Back when I was a child, before heading off to church, I’d wake up on Sunday mornings to a hearty breakfast and the comforting tones of Charles Kuralt—and later Charles Osgood—hosting CBS Sunday Morning, a 90-minute news feature program that was mostly what some may call “fluff” pieces, stories that didn’t divide and conquer like so many do today, no gotcha journalism, just profiles on art, culture, and interesting personalities from New York to Kansas and everywhere in between.
I’m sure I’m reflecting on it all through rose colored glasses, but it is a fond memory and one I was reminded of this evening.
Today was a different kind of “Sunday Morning.” Our garage door wouldn’t open, which meant we were unable to make it to Mass. But the Lord has a way of reaching us where we’re at and that serendipity can be wonderful.
After fiddling with it on my own for a bit, I reached for the only failsafe tool in my arsenal, the phone, and dialed the garage door company. Thankfully, they were open on a Sunday and told me a technician would be by between 4 and 6pm. Unfortunately, that meant we weren’t able to make it to evening Mass either, but again, the Lord has a way of reaching us where we’re at.
At around 5, Gabe (not his real name) showed up. With his long greying reddish hair pulled back into a ponytail and a pair of glasses, he did not fit the stereotype of your typical repairman and when he approached the door, something about his manner struck me, like we’d been friends for years, he a neighbor trotting over to fix my garage door.
But the wonderful oddity didn’t stop there. No, Gabe was that rare renaissance man who comes to perform a manual task only to reveal a penchant for quoting the modern classics and waxing profound.
Sure, it started off technically enough when he mentioned the average garage door gets used four times per day, to which I admitted that, with three kids, we used it more frequently than most as it was often our “front door”.
“These days, front doors are only for guests and Jehovah’s Witnesses,” Gabe bemoaned as we stood in my garage, then followed up with something about the slow death of community.
“That reminds me of something Orwell once wrote. Or was it Bradbury. Yes, Fahrenheit 451. The lack of front porches,” I replied.
At that, what started out as a minor home repair turned into a philosophy discussion, two bibliophiles discussing not just the torque force of the springs on my PDS 370, but the latest books we were reading, the excitement and trepidation of fatherhood, Hemingway, poetic versus terse prose, newspaper editors (we both wrote for the student newspaper in college) and heavy metal music.
This was what front porches were made for and this moment, although it was a Sunday evening, reminded me of the kinds of human interest stories that used to air on Sunday Morning. As I read the first draft of this reflection to my wife, I couldn’t help but hear the comforting tones of Charles Kuralt echoing in my head. A Postcard from North Idaho, as it were.
We didn’t make it to Mass this evening, but the fellowship Gabe and I shared was a small glimpse of the divine in the everyday. He shared with me that he and his wife were expecting their first child and how excited and maybe a little trepidatious he was. I shared with him a few insights from my fatherhood. The conversation was intermixed with garage door maintenance tips and the philosophy of leaving a lasting impact on the world. It was the type of spontaneous conversation that two strangers become friends, if even for a moment, were meant to have on a cool Sunday evening, the faint glow of the sun as it faded behind a row of ticky-tacky houses shedding a dim light on a bright conversation.
Gabe fixed my garage door and though I was close to a thousand dollars lighter in my bank account, the real value of the evening couldn't be measured in money or even foot-pounds, but in the rhyme and meter of the discourse.
This was a moment that could never be shared over social media or created by AI. This was humanity at its finest and its simplest. The meaning of life isn’t often revealed in some temple atop a mountain far away or in a leather-bound book found tucked away in the back shelves of an old library. The important moments for the vast majority of us are rarely the ones that will lead the nightly news or get their own chapter in a history book. The moments that form the core of our souls, the ones that are true in the truly philosophical notion of that word, are the ones that are more likely to have been profiled on Sunday Morning, not Tuesday evening, the ones that happen not on an international stage, but in a garage on a quiet street in a small town.
After I paid by bill (and Gabe bought a copy of my new novel), this renaissance man, this writer turned handyman turned sage, piled back into his truck and drove off as the last hints of dusk faded into darkness. A day that had started with a dark cloud of needed home repair had revealed the silver lining of a human interaction and, ironically and with a nod to Ray Bradbury, something that can happen not just on a front porch, but in a garage.
Godspeed, my friend, and I hope to catch you on the front porch of life again one day.
“No front porches. My uncle says there used to be front porches. And people sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn't want to talk. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned things over. My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn't look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn't want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong KIND of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think. So they ran off with the porches.”
- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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