Meals on Wheels – Month Seven

Another clear, early fall day with a high blue dome that went on out over earth’s subtended arc!  Atlas grinned down on us as Erin and I were at it again.  This was the last time she would help me before school’s grimly closing doors swallowed her alive.

The route this time was short - 7 stops, but a with a new one thrown in.  New things thrown in means change and change means thinking.  I like contemplation much more than thinking so I passed on the thinking part and asked Erin to figure it out.  Meals On Wheels is a Zen thing for me - I zone out gliding from house to house watching the interesting cracks in the road and what grows or crawls in them.

There is sprig of 'Phragmites communis x. australis' growing between the curb and the asphalt along Alden Road.  

I was stunned to see it as this is what’s called by botanists a ‘facultative obligate’ wetland plant (came over in a ship’s hold in the 1800’s) and it’s found mainly in our huge and ancient Meadowlands.  Seeing this interloper pushing up through the interstitial boundary of asphalt and concrete in a hot subdivision far from cooling waters, sets the Zen mind humming.

How miraculous and vital life is, undeniably both fragile and durable - it will not be contained.  Indeed the rhizome of  this simple plant will tear the pavement apart eventually.  The steady division of minute cells aggregates enormous forces that change the world.  It’s been happening for uncounted aeons and will happen for aeons yet.  Regardless of the travails of man, economy, politics, religion, social unrest - the small compass of human endeavor, the subtle forces of nature continue immutable.  In the present seemingly wild human world, it calms the spirit to know this natural constant is at work.

The nice people we deliver today are as durable in their own way, too and their grateful smile Erin so easily absorbs casts wide a radiant glow of humanity and hope.  With our own dividing cells we can cause a huge force of good in the world.  This Club and Rotary are like those roots - an amazing engine of change!  Think of us as connections expanding through the tarmac of ignorance and hate, breaking apart and reducing that toxic monolith to fragments of new understandings.

You just have to put yourself in the cracks between the road and the curb.