Can I Get a Witness?

Lately I've been having the kind of days when your shoulders feel heavy and tasks like not being able to open a jar of salsa make you want to burst into dramatic Disney-princess tears. For no particular reason, lately I kinda can't get a grip. But one day last week as I was driving home from work feeling tense and unreasonably melancholy, I got stuck behind a slow Fed Ex truck on Monaco Parkway, and I thought, "Of course this would happen to me!" And then the truck started to slow down for no reason, and I threw my hands in the air with frustration like a real diva. Then I watched as the truck driver extended his arm out of his window and offered a homeless person on the side of the road the rest of his Popeye's chicken. The homeless person accepted the food, smiled, and the driver sped up with the rest of traffic.

The whole transaction lasted 10 seconds at most, and a week later I can't stop thinking about it. It's not because it was such a profound act of generosity; the chicken was probably cold and leftover and the whole event was fairly unremarkable. But that quick less-than-10-seconds took me out of my head and out of my world, and I'm grateful to have been a witness to someone else's experience. I wonder what other things I could see if I stopped worrying so much about my shoulders and jars of salsa.