It was a
miracle
Not an
earth shattering
Water
walking
Miracle
But a
hunger saving
Dignity
raising
One
small life
Kind of
miracle
But it
was
A real
Reason
defying
Couldn’t
be anything else
True to life
My own
small earth
Shattering
And put
back together
Miracle
It
happened on that same hot, dusty road in the middle of Eden (what better place
for a miracle?) Here are the events of the 22nd of April when I
‘d calculated down to my last 1000franc, just enough to get me to my Wednesday
tutoring job, which happens to be in the cartier called Eden.
Near the
middle of the month my calculations get ever more exact. By the 22nd,
I have everything down to a near science. Except life doesn’t always run by
science and inevitably there is one thing or another that insists on ruining my
careful plans. And so one thing or
another had happened and I was on my way to a cash paying job to get me through
the rest of the week.
Except
when I approached the house, I found the door shut and everything silent. I
knocked. I waited. I knocked again. After ten or so minutes I figured one of
those un-plannable things had happened in someone else’s life and turned to
make the trek home.
I was
only slightly panicking, thinking of the second job I was supposed to go to and
my friend’s art opening that I couldn’t miss. I thought of breakfast and lunch
and transportation to school for the next few days. I walked down the hot, dusty
road trying to imagine a solution for it all. My mind kept returning to the house. The car had been in the
driveway. And I could imagine the kids inside, how they sometimes got lost in that
big house full of rooms that seems to swallow up all the life and appear so
silent.
I took
out my phone, knowing it had been out of credit and useless to me for days, and
tried to call anyway. Instead of the predictable “You don’t have sufficient
credit to make this call” I heard a woman’s voice on the other end. She was
there! After confirming that the family was, in fact, at home and just hadn't heard my knocking, I turned around and headed back. I immediately tried to call
my second Wednesday job- just to confirm that we were on- and received the
insufficient credit message I’d been expecting moments before.
There’s
no explaining why that one call went through- the one I needed to make the next
few days bearable, to save me from explaining to my friend or to my boys why
I’d once again let them down.
Oh but the
joy and relief I felt was enough to assure me I’d experienced my own small
miracle right there in Edan. Mash’allah.
