Sub-title: What is Your Truth?
Sitting in the Union Train Station in Denver, waiting on Amtrak to take me home, provided me ample time to people watch. Every socio-economic level is represented on the money- spectrum in that building. From those who enter with all their belongings on their backs to find shelter from the winter elements, to those decked out in the most expensive coats and boots and jewels money can buy.
I chose my seat carefully. Across from a beautiful white Pit Bull/Boxer mix. She was lying on someone’s coat on the floor. She was being petted by a young man who met the description of a person in the first half of the aforementioned sentence.
I watched him gingerly rub her ears, her eyes her neck, her tummy, her legs, and her paws. She responded with a gentle thump of her tail and looked up at him with big brown loving eyes. It was apparent they were connecting with each other on that level of unconditional love that fur babies lift us humans up to with no words involved.
His eyes met mine, and I said that he had a beautiful dog. He just shook his head no, then pointed to the lady in the next chair. I then noticed the leash tethering her to the dog.
She was dressed in a hippie-chic style. More hippie than chic. I liked it. She was more than happy to explain that ‘Baby’ did not like sleeping on cold floors. And that it was her coat she was lying on to keep her happy. All this time, the young man continued to love Baby. And Baby reciprocated. I could almost feel a positive, warm energy wafting across to me as Baby nudged the young man each time he stopped petting her. There was a soft smile on his face that grew into a large grin with each nudge.
I looked down to locate my train ticket buried deep inside my purse, and when I looked up, the young man had quietly disappeared.
I never saw him again. Dressed in his tattered clothes with a disheveled ponytail atop his head and a scruffy three-day old beard. He was just gone. He never spoke a word, but the conversation he had with Baby didn’t need any words. I wondered how long it had been since some human had hugged him. Had told him he was a good person and was loved. I guess maybe Baby had done that.
I will never see Baby and her human again.
As I sit on this train thinking about those fleeting ten minutes, I wonder why that experience made such an impact on me, so much so that I wanted to share it.
A quote from Claude Monet comes to mind… ”You have to know how to seize just the right moment in a landscape instantaneously because that particular moment will never come again, and you’re wondering if the impression you got was truthful.”
Those ten minutes might be considered a landscape. A landscape that was painted in my mind and will forever stay there. The truth lies in how I processed those ten minutes. The truth that I will always hug you good-bye. The truth that I tell my loved ones, “I love you,” every day.” Because those special people in my life might just quietly disappear, just as the young man did this morning at that train station.
So now, you have painted your own landscape just from reading this.
What is your truth?
