January 20, 2014

THE LAST WORD: First Impressions

last-word-imageA few years ago, in a hazardous winter storm that blanketed much of the country from Chicago to the Northeast, I found myself sitting in O’Hare Airport next to two people who could not be more disparate.

The young man to my right was barely 27, dressed in a fine suit and expensive shoes. He immediately pulled out his laptop and began working as soon as he sat down. More than once you could hear his agitated voice speaking into the Bluetooth device in his ear. “No, that is not acceptable,” he said. “I need those reports in as soon as I land. Get Peggy on it, she knows what she’s doing.”

The woman sitting across from me was probably the same age but weathered far beyond her years. Dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans, she seemed as if the long day in the airport had finally defeated her. Her 4-year-old was sleepy-eyed, but noticeably irritable, and not in any mood to sleep or to give her mother a break. With a bottle of orange juice in one hand, she clawed at her mother with the other as if she were trying to dig a hole in her sweatshirt.

“Clare, please stop that,” she pleaded. “What did I tell you? We will be home soon. Can’t you just please sit still for ten minutes?”

Occasionally, the man would look up from his laptop with what seemed like consternation on his face, as if he was growing increasingly irritated by this mother and child. Clare moaned and fidgeted, looking sullen and forlorn because she was not being entertained. Then Clare did the unthinkable.

Finally demanding attention from her mother, she took her open bottle of orange juice and threw it outward from the chairs. It landed just below the man’s laptop and splattered the bottom of his pants and his leather shoes. I sat there waiting for the inevitable eruption. He had been in hyper work mode since he sat down and now that singular purpose had been threatened.

Clare bounded out of her seat to retrieve her bottle while her mother quickly began to apologize for her behavior. She pulled Kleenex and moist wipes from her over-sized purse and handed them to the man, saying, “I’m so sorry. She normally isn’t like this.” Then Clare appeared next to the man, her doe-like eyes open and wet. “I’m sowwy,” she said. “Pwease fworgive me.”

What happened next still surprises me. The man set aside his laptop and looked directly at the girl. “You know, I have a girl about your age, too. Clare, right?” he said, looking up at the mother for her approval. She nodded quietly. He continued, “Clare, my daughter sometimes does things that need to be forgiven, so I have become really good at it. So, yes, I forgive you.”

Clare smiled a wide, toothy smile. “Yaaaay!” cried Clare aloud, and she began to dance around us. The man let out a chuckle deep from his gut, and Clare’s mother suddenly looked completely relieved and reenergized.

And suddenly, I found myself smiling, too — finally divorced from my preconceptions about a wrought-out mother and a headstrong, driven businessman. Such is the power of forgiveness when we let first impressions give way to grace.

Rev. R. Gabriel Pivarnik, O.P. is vice president for mission and ministry, director of the Center for Catholic and Dominican Studies, and an assistant professor of theology.