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life-time. By that I mean, people whose world I’d never enter, but for some reason or other our paths would cross for a moment.
One was a gang leader whose name I’ve since forgotten, but someone I’ll never forget. It was one of those moments when racial hatred was turned into another kind of communication between one individual to another, hatred turned into respect. From that moment, he’d show up from nowhere in my work as a si^ pervisor in a boy’s club and help me discipline the little ones.
Another time, a gentleman I’d see, who I admit didn’t look like he’d changed clothes in quite a while, used to play an instrument at the metro stop where I’d go to work. He was so good you felt it way only right to leave money in the cup in front of him.
Then for the longest while he disappeared. His music was much missed. Then, when my husband and I were walking in another part of the city, I saw him. I yelled something like, “Hello, we’ve missed you. Where have you been.”
Of course, since I’d never met him, he didn’t know me, but something in his face said that having someone miss him was a new experience. He pulled back his outstreched cup and we exchanged a few pleasantries of the day. I’ve not had that feeling of regarding a stranger as a good friend very often.
The particulars of this next account are not my own, but what someone told me. I’ve added it to my list of friends in Barney’s world.
After months of not sleeping, a man gave an account to his fiiend of a reoccuring nightmare of seeing the face of an enemy he’d shot in a war. The nightmare was hearing again and again what his enemy said to him before he died, “I forgive you.”
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