Because that's what people do, he said

The headlines are impossible.  The news is cataclysmic.  I woke at 3 this morning and came downstairs, praying that something in Japan had changed for the better.  It had not.  I sat here staring.

The night before, Saturday, rifled through with a bad case of food poisoning, I found myself curled up, exhausted, on a cold tile floor.  It was dark, a night now veering toward morning, and suddenly I heard my son on the other side of the door, roused, I suppose, from bed.  "What can I do for you, Mom?" he said.  "Should I call a doctor?"

Later, many hours later, I thanked him for his compassion, his concern.  He shrugged.  "It's not anything that anybody else wouldn't do," he said, "for somebody they loved."  Making it sound so easy, making me think, again, of the hundreds of thousands of survivors in Japan who need, just now, someone like my son—huge hearted and strong bodied, gifted with healing compassion.