We Do What We See

The boy was 7 when the dad was in that hospital bed and he sat their sad but then the woman in all blue with the polka dot hat smiled and rolled him a green rubber ball. The boy passed it back and liked it. When he was 27, that boy drove by that same hospital, now rundown and empty with broken glass and boarded windows. He saw the closed sign and turned that hospital into a recreation center for sports, a gym filled with red, blue, polka dot and green rubber balls for kids like this one 5 year old girl to dodge and toss and catch.  The floor in that gym was all green grass turf and the girl loved how it felt and when she was 25, well that girl drove by an empty lot next to a nursing home with bumpy pavement and potholes and broken fences, and she built a green house on that lot, one with flowers and plants, birds and green grass for the nursing home community to visit to smell and see. Another girl was 16 when she pushed an elderly woman in a wheelchair inside that greenhouse, where she saw the worker fixing the birdhouse using tools and screws and patience. That girl applied to be a heart doctor and when she was 36, after many years in school, she stood inside an operating room at a hospital, fixing the heart of that boy who had built that gym. The boy was now 77 and nearing the end of his life and his granddaughter sat outside that OR watching the people go by and heard a song playing on the speaker overhead, and she hummed it just like her grandpa used to. “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy, when skies are gray…” The girl grew up and when she was 26 she visited the home of a family she did not know. The girl was brought into a living room sprinkled with flowers and plants and a green rug. A woman laid in a large hospital bed inside that living room, struggling to breathe, frail and pale, nearing the end of her life. The woman closed her eyes and remembered her time in that big gym with the green grass and rubber balls, and then that girl started to sing the song, and the woman smiled and with what little air she had, sang along, “…you’ll never know dear, how much I love you, please don’t take, my sunshine away…”  I am always amazed by the science of our behavior, the humanity of people across generations, and for as much as we change and evolve, how much we still do what we know, what we see, and what we hear.