Ordinary Lives

Introduction: One morning, driving out towards the main road of our suburban community, I glanced at the other people in their cars coming out of the neighborhood. I didn't just see regular commuters as I would have many years ago. Instead, I saw a class of people-working middle-class-not just on their way to work but on their way to make a living, engage in their daily struggles to pay the bills: the credit card, the car, the mortgage loan, what have you, day after day, for years ahead of them. Like I did for decades. Lately, I've had many such 'insights' of people, places and events. I see things now as if through the lens of a mobile camera. I could zoom in and out on one of those commuters and see the whole life story of the fellow from beginning to end: childhood, high-school and college, entry-level job, career job, marriage, family, divorce, marriage, so on and so forth. Amazing how I could now see through the whole life cycle of these people. Now that I'm free of all the cares they're trying to cope with like I did. All the worries about becoming jobless, running out of money, getting seriously ill and having no health insurance; all the politics, the sniping, the cliques, the assholes, the back-stabbing, deadline and pressure in the office. I don't have to put up with any of that anymore. I've had my share. I did my time. I'm free! How I wish now, while I was out there years ago in that working-class commuter traffic, that I had the ability to see life as a whole the way I could now; to focus and zoom in and out; to see the forest beyond the tree. Well, I'm out of the forest now. I'm looking down at it, over it. It's a jungle down there alright, as some had said before. I have a few things to say about it myself, things that would give me a great satisfaction to share with you here, if I did nothing else before the whole scenery goes out of focus. Most of them involve me not always as a central character but one among the essential players. There are others where I am merely an observer, taking them in for their re-telling later on, as I am doing now. And, like a blossom falling in late spring, a haze in a midsummer evening, the yellow leaves of fall or the little feathers of snow adrift on a quiet winter day, each one comes back unheralded, back from a time in my past, in random, in no particular order but clear as the day I lived through it.