Looking Foolish, Seeing Grace

I have now looked stupid in front of so many people I will never see again, I can just start laughing about it any time I want to.

There was the time I walked a whole block waving my arm behind my back trying to find my other sleeve.

The time standing in line that I dropped a bag of cookies but had my hands too full of milk to pick them up again, so I just moved them along between my feet like a penguin.

The time the clerk asks me to make exact change and I completely blank out as to understanding what amount she wants, so I just hold all my coins out for her to pick some.

The time I swiped my metro card and then got stuck in the turn stile and lost 14 rubles and ten minutes waiting for the card to work a second time.

The time I got stranded in an Estonian train station and couldn’t not cry.

The time I walked the wrong direction to check-out in the tiny confusing supermarket and was accused of shoplifting.

Dostoyevsky is sitting outside the grocery store, larger than life and granite. I want to just stop and talk to him for awhile, because I’m sure he doesn’t believe I was trying to shoplift. I’ll tell him that I had lived on this street for nearly two months before Vera pointed out to me the sign that says, “”The Brothers Karamazov was written in this building.” I’ll tell him I nearly fainted. I’ll ask him how he ever thought of such a work on this street, that I’d have written “how not to get run over at the traffic light outside my window.” Was it so very different? I’ll ask. Or did you just know how to look at it differently?

Then there was the time I had a box of shoes and two bags of clothes and I bought bread and milk and forgot to ask for a bag (they cost an extra three rubles), and the clerk wouldn’t sell me a bag after she’d rung up the food. So I tried to put half the clothes in with the shoe box and the food with the clothes - and out on the sidewalk the bags broke and there was me kneeling on the sidewalk, clothes and milk and bread spread out around me, laughing and trapped.

I had an overwhelming sensation that I needed the good Samaritan to walk by at that moment, and that God would send him, that everything was fine. Because I couldn’t stay in the middle of the sidewalk for the rest of my life for lack of a plastic bag, and I couldn’t do anything else. I felt like I was outside of my life watching a funny movie. And that God who forgave sins and parted seas couldn’t overlook the matter of a bag, and must have a bag from eternity past prepared to give me, a bag that He’d get to me somehow.

So I looked up, and there was a woman pulling a grocery bag out of her purse. “Wait, Sasha,” she said to her little boy. She held it open and I piled the clothes and groceries and broken bags into it. It felt as strong as the hand of God. “Thank you,” I said. She smiled and walked away. Then I started to cry for gladness, that the good Samaritan had stopped and I had seen her. That she had seen me, and seen what I was feeling, and known what she’d have wanted another to do for her, and done it. It was so very beautiful, I saw the whole world with hope that grace and compassion are still at work in it.

And when I go back to America, the first time a cashier thoughtlessly piles my groceries into free plastic bag after free plastic bag, I am going to kiss her.