In these troubled times of sickness and loss, of protest and division, it’s uplifting to read about positive actions, such as those I took for a dying friend, which I describe in my piece “To Melinda” (Fall 2020 Intima). Two other works in the Fall 2020 Intima also describe small positive acts that make a difference in people’s lives. Reading them eases our sense of helplessness by offering us hope.

In Cara Haberman’s excellent short essay “Being Seen,” the narrator, a pediatrician, arrives at her car after an “emotionally draining” day, feeling “hollowed out, empty.” Ms. Haberman describes her feelings in term of the bodily experience of them: “my hands remembered . . . my body found the energy . . . I put my head back and closed my eyes . . . tears gathering below the surface . . .” When she exits the hospital parking lot to drive home, the attendant observes her closely and waives the parking fee. The encounter is anonymous yet at the same time it feels personal, and the narrator is “flooded with a tremendous sense of being seen.”

Sophia Wilson’s poem “Homing Signals” also describes returning home, driving in the evening away from the city’s “pandemically fractured centre.” Wilson writes: “In all likelihood, nothing was going to happen/but a gathering of more darkness,” a line which captures the narrator’s difficult day, and also speaks to a sense of hopelessness in these dark times. Reflectors appear down the middle of the road:

Then, in the headlights, small rectangular pieces of plastic
along the tar-seal centre line lit up a luminous gold ribbon;
emblems of human practicality and intelligence,
the wish to keep others safe—

These “emblems” are described with the same level of detail as the physical sensations in “Being Seen,” and represent an act of kindness similar to that shown by the parking attendant. They embody society’s fundamental responsibility for its members’ safety, and guide the narrator home.

Small actions like these — whether on a societal level, like reflectors on a road, or on an individual level, like a waived parking fee — often go unnoticed or are quickly forgotten. Yet they bring us the sense of fellowship and safety that we need to get us through these dark times. As Wilson writes, they are:

ordinary as anything and
precious as earth-bound stars.

Priscilla Mainardi, a registered nurse, attended the University of Pennsylvania and earned her MFA degree in creative writing from Rutgers University. Her work appears in numerous journals, including Pulse - Voices from the Heart of Medicine, the Examined Life Journal, and BioStories. She teaches English Composition at Rutgers in Newark, New Jersey and has served on the editorial board of Intima since 2015. Her non-fiction essay “To Melinda” appears in the Fall 2020 Intima.