Crazy

As I was standing in line at the post office recently, a grey-haired bespectacled man, sixtyish, wearing generic Mervyn's style shirt and slacks, nothing odd to look at really, suddenly and loudly "went postal".

"I didn't fight for my country in the jungles of Vietnam just to lose my rights at the post office !" he yelled. A chilly blanket of silence fell over us, all eyes riveted on him, his gaze directed to a vague space between the counter and the ceiling, as we waited to see what would happen next.

He simply walked out of the post office leaving behind a palpable group sense of relief as we nervously grinned, shook our heads, with some of us muttering things like "what was that all about?"

I hate to imagine just how easily it could have turned into a violent confrontation if he'd been bearing his rightful arms, or a weapon of any kind, as proponents of carrying firearms in plain view would have it. As it was, and I'm grateful for it, the only arms were either bare or dressed.

I don't know what was upsetting him, exactly, but I have come to recognize the importance of compassion for the stranger. We simply cannot know what a person's history is just by looking. I believe I get better clues, though, by listening. You could just say the guy was nuts, poor fella. You could just say that guy's too nuts to be out in public and he should be locked up for everyone's safety, including his own. You could just say a thousand things, but the simplest I heard one day as we drove past a homeless man with a cardboard sign, begging for money at a stop light, was when my daughter prayed aloud: "God bless him, even if we don't give him any money today, we bless our brother anyway, amen."

There are days when this same daughter makes me plain crazy and then there are days when I'm just crazy about her.