Look up, or you will miss the things that matter

I very nearly missed it.

A soldier was making his final journey, accompanied by police and Patriot Guard Riders.

I was waiting for the light to change by the TRAX station that sits between the Triad Center and Energy Solutions Arena, my mind racing with all the things I had to accomplish that day.

Work interviews, stories, grocery shopping, geometry with my eighth- and ninth-graders crowded everything else out on that early-autumn day.

Though I was looking straight ahead, I wasn't actually paying any attention to things around me. It took a minute for the procession even to register.

It moved in slow, stately formation down 300 West to its left turn at South Temple: dozens and dozens of motorcycles with American flags flapping gently. First came the uniformed police officers on what looked like just-polished motorcycles. Then the hearse, a heart-wrenching sight, followed by members of the Patriot Guard Riders in another flag-bedecked group of motorcycles, at least two abreast, that stretched nearly the block's length.

As traffic continued its normal flow and pedestrians shuffled along the street, many with heads down or earphones in, as oblivious as I'd been a few minutes before, I got a huge lump in my throat and literally froze at the sight.

If you've never seen it — the flags, the procession, the hearse that's a tender, grim reminder that men and women die for this country's cause — it's hard to explain the moment. It was more than touching. It was astonishingly emotional.

And I suspect that wave of raw emotion would cross political lines and that it wouldn't even matter what you thought about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Patriot Guard Riders escort the hearse by invitation from a fallen soldier's family. They were inspired, ironically, by the hateful Westboro Baptist Church, a teeny group of protesters who like to show up at soldier's funerals and bother the families with their message that the individual's death was divine retribution for America's tolerance of homosexuality. They say stupid things, like expressing thankfulness for the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that have killed so many of our young men and women in the last few years.

Why their deity would single out a soldier here and another there to express wrath is beyond me. It doesn't fit in with anything I've been taught about God's nature.