Little Vignettes

It Is Well With My Soul - Amy Grant (mp3)
Stay for a While - Amy Grant (mp3)

The condensation on my can of root beer, outside in the muggy weather. A drop rolls down, growing in size and gaining speed until it pools at the bottom.

Across the table at a poorly-lit bar, the look from a friend, whose eyes say everything because they say, without the need for words, "I understand you... and yet I remain your loyal friend."

Girls playing Two-Square, and one girl keeps screaming for do-overs and rules changes, but the other two patiently tolerate her. For love of the game, or kindness? Does it matter?

A woman's voice, projected through a computer from New Hampshire, shows me something amazing and new, and I'm continually reminded that technology advances with two or three positive atoms for every negative one.

Two women in their 70s stand outside a church entrance, embracing one another over news of a friend who died earlier that day. It looks like they are holding one another's frail bodies up, but then they separate, and you realize they're stronger than the hulkiest teenagers.

An older acquaintance, in a moment of inebriated freedom, admits he's held a grudge against one of his teachers for more than 40 years. And you realize you can't really predict when or how most grudges come about; you only know that once they set in, they're harder to remove than blood stains on cotton.

A crow chases a squirrel down a tree and across several dozen yards, and you wonder if the squirrel knows the crow is just screwing with it.

The face of my daughter on a computer screen as she sits 180 miles away in North Carolina, a beautiful face with a thousand different expressions. And although my phone calls with her rarely last more than a few minutes, I look up and realize we've Skyped for 12 minutes and counting, and I don't really want to say goodbye because my eyes are still eagerly and hungrily soaking her in.

At a stop light, a young couple pull up in a dirty, dented beat-up clunker with plastic covering one of the backseat windows. He looks left at the preppily-dressed guy on a scooter, shakes his head, smiles, and shouts out the window, "Four wheels move the body, but two wheels move the soul."

Three men, all around 40, stand beside a hospital bed wherein lies an 85-year-old man. They have watched maybe 100 UNC basketball games together in the past decade. The elderly man is rehabilitating after a stroke. He chokes up as he attempts to express his appreciation.

Amy Grant shows up on your iPod as you shuffle your collection, and a blast of pictures and flash-memories from 25 years ago flitter through your mind like old Super-8 film. The cheesy glee of it all is almost enough to buckle the knees.