I generally hate it when the StoryCorps segment comes on NPR in the morning. I’m on the elliptical, so I’m a captive audience. Can’t change channels. Just have to suffer through another boring slice-of-life segment.
I was feeling the same way this morning as some 96-year-old woman prattled on about her life. But I was completely floored when she rippled through this truly transcendental close:
“We never know what diseases are going to catch up with us. It’s amazing the things that people can live through when they have to. So you get through it, and you get through almost anything. And you live to be 96, and sometimes you wonder why. But then when you look up at the blue sky, you think, it’s gonna be alright.”
Wow. The parallelism is almost biblical or Whitmanesque. I stopped churning away on the elliptical and just stood there, astounded by how profound it was.
… in the strangest of places, if you look at it right.