We walk through life not seeing

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

The child was 3, maybe 4, and walking hand in hand with his mother down Charles Street on a beautiful August day. Boston Common was to his left, the Public Garden to his right, The Four Seasons Hotel ahead and the State House behind. The sky was blue, the sun bright and every tree in the city was in bloom.

The people were in bloom, too, little kids, big kids, tourists and natives, colorful in their shorts and baseball hats, suits and sundresses. The streets teemed with cars and trucks, bikes and bikers, busses and trolleys and in the distance, there were even more buildings and people and things. It was a page right out of "Where's Waldo."

Then there were the city sounds: People talking and laughing and yelling and walking, brakes and horns and bells, and music spilling out of car windows. A person new to this earth, plunked down in the midst of all this, would have spun himself into butter, taking in all that was before him. But already the child of 3, maybe 4, was so used to this that he walked along with his eyes straight ahead.

Then a duck quacked by. Not a real duck, but a motorized one. "One, two, three!" the driver shouted and the duck tour full of people quacked and the child stopped walking and looked up and smiled. "Let's do it again," the driver said. And so we did. Everyone on the duck, including the 12-year-old at my side, let out a loud quack and now both mother and son were smiling at us. We were at a red light so we quacked once more and the child laughed and jumped the way children do as if laughter makes them suddenly lighter, which maybe it does. And then the light turned green and we waved and the boy and his mother waved as we drove away.

A few hours later, after the duck tour, the 12-year-old and I were walking past the Wang Center, past a crowd of parents and children dressed up for the theatre, when a young woman stopped us and asked if we wanted tickets for "Beauty and the Beast." "They're free," she said. "Really. No strings attached. We ordered too many for our group." Then she handed us two. Free tickets to the best show in town, not outrageously expensive tickets, $ 25 apiece, but we got them just because we happened to be walking by. "What luck," we whispered as we took our seats. "This is incredible."

It was incredible but not because the tickets were free. The play was what was incredible, all color and energy and magic, pleasing not just to the eyes and the ears, but to the heart. And it had been right there practically in our back yard for weeks but we wouldn't have stopped and seen it if it weren't for the free tickets. They were what was a first so they are what surprised us. Until then we were like the little boy walking along staring straight ahead unaware of the surrounding wonder.

Maybe that's what we need, free tickets every now and then to remind us of what's right in front of us. Maybe it takes someone to quack at us once in a while to make us look up and around. Had we or the small boy seen a tall building for the first time, or a single tree, or a lone flower or a the only chipmunk known to man; had we encountered our first automobile or heard our first song; had "Beauty and the Beast" been our very first play, we might well be standing on a curb, still mesmerized.

But because we have so much, it takes what we don't have to impress us. A couple of free tickets. A duck tour bus full of people quacking. What are these, really? Absolutely nothing compared to all the every-day wonders that surround us, that would impress us, if only we'd look around and see.