Renewal.

(This is a story I wrote some time ago, from my time in Singapore)

The old man pushes an ancient shopping cart along the street in front of my rented terrace house. His body is bent; bony shoulders stooped under the weight of time. He and his cart have seen better days.

He calls out to each home he passes in a cracked and warbling voice, asking us to bring out old newspapers. His mission today, as always, is to deliver his load of paper to the nearby recycling center. I know that given his glacial pace each trip will take more than an hour, cart by laborious cart.

He is a throwback to an earlier Singapore, a Singapore nearly forgotten in this island-state’s headlong rush to the future. Yet there he is defiantly pushing his cart of paper, showing us that he has preserved both his usefulness and his pride. As he shuffles along I can hear the gentle slap of his slippers on the pavement, the squeak and rattle of his rusty pushcart and the tremolo of his voice – a timeless chorus of renewal sung against the backdrop of our recycled history.

One fine equatorial morning I leave the flat early to catch the bus to the University. I am halfway to the bus stop when I see the old man pushing his daily burden of papers up the road in front of me, and it seems to me that he has miscalculated and stacked his cart too high. I watch in dismay as his load slides off onto the street and lands with a series of audible thuds, restoring the sovereign state of gravity.

Something seems to go out of him then, as if the whole thing – the effort, the burden, the journey – has become too great to bear. He sits down at the curb and places his head in his hands, his posture a testament to life’s cruel mercies.

A young girl of no more than 11 or 12 years rides slowly by on her bike. She is wearing a blue middle school uniform common in Singapore. She slows to a stop, dismounts and begins to pick up the scattered papers, placing them quickly and efficiently back into the shopping cart, as if performing a common chore. She gives the cart a quick shake to insure against a repeat catastrophe. She then walks respectfully to the old man, offers her hand and helps him up. He stares down at her and smiles uncertainly as if agreeing to a new and unspoken contract. She pauses to review her handiwork – cart and man – mounts her bike and pedals off to a future at least as bright as the rising sun. She does not look back.

I am the only witness to this muted single-act life play. No more than a minute has passed yet it resonates with a kind of permanence outside the sweep of time. The old man places his hands back upon the cart and resumes his circadian duties, though it seems to me that he stands a little straighter. As do we all.

I cannot say how often such events occur around the world unreported in major media outlets. We have all seen the tricksters, the charlatans, and the self-important and it is easy to assume that those people are the mainstream; that if you roll back the curtain you will discover that deep down we’re all just faking it. Maybe we have become too cynical and suspicious to remember the many little acts that play it forward. Maybe you have seen such things or done such things or been on the receiving end of such things and forgotten them.

But I have not forgotten. I do not believe they are in any way random; rather, they are full of purpose, succinct and compelling – a bunch of imperfect Earthlings trying to get along as best we can. A pebble strikes a glassy pond and ripples roll out fated to touch distant shores. On an obscure Singapore street that morning I saw such a pebble fall.

All over the world life seems to happen when we least expect it, but in actuality life is happening all around us; second by second, deed by deed. It is in these little acts that perhaps we can take a measure of grace, and understand that this thing thought lost is forever found.