Unreasonable joy and happiness came to me on an ordinary day, an
unremarkable day, when I was playing poker. The clatter of chips
and the shuffling of cards played background music to the
conversation of the players. Now and then, the dealer would call
“Seat open!” and a floorman would escort another player to a
table. The nine players at my table were all sizes, shapes, and
colors. Some were Asian, some Persian, some black, some
white-bread American like me. We were all enjoying the game,
taking turns winning a pot, whining a little when we got beat.
A wizened old man who spoke with some sort of European accent
was losing a bit more than the rest of us. I named him “Mr.
Grumpy” in my mind as he threw his cards on the table with a
curse again. “Just take your losses with good grace or go
home,” I thought primly to myself.
A brash young player named David sitting next to me lost his
patience. “Don’t throw your cards like that,” he lectured
the old man. “Mr. Grumpy” yelled back at him and as he did,
his shirt sleeve fell askew, and I saw the tattoo on his arm. A
blue tattoo, a number. Like they engraved on you at Auschwitz.
Or Sobibor. Or Bergen-Belsen. As he stood up waveringly,
clutching his cane, and then stalked off for a few minutes, I
thought of what horrors this man had seen, what terrors he must
have endured in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.
David hadn’t noticed it. He continued to complain about the
old man shuffling out the door. “They should reprimand him for
throwing cards,” he said angrily. “He shouldn’t be allowed
to play.”
“He has a tattoo,” I said.
All the players looked at me.
“He has a tattoo,” I said again. “Here.” I motioned to
my arm. “A concentration camp tattoo.”
“Oh.”
“Oh.”
Nothing else was said. In the silence, I could see everyone at
the table making an inner shift to understanding, sorrow,
kindness. He had a tattoo. We all knew what it meant. And we
knew that none of us knew what it meant.
When he came back to the table, the Chinese man next to him
helped him with his chair. The Iranian player smiled and nodded.
The old man showed his cards at the end of the next hand he
played, and several people said, “Nice hand.” I saw David’s
winning cards as he folded them face down and smiled at me
conspiratorially. “Good job, David,” I whispered, as we
watched our newly discovered friend rake in the pot. A little
moment, a little gift, a little win. But I had won something
bigger than a few chips that day.
As I threw my own cards into the muck, I felt the thrumming of
humanity. My focus on the game dissolved; I looked around the
tables at the players and saw Indians, Arabs, Persians,
Israelis, Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese. I saw
African-Americans, Jamaicans, Latinos, Swedes, French,
Vietnamese, and Thai. Men, women, old, young, sober, tipsy,
rich, poor, criminal, virtuous, all were playing. And in that
moment, I saw the tattoos on all of them. Tattoos of sorrows
endured and tragedies survived. Tattoos written in invisible ink
on old arms, swarthy arms, pale arms, hairy arms, smooth arms.
Tattoos whose needle incisions had driven stakes into hearts.
Tattoos of courage, of shame, of glory, of a million tears. And
all these tattooed warriors sat next to each other, playing the
next hand they were dealt in the card game of life.
In that moment, I loved everyone in the room and beyond the
room, full-out, whole-hearted, helplessly, generously. We were
the same; of one breath, one body. We had all suffered, all
wept, all loved, all laughed, all prayed to our own version of
the zillion aspects of God. When James Lipton asked Meryl Streep
what she would want God to say when she arrived in heaven, she
said, “Everybody in!” I read of a man who told of his
near-death experience where he passed through a great light and
saw Jesus. Was he judged? he was asked. He shook his head and
said, “The Jesus I saw had room for everybody.”
I tried to hold on to that deep welling joy, but it was like
trying to put smoke in a bottle. It faded away in wisps on the
air as I grasped at it. I dropped back into my own separate
self. The larger picture on the jigsaw puzzle of life was lost
once more and I saw only my own little, worn piece.
But I haven’t forgotten. I want to feel that love again. And
so, sometimes, when someone is cranky, or tired, or
out-of-sorts, I recall that somewhere deep, in some hidden spot
on their soul, they wear a tattoo. And I smile at them in
remembrance of this ordinary day when, for a few brief moments,
I was in love with the whole world.
About the Author: Chellie Campbell is the creator of the popular
Financial Stress Reduction® Workshops, and the author of The
Wealthy Spirit and Zero to Zillionaire, both published by
Sourcebooks, Inc. She is one of Marci Shimoff's “Happy 100”
in her current NYT bestseller Happy for No Reason and
contributed stories to Jack Canfield’s recent books You’ve
Got to Read This Book! and Life Lessons from Chicken Soup for
the Soul. She is prominently quoted as a financial expert in The
Los Angeles Times, Pink, Good Housekeeping, Lifetime, Essence,
Woman’s World and more than 35 popular books. For more
information, visit her web site http://www.Chellie.com
or email her at Chellie@Chellie.com.
