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Bangor Metro >  January-February 2007 >  See More

Illustration of half-moon cookies by Leslie Bowman

“Look at that!” the toddler in the blue puffy coat says, as he briefly pulls his face from the glass case filled with spinach pie and coleslaw, potato salad, to make sure his parents will not miss out on this most amazing thing in life, and then he quickly presses his face back against the glass.

He is staring at the mountain, actually the two big mountains, of cream cheese—one plain and one with sun-dried tomato and herbs—that are staples at Bagel Central. I love lots of things about this place—its location, its open space, its many long windows looking out on the street, its food, including the cream cheese—but what I love most are its people, both the ones at the tables and the ones who work there. Everyone gets that it’s OK to be a kid here; everyone loves the energy of their voices, their antics, their naturalness, their interest in all things not them. They are paying attention.

Paying attention is something we spend our entire lives unlearning. We arrive with the paying attention skills intact, everything we need to take the world in, in all its entirety. (No, I don’t mean paying attention to the rules established by parents and society and communities and planetary organizations. I mean paying attention to who we are, where we are, how we are.) From that day forward, we can then spend our days allowing those skills to support us.

But it’s not usually how we play it out—until we hit a point in life when something jars us (let’s face it, folks, it’s usually a negative) and we have three options: The something is so overwhelming (sickness, death, loss), it nearly kills us and we are weighted down, or we get through it and return to our lives, or a gauze is lifted and we begin the practice of being present for every single moment in every single day. Just like this little guy ogling the cream cheese—and not because he wants it, but because he sees it just as it is: in the case, untouchable, creamy white, beautiful.

I recognize this little one from a few weeks ago. He was fixated on shifting the small movable signs that clung to the case, identifying the pie and slaw and salad. Up until that day I had never even known the words could be moved. His parents and the server let him rearrange every one, reveled in his excitement, as they do this day, too, as we all smile and comment on the magnificence of the cheese mountain.

What a child gets, and we often lose, is that our lives are filled with amazing people and events and things, sounds, movement, opportunities. And that the more we see, the more there is. And so in this new year, I wish us all the willingness to pay attention—and that when we notice the moving of words, the thrill of the cheese mountain, we recognize it for what it is at that moment, the most amazing thing in life. I am convinced it will create a better world.

Annaliese Jakimides is a writer and visual artist. Her work is included in the recently published anthology The Other Side of Sorrow.