We all hold each other’s lives in our hands

Am at the cemetery, listening to Tori Amos,” she texted me.

“What are you doing at the cemetery?” I texted back.

“Enjoying the weather,” she replied, with an umlaut-enhanced ‘u’ for a smiley face.

I joined her there. It was not a day for being friendless. Most of the time, we have little choice in the matter; I was happy to be fairly near, and free.

We sat in her car and listened to Tori. “You do know,” I said, “that Tori Amos made albums after ‘Little Earthquakes’?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, turning the volume up a notch. We listened appreciatively to Tear in Your Hand for the second time. After a while she turned it down again and looked at me. “You have a strange expression on your face,” she observed. “Stranger than usual, I mean. What were you thinking?”

“I was just remembering something I did when I was very young,” I told her. “Something I did for what seems now to be no reason at all.”

“As opposed to the purpose-filled activities of your current everyday life,” she said, clearly amused. I politely told her to shut it.

“This was before I even entered grade school,” I continued. “I was attending a little kindergarten school in our neighborhood—I remember the outside walls of our small school were red brick, and veined with ivy; I remember it was near our local parish.

“Our days were spent filling up our activity books and playing and napping and learning songs and things, and I remember never really liking any of it very much; I would much rather have been at home, watching cartoons.

“One recess period, I was sitting on a bench in the long narrow hallway that linked all the classrooms, and some of my fellow kindergarteners were running back and forth in some game of improvised tag. Back and forth, back and forth, a bunch of children chasing each other, yelling like maniacs. As I said, the hallway was narrow, and as these kids ran past me I could have just reached out and brushed my hand against a speeding shoulder or leg. I was suddenly possessed by an insane impulse, and I closed my eyes, and thrust my right leg straight out in front of me.”

“Oh, wow,” she said.

“The splat that followed was louder than I expected it to be,” I continued. “I had tripped one of the runners, and he had gone down, face first. Immediately I was surrounded by angry faces, mostly other kids my age, but with one or two adults among them. I remember being calm and unrepentant, though slightly worried that I would get into trouble. Anyway, for some reason, it all blew over and I wasn’t punished. The adults probably thought I was young and didn’t know what I was doing. Besides, the boy I had tripped was a little surprised, but unbruised, and he was soon running around again.”

“Well, remind me never to go sprinting in your vicinity,” she said.

“And then—just now—I thought of a book I read a year or two ago, a woman’s memoir. This woman’s face had started swelling up when she was a child, after a baseball accident: the swelling had not gone away, and she was eventually brought to the hospital, and diagnosed with the cancer that would alter the rest of her life. She had written about how it had eaten away the bones under her face, and how her whole life had been an ordeal—going to surgeons and getting operated on, and worse, getting stared at and shunned because of her unusual appearance. What if, I thought, the baseball hitting her face had somehow catalyzed the cancer? Some cancers, I’ve heard, grow from scar tissue. What if she had never been hit? Might she have lived a normal life?

“And what if something similar had happened to that boy I had tripped? What if he had not been able to just brush himself off and go on playing as if nothing had happened? What if, in that moment of idiotic impulse, I had changed the rest of his life, saddled him with the burden of disfigurement or disability? What could I say to him now, aside from a pitiful and insufficient ‘sorry’? I couldn’t even give him an explanation.”

My cemetery companion stared at me with something that was not unlike pity, mixed with a dash of WTF.

“I think,” I said, “We don’t always fully appreciate how it’s not just our lovers and loved ones, not just people who are close to us, who can alter the rest of our years, send us spinning in new, uncertain directions. Complete strangers, for no reason, have that power. We all hold each other’s lives in our hands. It’s not a comforting thought.”

“God, you’re a lot of fun to be around,” my friend said. Then she started her car.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“In the direction of ice cream,” she said. “Only you could make a cemetery depressing for me.”