How the Light Gets In WINS in NYC!

How the Light Gets In WINS in NYC!

I almost didn’t attend the 2020 Audie Awards Gala in New York City. The ticket to the event at Guastavino’s in Manhattan would cost as much as the trip itself. And we’re building a house and raising three daughters whose financial needs have increased with age.

But something inside of me really, really wanted to go, even if it didn’t make sense. 

One day later, Oasis Audio, who’d published How the Light Gets In, offered me a ticket at their table, and I knew I had my answer. I bundled a deal on Priceline and dug in my closet for the red chiffon dress from Anthropologie I’d purchased for $7.99 at a thrift store. 

Everything about the trip was magic. I arrived in NYC around 10 on Monday morning, dropped my over-sized purse off with the bellhops at the Crowne Plaza on 49th & Broadway, switched out my fringe boots for sneakers, and explored and people-watched until 2 p.m. 

In those four hours, I fell in love with the Big Apple. I had lunch while sitting at a wooden table in the calm, sunlit center of glittering Times Square. I walked ten blocks up to 59th, got a matcha latte at a quaint French café, and entered Central Park.

I watched a stooped, white-haired grandpa stop pushing a pram to peel back the blue blanket and check on his grandchild. I smiled while eavesdropping on two young mothers, who were talking about spit up and cluster feeding their babies so they would sleep through the night.  

I saw a suited man sitting on a bench and reading a novel, Cowboy King. I heard a mother call out to her child, “Don’t touch that! It’s dirty!” and turned to see a black-haired toddler patting a trashcan. A weary busker stood beneath the Dipway Arch and played “A Tisket, a Tasket” on his saxophone as parents pushed children on swings and horses pranced by while pulling their carriages.

The citizens of New York (excluding a few airport personnel) were kind, even if some viral fear was evident by people of every nationality wearing masks.

Once, waiting in the crush on the sidewalk—steam sieving up through the storm drain and taxis and cars fighting to make their way down the congested street—I overheard a man talking to his friend about storing up nonperishable items like lentils, beans, and rice.

A homeless man with a grizzled beard yelled to a street vendor selling Greek fare, “That virus. It’s gonna get me, Man!”

The last time I’d felt this sharp level of awareness and consuming love was before, during, and after my husband’s 2019 brain surgery at Vanderbilt. My heart was raw and wide open, and I had wanted to hug every single person I met, whether in the hospital or at the coffee shop where I would go in the mornings to get my bearings for the day. 

And then I understood that the entire world has become a hospital. We are desperate people walking its corridors with one common goal in mind: survive.

From the comedian and DJ who’d sat at my table in Times Square and joked about corona to the woman who’d scrubbed her hands beside me at the airport sink, and we smiled at each other in the speckled mirror and she said, “They told us to wash our hands!” we were being brought together by fear, yes, but also by love.

And to think I almost hadn’t gone.

It wasn’t just the coronavirus that had brought anxiety but also the trip we’re taking as a family this summer, visiting four different countries in two months. My life, at home, was smaller but predicable. Predictability was easier to control. Exploring and venturing beyond my box was not.

Then my plane sliced through the clouds hovering over New Jersey, and I could see acres and acres of storybook mansions with tennis courts, kidney pools, and circle drives. And I thought to myself—this is what we’re working for?

All our lives, we’re fighting to accumulate possessions that could be gone in a moment.

I discovered this was all too true when I awoke on Tuesday morning after How the Light Gets In won a 2020 Audie Award the previous night. Nashville and the small town next to us had been struck by an EF4 tornado that, we would later learn, had been on the ground for fifty miles.

I tried calling my husband but couldn’t get through. My sister-in-law thankfully had service and said they were all okay. But over the course of the next few hours, I understood the extent of the damage. Twenty-four people had lost their lives. A family of five from my daughters’ school had to climb out from beneath two stories of rubble.

But they had survived.

Walking to ground transportation at BNA in Nashville, I overheard two guys talking about the damage in the county I count as home. Three more people and I exchanged stories while riding the bus that would take us to Economy Parking Lot B. I was pulling on my seat-belt when my mom sent me a text saying the hospital where I’d given birth to all three of our girls was requesting O+ blood.

I started crying. I wiped my face before pulling up to pay at the gate. The window opened, and I asked the young man as I handed over my card, “Is everything okay where you’re from?”

He nodded. “But I heard it’s pretty bad further out.”

I-40 between Nashville and Knoxville looked like a war zone. Trees stripped and twisted; ground, roots, and rocks churned like butter. Houses flattened or with exposed roofs. Every creek I passed had become a gleaming river spread out into the fields where hunkered cows grazed.

I remembered a man in New York guessing I was from Nashville when I’d commented on his dog. He’d looked right in the eyes and asked if everyone back home was okay.

I remembered the grandpa stopping pushing the pram to check on his grandchild. Or the man in the JKF airport who’d put on a mask when I choked on water and coughed.

We are all so desperate to protect and survive. We carefully gather and build our lives with toothpicks and straw, knowing that it could all be gone in a moment. So, we hold on tighter, but the assets we’ve obtained run through our hands like water.

And yet, the ripple effects of kindness will not end.

People across the nation are flooding to our small town to help. The old Hobby Lobby parking lot yesterday was crammed with volunteers. The mayor had to send out a notice that tornado victims have received the maximum of clothing and soup.

In the teeming hospital corridors of the world, there are simple ways we can make a difference: smiling with our eyes, holding open a door for a stranger, offering directions to someone who is lost, picking up trash, letting someone step in front of us in line.

These are all simple, lasting ways we can reach out to others and let them know—You matter, so I care.

Together, let’s be drops in the bucket that pours down the hospital corridors of the world.

How has kindness from strangers impacted your life?