps in, when your heart is open to it. I started a blog, and I didn’t know what might happen. I worried if I’d have enough to say, wondered if any would notice. I said to myself, You could be writing toward silence. Still, I started a blog, and things unfolded. Readers I didn’t know stepped forward. Writers agreed or they didn’t. The world became a more interesting place, and a new kind of goodness percolated.

I met young women, college bound. I met two young sisters, both of them poets. I met women who swept me into their fine net of generosity. I met fellow aspirants and photographers, enthusiasts and doubters. And then I met a young woman who went by a mysterious code name. She was young, utterly original, talented. Her poems and photography were thrilling.

Back and forth we went, visiting each others’ blog. Knowing got mixed in with the mystery.

I live on the east coast. Last August, I traveled west with family to my favorite California city, San Francisco. We had but three days, my husband, son, and I, and we had friends to see, an island to boat to, a park that was offering music. I posted a San Francisco photograph on my blog from our hotel room. A message came back: You can’t visit San Francisco without saying a real hello to me. It was that mysterious poet/photographer. She wanted to meet in a central square.

It was the end of the day, the end of the trip. I grabbed a sweater and headed toward our meeting place. She was a little late, and I wondered if the rendezvous would actually happen. I wondered what we would do once we met, if indeed we met: Apple cider? Hot chocolate? A conversation in the chill dusking air?

I saw her, then, traveling toward me from across the square, her hair haloing all around her. “Hello,” she said. I made my suggestions. She said she had other ideas. I was wearing flip-flops. She looked down, looked up, and asked, “Can you walk up that hill?” It was a steep hill, the way San Francisco hills go. I said that I was up to it. We cut through Chinatown, went up, turned left, kept walking. When we reached the big cathedral on the top of the hill, she said, “This is it, where we are going.”

Grace Cathedral.

It was near-evening. There were but a handful of people inside. Four a capella singers. Some stray groups of tourists. Someone official. We looked at the art, we felt the expanse of the space, but my young blogger friend had not brought me here to see the sights. She’d brought me here for healing. “We’re going to light a candle for your mother,” she told me, for I’d written a book about a daughter coming to terms with a mother’s dying, a book fueled by my own mourning. A book is public. Sadness is often private. There my young friend stood, offering to share the sadness with me.

We each took a candle. We stood above the sands and lit our flames. I remembered my mother, and my friend imagined me remembering, and there is kindness in all of this that doesn’t fade.

~Beth Kephart

[Noetic Profile]

FAKE!