A Thousand Years by Laura J. Oliver

My first trip to New Orleans is imprinted on memory like the aftermath of a flashbulb when you close your eyes. I was in my twenties. Before kids. Before dogs, even. We were staying in a really pretty Hyatt, with multi-floor interior elevators and garden cafes. During the day, we toured southern plantations, where, to recreate historical ambience, docents in pastel gowns drawled, “Can’t y’all just smell the cane fires burnin’?”

We could not smell the cane fires but nodded encouragingly. In the South, good manners are everything.

One soft September evening, as we were leaving the hotel in search of jambalaya, I glanced back across the massive lobby just as an elderly man in a rumpled suit teetered to the very top of a multi-story escalator, pitched forward, and began to tumble head over heels down the grillwork of the moving steps.

I stood transfixed. He didn’t cry out, which was surreal. Surely something flying through space should make a sound– but he cartwheeled towards the lobby in silence—for seconds, for minutes, for years.

When he hit the bottom and was ejected out onto the marble lobby floor, the spell was broken, and I ran to him, calling out for an ambulance. I knelt over his splayed body–his eyes open but dazed, uncomprehending— as blood seeped from his forehead. His glasses were bent askew but still on his face, as if the glasses had been in a car accident without him and would need to be taken to a body shop for repairs.

But no one called an ambulance. The hotel manager had countermanded my alarm until he could assess the situation. He was a corporate man with large eyes and a high forehead, well-versed in emergency protocol. Apparently, commercial establishments want to avoid flashing lights and emergency vehicles at their entrances.

Someone in the small crowd that had gathered speculated that the injured man was drunk, although I was thinking old. Did it matter? Did intoxicated mean he didn’t need help? I was 23 and had never had a drink in my life so I was uncertain. I also don’t think I’d ever tried to comfort a bleeding stranger.

I remember being embarrassed at the canceled ambulance as if I didn’t know my place. And it was true, I’d called out before I’d reached him, and my intention to help far outweighed any skills with which to do so.

This is often the case.

Last week, my grandchildren Maisy, Emerson, and I were heading to Five Below, where you can spend $50 in Below Five minutes, and a man delivering cases of water to some businesses on Melvin Avenue lost control of his dolly spilling water bottles all over the street just at the entrance to a major intersection.

The delivery driver was groping about in traffic for rolling bottles with cars veering dangerously around him in both directions. The first person to come upon him should have stopped traffic and gotten out to help, but since that person hadn’t, cars continued to squeeze past him attempting to make the light. I tried to stop but couldn’t pull over safely in the melee. Powerless to help, I was forced to drive on.

What do you do with the instantaneous desire to serve, which I think we all share, and the knowledge you can’t? I was meeting a friend for Happy Hour at the Chart House the other night. The wind whipped up white caps like ice had become air. It sliced right through my white puffy jacket as my boots rang out on the boardwalk over the water to the restaurant’s entrance. The sun sank orange-gold behind the drawbridge, sailboats next to the pier rocked on the winter waves, and the halyards sang. And, of course, I thought what everyone thinks as they approach a warm, waterfront restaurant where a friend you hope snagged a table by the fireplace is perusing the Happy Hour menu.

“If the lady in front of me fell into that ice water right now…. would I jump in to save her? Or look for a long stick?”

A gust of wind whipped my hair in my eyes, and I pulled my jacket tighter around me. What if my dog fell in? Would I jump in for Leah?

…What if it was Maisy?

Who would I dive in for?

I used to hope that this was not an indictment of love but an exploration of courage. Currently, I’m contemplating a new theory.

I wonder if “what-would-I-do” scenarios come to mind because we are inundated by injustice, violence, and innocent victims—about which we can do nothing. Students pinned down by active shooters, cries coming from under bombed buildings, terrified little girls pleading into cellphones amidst gunfire, “Can’t you come get me?”

Maybe we test ourselves to be sure we’re ready to serve because we want to serve, should service ever be an option. Because the burden of our helplessness is crippling. If you’ve ever loved anyone, the child crying for help is your own, and the brother under the rubble is your own, and the mother, father, sister, wife held hostage, left wounded or perhaps starving, is your own.

In the book Sapiens, historian and science writer Yuval Noah Harari documents the evolution of man from the first multicell organism to now. Our destiny, he determines, is that of so many bright and beautiful species before us. We are time limited. Given the current trajectory of our evolution, we have, at best, a thousand years.

Where do you put the grief of your powerlessness?

Wherever you can.

Maybe you run to the old man who has fallen with a call to action no one will follow. You park in a crosswalk and scramble to help the delivery man on his knees in a busy street.

You hope that the desire to serve serves in some way as you throw off your jacket and take off your shoes.

You pray evolution is not done with us yet.

You dive in.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.