ISawArkansas

Tell you what, there’s a silver lining in this dark cloud full of submicroscopic infectious matter that’s hanging over the world.

Silver linings around clouds are hopeful signs, the upside of a dire situation. Songs have been written about accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative. Apparently, Eddie Hodges and Frank Sinatra believed there was a good possibility that an ant could move a rubber tree plant.

Pink Floyd sang “High Hopes” for eight-and-a-half minutes, artfully philosophical and vague, and a mastery of word-knack, but totally polar from Eddie Hodges’s and ‘Ol Blue Eyes’s version.

After weeks of being deprived of the life we took for granted, or were at least accustomed to, we have become more flexible in our way of getting out of bed and wondering, “Now what?”

Isolation isn’t for everybody, and forced isolation works for even fewer. But it has made a difference in people. We are kinder.

For instance, remember way back in February when everybody who had a car would get in it and drive somewhere? Anywhere? Now we question the wisdom of even starting a car.

Remember that cult called tailgaters? I promise you, I haven’t been tailgated in more than a month, maybe two. Perlinda said the same.

It’s turtle season, and drivers know that a turtle is not going to amp up hysteria to get away from a car wheel the way a squirrel does. Driving slow-er is good for turtles tootling across the road.

Early yesterday morning I was driving on Hwy. K in McDonald County, Mo., and wouldn’t you know it, a school bus situated itself in front of me. I turned up the music and wondered who was going to school at a time like this.

It was a woman delivering meals to students who were at home. She’d stop the bus, turn on the flashers, extend the Stop signs, gather the meals, walk down bus steps with risers made for people still close enough to the ground that it wasn’t a problem, and hang three or four bags of hot food on a fence post or mailbox stud.

She did this every few hundred feet for eight or nine miles.

It was peppy to chance upon this woman. She had a spring to her step, she didn’t look like she was doing anything she didn’t want to do, and she was making a difference to families with kids.

It would’ve been too rude to honk, pass, get indignant or start shooting, so I stopped when she did and watched her work.

When she turned down a dirt road, I wanted to give her an appreciative double toot, but the horns on little Japanese cars are so embarrassing. They sound like you ran over a startled, uncommitted mouse.

I waved and got one back.

Two months ago, I’ll bet that woman never thought she’d be spending her day delivering meals to the kids she usually drove to school.

But she was.