I’d saved a baggie of the store’s shattered window glass, broken during the protests of the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, always meaning to make something with the chunks. But what?
Five years later, I am wiring them to the God’s eyes I’m making to hang on the fence of the micro-park next to my workplace. Fractured, they make reflections in the eyes.
Yesterday, a day off, I was sitting in the backyard making these. I’d been hearing sirens all morning—we’ve now joined other US cities (nearly forty) that have experienced a school shooting. The grade school is a mile-and-a-half south of here (and George Floyd Square, the same to the east).
A young man came by, carrying a bundle of long-stemmed carnations. He walked toward me, holding out a spray of white carnations—“For you.”
“Oh!” I said, “You’re making me cry. I’m just making these God’s eyes to give away too – – would you like one?”
Thank you, he said, but I should keep them for someone else. He walked on—I saw him give flowers to a woman and her little girl—and then out of sight.
It shocked me, on this terrible day— this kindness from a stranger. When I do such a thing, I feel it is minuscule, and in terms of real-politik, I guess it is. But being on the receiving end, I felt it as enormous.
I put the flowers in a vase and kept them near me until bedtime, and then I moved them to the bookshelf by my bed.
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