JCK-at-large SITE

I get a little tired of being reminded that we are called to be “salt and light” in this tasteless and dark world.  Of course this has never been more necessary. “You are the salt of the earth.”  But what about sweetening that which is sour?  Who is going to be the sugar of the world? 

It was in the Metro parking lot that I learned more about this.  I was pulling out of my space when a senior citizen dropped her oversize Murano into reverse and slowly backed right into my passenger side.  Of course I saw the rear tail lights descending upon us like a cloud of doom, and I laid mightily on my horn.  But it seemed this driver could not hear — along with not seeing all that well.

She came to a halt with an extended crunch. I jumped out of the Buick and ran around to survey the damage.  One broken mirror snapped right off.  A long crease along the door, Murano blue.  A bend in the trim.  It wasn’t pretty.  

I was reaching for my cellphone and preparing to jump up and down when the culprit appeared on the scene.  She was a little lady of five foot tall or so, heavy rimmed glasses with an auburn tinge to match her hair, pulled back in a bun. She was something like late seventies, I guess, or perhaps — horrors — even eighty. Both hands were pressed against her cheeks.  Big tears welled up in her eyes.  Her mouth was moving but no sound was emitting. She was trying to find her voice. 

Then I heard this other voice speaking: “Oh this is nothing, dear… we can fix this.”  Sure enough the voice was mine!  “Let me just get out of your way…”  Post haste!, I was thinking. “We’ll be fine. You take care of yourself and have a good day.”  And I gave her something like a hug.  

She made her way shakily back to the Murano – and I jumped back in behind the wheel and made for the exits.

“Didn’t you get her insurance?” someone asked.

“How could I do that… Didn’t you see she was coming apart?  And where’s her family?  How could they let her drive that oversize grocery wagon?”

It was a case of saving my salt — for when and if I caught up with her family — and spreading a little sugar.

“I’ve got a small job,” I said at the Body Shop.

“We do small jobs,” they said.  “Let’s get an estimate.”

Garrett did a walk around, asked for my ownership and waved me into his office.  

“It’s not going to be easy finding a new mirror for this baby,” he said.  “We can get a used one out of Quebec next week….”  He wrote up an estimate.  And I found out that my Metro incident was not exactly “nothing!” 

It was 19th Century poet Matthew Arnold, who raised the call for “sweetness and light” in his elegant essay, “Culture and Anarchy:” 

“If I have not shrunk from saying that we must work for sweetness and light, so neither have I shrunk from saying that we must have sweetness and light for as many as possible. Again and again I have insisted how those are the happy moments of humanity, how those are the marking epochs of a people’s life, how those are the flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive.  Only it must be real thought and real beauty; real sweetness and real light.”