Compassion in a Keychain

Being at home causes me to usually be unneccesarily reminiscent. I didn’t grow up in this house, any house in particular, which probably emphasizes why I save scraps and shards of notes, doodles, irrelevant paraphernalia that any decent person would have thrown out several moving boxes ago. I don’t have any secret hidaways or name carvings in the banister here, because my parents moved when I was a senior in high school, and even then, I still didn’t live here; so, I keep things. Lots of little things that add up to a big box of things that I store in scattered drawers and corners of my room.

I don’t go through the drawers every time I’m home; sometimes I read old journals, intending to throw some of them away (because they usually only have a couple entries, a few if I was really persistent for a week or so), but I can’t ever bring myself to do that.It is so hard for me to throw away something I’ve written , maybe because of my fascination with words, I don’t know, but trinkets I am more apt to chunk. Tonight, I was going through a desk drawer of mine, and I found a keychain, made of plastic pink and white beads, strung on a few strips of black cord, linked together by a silver heart that looks like a bolo tie ornament. To anyone else, it would appear at best to be an old childhood artifact that probably came from agitatingly begging for quarters to feed an arcade machine.

I was a senior in high school, and because of the perks given to us as the eldest, my friends and I were headed off-campus for lunch. At one of the stop lights by the freeway, there was a man selling keychains, and maybe something else, but that’s all I remember. I kept staring at him from the passenger seat, my friends never noticed him, and I couldn’t work up the nerve to hand my friends a couple of dollars so they could roll down their windows and buy me a keychain and some peace of mind. I admired him for the attempt to work instead of ask for a handout, and I wanted him to know that someone recognized it. But I never said a word, and we kept on driving. We went to lunch, then back to school, and it was all I could think about. When my sister and I left school, I told her we had to do something; it was crazy, but we had to—we had to find him. We drove the loop around the freeway, and when i spotted him, he began to move. It took several lights before we finally caught up with him, and my joy was hard to contain when I rolled down my window and held out the few dollars. I did my best to throw in a “thank you!” before he walked down the road, hardly recognizing my elation and certainly not understanding the previous 2 hours that I had spent thinking about him.

The day went on, my conscious was calmed, and life continued. I haven’t thought about that man, or that keychain, in years. It has been tucked away in a drawer with all the other Things I don’t think about: old wallets, empty photo albums, faded receipts. Why is it that I cared so much for one day about this, and then let that compassion slip into a drawer of unused items? I pile up compassion and let it substitute for action. I don’t want that to be true, but moreover, I can’t let that be true. I struggle with what I want to do when I graduate, what kind of job I want to have, what kind of life I want to lead. Success is emphasized as a pre-requisite for employment after Vanderbilt—but what does success look like for me? Memories like this remind me I have stored up compassion for the people of the world (who really cries over a man peddling keychains off of MoPac in Austin?), and that compassion must be what drives my action. My heart breaks so easily, and while sometimes it is what creates the exacerbated pain I feel when I get hurt, it is also something I am learning is a gift the Lord has given me, an ability to see others sufferings and want to share in them. I want to pursue something that helps me to share in the pain of others, but also be able to bring about change. Maybe that’s why I am so interested in government, because I see a lot of people who want to bring about good to a world that has so much bad.

I promised long-winded, and delivered. Not to mention, probably confusing. But it flows in my head.