City lights.

The following is adapted from a regular column, "From the Pastor's Desk," appearing in the parish bulletin of Epiphany Parish in New York City.

The news media, both print and TV, are preoccupied by the things that go wrong. The sudden violent act, the disaster, the pathologies of life claim disproportionate attention. A dominant or regular disposition to goodness requires too wide an angle for the narrow focus of the TV camera or the limited space of a news article. But New York abounds in examples of the day-to-day, year-to-year practice of virtue, examples we often fail to notice.

My leg injury of last May has kept me out of the subway: too many stairs. But I found an interesting world in the city's buses. The mix of people, their stoic endurance in traffic jams, and the steady patience of the bus drivers carry their own inspiration. The drivers don't have steel rails to guide their multi-ton vehicles. Each moment requires steady attention and careful control in the flood of trucks, cars, taxis, bicycles, and rollerbladers. There is no idle moment save when, like a miniature Queen Mary, the bus sweeps up to its curbside wharf and exchanges passengers to and from the street. Then the patient wait for people with canes, purse fumblers, and those who want out when they find they are on a "Limited" bus. A big salute to our city's bus drivers - saints of patience not yet properly canonized.

A dominant disposition to goodness is found in many other places in our city, very frequently among the men and women of the NYPD. A week ago I was chatting with some of the men of Emergency Service Unit, Truck One, opposite the rectory. One of their smaller trucks rolled up and Ken Winkler and Mark DeMarco jumped out.

Mark shook out a wet rubber suit. "A little applause for Ken," he said. "He just pulled someone out of the river." At the pier at the end of 23rd Street, someone had heard a splash and phoned 911. A police helicopter arrived and dropped a life ring, which the thrashing figure pushed away. Ken, already suited up, dove into the murky water. When his 100-foot line ran out, he called for more line. Another was quickly attached, and in another fifty feet he reached the struggling figure, who spouted water at him and told him to get lost. But Ken persisted and soon his line tenders had both back on shore, along with the rejected life ring. All in a night's work!

Ken had initially failed a scuba diving test (he didn't know how to swim). So on his own time he went to the YMCA and learned to swim, passed the test, and is now a certified "Dive Master" who teaches scuba diving to ESU officers. Ken lives with his wife, Alice, on Staten Island, with their two children, a five-year-old who is in first grade at Saint Charles's school, and a one-year-old. Ken went to Our Lady of Perpetual Help school and Xavierian Academy in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, then spent a couple of years at Kingsboro Community College. He entered the department in October 1981. Alice joined in January 1982. They met, worked together, and dated; in 1988 they were married.

Alice today is a detective in the Staten Island "Crimes Against Persons" squad. "How do you deal with two little kids?" I asked. "We juggle schedules as best we can, and when that doesn't work we alternate with Larry Oliveti on Truck One and his wife - she's a sergeant on Staten Island."

Not a pulse-throbbing story, but what it shows is that there's a lot of commitment in this city, of dominant disposition to goodness and a deep respect for what life is all about. A big salute to Ken and Alice, to Mr. and Mrs. Larry Oliveti, and their partners in blue.