My attention lifts off my morning newspaper like the steam rising from my coffee cup. It floats out of my living room window and onto my quiet neighborhood.

She stands about 4 1/2 feet tall. He towers over her, his thin, lanky frame covered in loose-fitting green coveralls. He must be at least 6 feet tall. A steady beat of a smooth R&B melody drifting out of the large green garbage truck’s open door like a cool breeze on a hot summer day. The beat is subtle and steady, like a metronome for the moment.

The scene was familiar. Every week he comes. Every week she waits. Every week she hands him a plastic bag filled with things growing in her backyard, from her trees, some persimmons, or oranges, or maybe lemons, and pomegranates. During the height of the Covid pandemic they would wear masks when they met in the middle of her driveway. Today they bump elbows, but the masks are now somewhere at the end of the line, piled high on a landfill, no longer part of the ritual of their weekly meeting.

Today they bump elbows…She understands him. He understands her.

My neighbor is a Japanese woman at least 80, maybe even 90, years old. He, is a garbage man, a working man, who takes a moment out of his busy schedule hauling our weekly refuse to connect with his friend, the elderly Asian lady. When she speaks to me, I can hardly understand her through the thick accented English that lingers even after a lifetime of being an American. But he understands her; his smile is bright as the day is sunny. She nods and bows while gesturing with her hands. He nods and bows back. He speaks her language. She understands him. He understands her.
I don’t hear the words. I don’t need to hear the words. I see their bond through the canopy of my wisteria as I watch the scene outside my front window. I begin to cry tears of joy. I am suddenly filled with an incredible sense of awe at being an invisible witness to such a perfect yet, improbable connection between these two people.

I look back down at the newspaper sitting on the table in front of me. Drought, war, Covid -19 still ravaging communities, and billionaires getting their kicks flying into outer space. The headlines disturb me. The bathtub rings around the reservoirs, like rings around a fallen tree. How can this planet survive? Fish are drowning in the puddles of toxic waste. When will our civilization cease to exist in this overheated place? Water is life. Water is evaporating. Water is gone.

The next page has a large picture of people wading in a pool to cool off in a place called “Drytown” somewhere in California, where the temperatures hit 107 in the shade. They look like human water lilies bobbing up and down in plastic inflatable lifesaving rings in chlorinated man-made ponds with concrete walls to keep in the little water we have left.

…no spectators for the Olympic Games in Tokyo because the pandemic can’t be stopped, but the games must go on.

I turn the page. I read no spectators for the Olympic Games in Tokyo because the pandemic can’t be stopped, but the games must go on. I flash back to memories of attending five Olympic Games as a volunteer, a journalist, and a spectator. The roar of the crowds still resonates deep inside me as if it were yesterday. The collective energy of a universal love connected the watching and the competitors and the collective breath-holding as the athletes put their entire blood, sweat, and sometimes tears into pushing their bodies to the limit.
I close the paper, but the front page screams out at me. Images of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spacecraft successfully flying 53 miles above the earth’s surface. NASA says that qualifies for outer space. Why do this? Because they can. Branson said it was 99.9% beyond his wildest dreams. What are those dreams? A life-changing experience? Is it the price tag or actually the experience that is life-changing? People will pay $250,000 to take a flight above it all in order to look back down at us. Just imagine how $250,000 could give decades and decades of food and shelter to millions of people down here on earth.

The small perfect moments that I witness daily down here on earth have a big impact on my well-being…

The small perfect moments that I witness daily, down here on earth, have a big impact on my well-being, and many of them are free. Do I really have to fly into space when I can see a flower growing through the crack on the concrete sidewalk? Or I see my two dogs licking each other’s muzzle and smiling? Or the joy when I see a hummingbird feeding from the sweat nectar inside the orange bird of paradise blooming outside my bedroom window? Or when I witness the smile on the face of a neighbor’s 4 year old riding her bike without training wheels for the first time. Or when my octogenarian Japanese American neighbor bumps elbows with a tall, smiling black man.

The man in the green coveralls rolls her two garbage bins back behind her large gate so she can fill them up again. She closes the gate behind him. He walks to his truck and jumps back inside the cab and onto the driver’s seat with a smile and his bag filled with small things. He drives away with his humanity, and I close my newspaper.