Transitions

It took more than a year for me to lose habit of saying “Oh, Bob’s home” to myself when I pulled up to the house on late evenings  after class.

Bob was a trucker and, in the year after his mother Millie died, the glowing lights behind the curtained windows meant he’d completed his most recent trip. When Millie was alive and Bob was on the road, she’d leave the curtains open, even late into the night, as she watched t.v. and waited for him to return, the flickering blue of whatever she was watching dimly lighting the yard below.

She’d wait and watch and when Bob finally came rumbling down the street, he’d lightly tap his horn so Millie could see him drive past the house on his way to park the truck out back.

On my late nights there are those few minutes between the car and the house, the minutes I pause to take in the evening. Checking the night sky, savoring the evening breeze coming up and over the hills from Puget Sound. They are the moments of transition from whatever I’ve been doing—winding down from the hyperactive mind of teaching a long class or storing the mental release from yoga so I can recall it at necessary times during the week.

I look at the glow of lights from behind our curtains, knowing everything is all right in that little world. I used to glance, too, at the glow of lights from behind Bob’s curtains, knowing that the longevity of long-familiar neighbors settled the world to rights as well.

It’s been over a year since Bob died, over two since Millie did—a family gone within months—but lights still glow behind the curtains in the evenings. The house is empty, the lights representing not Bob or Millie, but the dedication of another neighbor. One who is vigilant at maintaining the fiction that they are still there, that they can still return at any time, that the house is anything but empty.

Confession

I’ve been cheating on Along the Branches with another Blog. I’ve got a draft in the hopper for Along the Branches, but I figured I’d better reveal where I’ve been spending my writing time since January.

I was asked to blog about skiing for a local magazine here in Seattle. Though the subject matter sounds specialized,  the stories I tell each week are really just creative nonfiction pieces that just happen to involve snow and skis. You don’t have to be a skier to enjoy them–at least I don’t think so!

I’ve listed three of my favorites below. I hope you’ll check ‘em out.

The Beginning

Pack Rat

Dude

Flat Rate Archives*

The boxes are sitting on my Seattle steps, bright white against the dark, mildew-stained stairs. I heft them up; they’re surprisingly heavy.  I elbow my way inside the front door and drop them on the table with a thump.  The red and blue lettering reveals nothing about what’s inside, though I have my suspicions. I find scissors and slide one blade through the clear packing tape.

Flat rate boxes are a marvel:  we can fit anything we want into them, no matter how heavy, and ship them across the country for one low price.  My dusty storage boxes in Ohio, so long forgotten, are being downsized.  My mother is emboldened by the low cost. She is shipping the detritus of my youth to me one medium-sized, flat-rate box at a time.

But what to do with them?

This is my dilemma.  My drawers are already filled with scraps, bits, pieces.  Newspaper articles, half-finished poems, notes for haikus, drawings from the kids, kudos given long ago for acts unremembered.  Post cards, lists, film negatives.  My mind drifts backwards, always has.

These thin, nondescript cardboard boxes contain the elusive, fragmentary stuff of memory.  Their arrival has hurled me headlong into a hurricane rush of imagery, words, and emotion.  Long ago memories are again fresh as the rain that soaked the cardboard edges of the boxes as they sat on the front steps waiting for me.

I pull out stacks of letters, their envelopes still crisp after so many years in the dark. There are dozens of them, all mixed together. The letters smell of paper dust and old libraries. I think back to my days working in the rare books collection of the library during college. Long afternoons spent in the climate-controlled vault, shelving rare editions, books that only researchers with special permissions had access to. Hours spent reading and organizing the personal correspondence of journalism magnate E.W. Scripps—the thin onionskin paper, letters typed in duplicate by an anonymous, probably overworked, secretary. I was trained to treat envelopes, postage, paper with the utmost respect and care. Most of them are digitized now, but the hardcopies are still hoarded in the archives as treasures of a bygone age.

This flat-rate archive spans my own bygone age.  It is evidence of a particularly transition-ridden time: moving to a new town, the change from high school to college, the shift from undergraduate to graduate school. I see the handwriting and, even before I focus enough to read the names, I know which of my long ago friends sent each one.

The letters inside these envelopes echo back to me the shared experience we all had of leaving home for the first time and making our way in the world. But even if I didn’t have the letters themselves, the envelopes are artifacts enough for anyone to follow our journey into adulthood. The dates stamped on the outside show a flurry of letter writing at the start of these years, a tapering off in the middle, and then, eventually, the letters come to an end as we gain confidence in where we’re headed. The addresses show our moves from one place to another, from cheap apartment to cheap apartment, with brief layovers at our parents’ houses.  The later letters are typed out on computers, their dot-matrix ink now fading.

When I rifle through these boxes, trying to decide how to handle this rush of memory, I see the handwriting of my two grandmothers. I catch a glimpse of the precisely written addresses, the classically formed letters–themselves icons of a lost era. These letters bring my grandmothers vividly to mind in a way photographs of them do not. Photos show their images, but from a formal distance. Photographs show my grandparents on “occasions,” but the letters are based everyday life.

I hear their voices, again, through words on the page. The “God bless you!” at the end of each letter from Grandma Lynch.  Grandma Flynn’s funny expressions, “We have green grass again—and we also have scads of something else—Box Elder bugs. They are driving me up the wall.”

On visits to Wisconsin when I was a child, I lingered in their kitchens, listening while they worked and talked “grown up” talk with my mother. I didn’t know who they were talking about and didn’t really care. I just wanted to be in their domains, to listen to their voices, to absorb their presence. The letters they later wrote to me were my admission as an equal into that grown up world. My grandmothers summarized for me in their letters what they always told my mother in the kitchen: who was at the dinner party, which relatives were coming to town, what was happening at church, the description of a new recipe, a little bit of gossip.

These pieces of paper are an inheritance from my grandmothers. Their letters are a physical manifestation of love.  Each of my grandmothers selected the stationery, took time from her day to write and tell me what had happened in her life, carefully folded and creased the paper, sealed it, and sent it out from Wisconsin to wherever I happened to be.

Each of the letters from friends, scrawled in the wee hours of the morning, is a gift, too. A gift of time and friendship that cannot be replicated with a text message or social media update. Each moment described, each question pondered, each “I just wanted to say hi” required a conscious effort. A handwritten letter is a time-oriented task, a true investment in friendship and connection.

It’s been years since I received—or sent–a wonderfully thick, handwritten letter full of news and observations. With the rush of technology changing every aspect of how we communicate, I often hear and, to be honest, worry a little about the death of this or that: the death of the book, the death of traditional newspapers, the death of handwriting. I comfort myself knowing that technological advances often signal a sort of evolution rather than annihilation, but I know this is not true of the letter. I knew long before the advent of the laptop and the internet that the art of letter writing was on its deathbed, and that is one of the reasons I kept this jumbled archive in the corner of my parents’ dark basement.

*******

This essay first appeared in the October 2011 issue of Hippocampus Magazine. Because of a kind comment he made on my first published essay, I met a very talented blogger, Mr. London Street, whose entertaining and thoughtful observations of life inspired me to start this blog. He introduced me to most of the other bloggers on my Favorites List. Sadly, Mr. London Street is retiring from the blogging business, but his blog is still available, so I do hope you’ll check it out.

 

Faith and the Fall Line*

“You’re ready for Chair Two,” He says, eyes behind the impenetrable black of his sunglasses.

I look around the parking lot, a rare sunny day at Alpental. The girls are eating grilled-cheese sandwiches cooked up on the camp stove, chattering away with their ski friends between lessons. Sixty miles from rainy Seattle, it’s a blue-bird day up in the mountains. I think about the people down at sea level waiting out the drizzle we’d left early in the morning. Did they have an inkling of what they were missing?

“You’ve said all season this is your year to do it. Snow’s great up there. Sun’s shining. You’re ready.”

I stall, rooting around for another potato chip, taking a swig of beer. “I don’t know…how’s the entrance?”  I’ve heard tales of the entrance to International, a double-black diamond ski run.

This is the traditional question experienced Chair Two skiers ask one another on the lift:  “How’s the entrance?”  On a late winter day, after several months of snow, the answer is most often a mellow, “Good.”  The rest of the time the answer varies: “icy,” “terrible,” “hardcore,” “zero visibility,” “I’m sure it will get better if it warms up some.”

Michael hasn’t been down International yet today, but he’s had a fun ski on a single-black diamond run on the upper mountain. He’s sure that with the great conditions, International is the place to go. He’s convinced I’m ready for it. After all, I’ve skied all the black diamonds on the lower mountain. Eight-year-old Megan is convinced, too, “Do it, Mommy! I’ve been on it with my class two times this year!” She’s feeling the pride.

****

Comfort Zone n. …2. the level at which  one functions with ease and familiarity.

Line of demarcation n: a boundary marking something off from something else

****

I feel like a fraud when I see the sign at the base of Chair Two: “EXPERT SKIERS ONLY! There is no easy way down.” Looking back, stomach churning, I glance over the heads of the “dudes” laughing and joking comfortably behind me as they wait in a rag tag line. These are the expert skiers.

Michael urges me ahead, “Remember. These guys don’t like to wait and they’ll be pissed if there’s an empty chair. It seems slow, but you’ve got to be ready when the chair comes up.”A rickety double chair appears suddenly from behind the bearded lift operator. He grabs it to slow it just long enough for us to wedge ourselves in the tiny seats.

“And you’re off!” he says and gives us a slight push, already turning towards the next chair.

We are away immediately, traveling up a cable that sags ominously between each lift tower. My heart pounds more rapidly with every bob of the chair on the line. The angle of now bowing line would be steeper if the cable were taut. This lift was built in 1967, the year I was born. A thought flashes across my mind. What is the life span of a chair lift? We cross over the heads of hotshots zipping down the deep moguls under us; we are low enough to whack their helmets with the tips of our skis if they catch air.

Up and up. Michael points out the beauty of the cliff faces, the cornices across the other side of the bowl, the skiers whipping down the narrow chutes, jumping over rocks. Between bobs of the cable, trying not to move my head too much so I don’t fall off the little chair, I pretend to look at what he points out. I am becoming more nervous with each lift tower that passes, with each foot of altitude gained, with each dip towards the earth as we move along the cable. I am on the easiest ride on the upper mountain. I am nauseous.

***

Life span n. 1: the average length of life of a kind of organism or of a material object esp. in a particular environment or under specified circumstances. 2: the duration of existence of an individual.

***

Michael falls silent, relaxing as I take deep breaths, trying to get myself out of this increasing anxiety. My fingers tingle as the chair delivers us closer to the lift shack at the top, 1,000 feet from where we started the ride. Spread beneath it is a large sign listing the names of the expert runs: Upper International, Widow Maker, Adrenalin, Snake Dance, Shot Six…. I see black diamonds, exclamation points all over it. The easiest way down, the sign declares, is Edelweiss Bowl, a single black diamond run. Michael points to the opposite side of the shack. Upper International is that way. There are two black diamonds next to its name.

With a final lift, the chair swings into line with the shack. In front of me is the steepest and shortest off-ramp I’ve ever seen. It ends abruptly in a wall of snow, but there are skiers congregated in front of it, making it even shorter. I imagine careening into them, knocking them over like bowling pins in a cartoon, poles strewn everywhere, skis akimbo, everyone yelling at me. “What the hell are you doing up here, you fucking idiot? Experts only!”

***

Imposter Syndrome: Despite external evidence of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more…competent than they believe themselves to be. (Wikipedia)

***

Michael pushes off down the ramp, takes a sharp right at the bottom, and stops to look over the boundary rope about 10 feet away from the crowd. I notice that the thin orange ribbon “rope” is the only thing between me and a terrifying cliff edge. We have reached 5,450 feet, and Michael only notices the horizon. His voice full of awe, he names the mountains we can see on this glorious day: Chair Peak, Snoqualmie Mountain, Guye Peak, The Tooth. We can even see Mt. Baker nearly 100 miles away, its great white head rising from the hazy foothills surrounding it.

I just “uh, huh” politely. Even with my life at stake, the old lessons in manners are still automatic. I don’t care at all about the mountains’ majesty. I’m resentful that Michael is mellow enough to enjoy the view, that he doesn’t seem to notice I am so scared. I’m resentful that somehow I’m going to have to go down a run that’s at the bottom of this cliff, and he’s responsible for making me do it.

“Okay, let’s go. Just follow me.” He smiles encouragingly. “We’ll take the lower entrance, it’s easier.”

“I’m really nervous, Michael.” I finally just say it. “I’m not sure I can do this.”

“You have to. How else are you going to get down?”  Logical. Calm.

Damn.

***

Logical adj …2: capable of reasoning or of using reason in an orderly cogent fashion.

***

The lower entrance is easier? Moguls bar the way between the view point and the lower entrance. The dudes whip past, easily dipping and dancing their way around me. I feel conspicuous lumbering my way carefully in and out, feeling light-headed as I look for Michael and the drop-in. It occurs to me that my flamboyantly designed ski pants, raspberry jacket, and bronze ski helmet with pink goggles are not optimal wardrobe choices for blending into a crowd.

Glancing up, I see what I don’t expect. A line of people. The dudes have come to a halt. Michael, having stopped to wait for me, waves me over.

“Okay, it’s a little challenging. There’s some ice through here and the path is narrow. Just watch me and follow what I do.”

I look over the edge of the drop-in at a path snaking its way along the rock face under the cliff we had just left behind. A ski patroller is mid-path, skis off, muscling broken chunks of rock back into the rock face. Skiers who had blasted past me seconds before are now gingerly sidestepping down a path more narrow than their skis, exposed rock and patches of ice causing them to hesitate. They move almost daintily as they negotiate the entrance, then disappear with a “whoop!” when they hit the bowl and drop out of sight over the edge.

I don’t want to think about that edge.

Michael makes his way down; it doesn’t take him as long as I think it should. He waves at me, points down a fall line that I can’t see, yells something I can’t hear.

The pressure of the line building up behind me forces me to move. I am shaking, concentrating on each step. I feel the scrape of ice and rock under my skis. I hear the punch of my pole tip as I push it into the snow on my left, practically horizontal to my hip. My right pole slides through the powder into air. There is no purchase. I am freaking out, my nerves feel like they are shattering, but there is one thing I know. I refuse to make an ass of myself here.

***

Ass n. sometimes vulgar : a stupid…person <made an ~ of himself> — often compounded with a preceding adjective <don’t be a [dumb-]ass>

***

Somehow I make it into the run. Unable to drum up the courage to make a sharp turn straight downhill, I keep edging my way across the face of the slope. The dudes are rushing past me, taking the steep moguls smoothly, gracefully negotiating the paths cut deep around the bumps. Their routes are a series of beautifully linked moves: bend at the knees, slide through the curve, bounce up, bend and curve, slide, bend and curve, slide, the sound of their skis a smooth “shussing.” I just know that if I turn down this slope I’m going to simply fall off of the mountain all together.

Michael has been tracking me from below, keeping parallel. I stop to catch my breath as he yells up, “Turn now! You don’t want to go further towards the rocks over there!”

Nothing looks safe for a turn. It doesn’t seem possible. “Turn now!” Michael calls again. “Just turn.”

“Hi, MC!” Twelve-year-old Eric, whom I’ve known since his birth, has come to an elaborate stop just below me. He’s smiling with joy. His face red with cold, eyes gleaming. “Are you a little stuck?”

“Yes, Eric, I am,” I pant. I hope my smile looks natural, but it’s completely fake. “Just a little.”

“Turn now!” Eric says helpfully. “You can do it! Just turn now.” And he’s off, dancing his own path down International. He and Michael wave to each other, and then Eric’s gone, taking a jump and disappearing over the other side.

***

Encourage vt… 1a: to inspire with courage, spirit, or hope : HEARTEN… b: to attempt to persuade : URGE… 2: to spur on…

***

Michael’s looking at the horizon again. Patiently waiting as other skiers go by. I turn downhill.

And fall. Get up, find the pole. Turn. Fall. Get up. Breathe. And turn and fall, losing a ski. Sit, breathe, brace myself, get the ski on. Turn. Fall. Turn. Fall. Turn. Fall. Gradually, though I never stop sweating, panting, laboring, my falls are less frequent. I can make two or three linked turns in a row, then four, until I finally reach the relative ease of Lower International.

It takes me almost an hour to get down Upper International. At every frustrating moment, once I recover my breath and look for the next turn, I can look below and see Michael, steadfast. Always just a bump or two below, leading me with invisible bread crumbs, tossing back the occasional, “Look how far you’ve come!” or “You’re doing great.” But mostly he’s silent, letting me battle my way down. He knows I can do it; he’s not worried.

We go through it together, yet alone. The quiet force of gravity—and of something else–holding me to the fall line as I work my way down.

***

Faith n. …complete trust 3: something that is believed esp. with strong conviction…without question.

(*This essay first appeared in the January 2012 issue of the online magazine This Great Society. Thanks to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed and Wikipedia for life-informing definitions.)

Time Zone

The phone rings shortly after 6:00 in the morning. Too early for anything typical: car pool questions, school bus changes, telemarketers.  When there are 3,000 miles and three time zones between us and family, calls at odd hours mean a quick intake of breath.  A racing mind that generates a list of benign mistakes that might be behind the call.

I want it to be a wrong number, something annoying, because calls from far away can turn a life upside-down in an instant. When that happens your life acquires a new time zone. Life Before the Call becomes Life After the Call. And there’s no turning back from that.

I pick up the phone on the second ring. “Hello?”

A pleasant voice, a woman’s voice, asks for me, though she shortens my name. I recognize the Appalacian accent—my thoughts go to my mother-in-law—but the voice itself is unfamiliar. I assure the woman that, yes, I am the person she’s asking for.

Pause.

“I’m looking for….” she gives my husband’s full name. Almost. First name, last name. Just shy of his middle name. Correct first letter, though. “Do you know him?”

My husband is sitting at the kitchen table, drinking strong coffee and reading the front page of the paper while our tussle-headed daughter, who’d rather be in bed, is reading the comics. Neither of them had looked up as the phone rang. Their sleepy curiosity is held by the papers scattered in front of them.

“No. I’m sorry. There’s no one here with that name.” Because there isn’t.

“Oh.” Longer pause.

Maybe it’s delicate. Maybe it’s none of my business. But she’s a stranger calling my house early on a dark autumn morning, causing the familiar start of adrenaline that comes with an oddly timed call. I want to know why she is looking for this man.

“Is there a reason you want to find him?” I ask. I’m polite because I am always polite on the phone.

It tumbles out in a bit of a rush. “I’m looking for my son. I gave him up for adoption in 19___. His real father wants to find him. We’re sixty now. He was taken to a small town in Ohio. I searched the internet and got this number.”

“It is a common name,” I say unhelpfully.

“I know,” she says. Another long pause. Disappointment? Relief?

“Well.” There’s not much else to say. “Good luck with your search.”

“Thank you.”

I picture her, a woman sitting at the kitchen table in southern Ohio, it is 9:00 there, three hours later for her than it is for us. She’s not thinking of time zones. She’s not even considering that in some places people are barely awake, less prepared for astonishing news from far away in space and time than they would be at midday. But when is anyone prepared for a voice from the past shattering a mundane day, one that started with newspaper and a coffee just like any other morning?

She sits there at her table, sheets of printed names in front of her. Dozens of versions of her son’s name, men born around the same time, men in towns all over the country. I imagine her calling each of these numbers, ticking down the list. Those common names, the unknowing families answering on the other end.

Is she nervous as she dials each number? Does she look out her window at the lovely, crisp autumn day as the phone rings? As she says, “Hello. I’m looking for my son,” hoping a little that the answer will be no? Or does her heart soar a little, hoping that this time it will finally be a yes?

I look over at my husband with his newspaper and his coffee and his child. They’re still focused on what’s just in front of them. I tell them about the pleasant voice, the enormous task in front of her, the odd way her voice flew across those miles, those time zones.

They are momentarily caught up in the mystery, then turn back to their papers.

The woman remains in my thoughts. A perfect stranger and her past, her choices, her quest turning my regular morning routine into something altogether different.

I lean against the kitchen doorframe, musing. “What do you think would have happened if I’d said, ‘Yes, he’s sitting right here?’” I asked my husband. “If you’d been the one?”

He turns the page. He looks up at me and says, “There would have been a long silence.”

Night Vision

The three of us held hands as we walked along the road between campsites. The glow campfires and lanterns just reached our dark path but didn’t illuminate it. Voices of the families gathered around them were hushed now that darkness had fallen. We were headed towards our own shared campfire. We could hear our friends’ voices, laughing and telling stories, as we walked towards the warmth and light awaiting us.

“Hey, come here.” His familiar voice out of the shadows startled us a bit, not much. “I’ve got something to show you.”

He’d been waiting for us to return from our trip, hoping to catch us away from the others so our absence wouldn’t be noticed. We didn’t have our lights on, but we could see him now that we knew where he was. Smiling face obvious now, the lenses of his glasses flashed the slightest bit in the starlight.

“Come on. We’re going to the beach.”

The kids and I all carried headlamps in our pockets, but only Michael used his as we started down the steps from the headland to the beach. Cupped in his hand, it emitted the slightest red glow through his fingertips, just enough to illuminate the uneven steps hewn from enormous logs brought in by the tide. Once we reached the beach and cleared a log jam against the cliff wall, he clicked it off and we stood a minute to let our eyes readjust. The sand at our feet was still warm from the sun, the brisk breeze on our faces cooled by salt spray.

Our toes dug through the churned up dry sand as we crossed the top of the beach. It became flatter and harder, almost like concrete, as we continued towards the water. The tide was so low and the waves so far away that the roar of the Pacific was muffled and remote. The sky was vast above us, the light of the stars bright enough that we could see each other clearly.The kids ran ahead, no longer concerned about tripping over logs or falling into moats dug around sand castles.

We met at the water’s edge, the rising moon still bloodied by the reflection of the sun, a reflection we could no longer see at the horizon but that stretched unseen around the curve of the earth. Those last rays of the sun reflected in the moon’s face made its path glowing across the calm sea just this side of pink.

In a low voice Michael pointed out the constellations to the girls, their questions and giggles still low, but lively. The darkness blanketed even the sound of children’s voices, but not their energetic tones. He pointed out constellations, mars, satellites overhead. Then he showed them the tiny pinprick of light on a fishing boat miles out, so far that it looked about to fall over the horizon at any moment, like the sun had.

I didn’t fully listen. I was content with the named presence of the big dipper, the rising moon. I thought instead of the gift he was giving them. A memory being built. Tonight it’s an adventure. Long from now, in some unexpected moment, this memory will surface: Dad, beach, night, new rising moon. Entering their minds like nourishment, stored away for when they need it.
****

Driving at night on the winding, two-lane rural road. It rises from the river bottom, curving its way through small farmsteads, in and out of woods of maple, oak, birch, and sassafras. Humid summer air whisking in the windows, smelling of cows and mown hay. The night noises of crickets and frogs gaining and losing volume as we pass. The family is safely enclosed in the car, my parents’ profiles silhouetted by blue lights from the dashboard. My sister and brother on either side of me, dimly seen, but pressed close in the back seat. We are silent, expectant, because the cabin is just a mile or two away.

Finally, we crest the last hill into the bright full moon, leaving the woods behind for a little while. Dad says, “Look at this everybody!” and he clicks off the car’s headlights for a few exhilarating minutes. We speed along the broad bend at the top of the hill in the moonlight and slope downwards just enough to feel the rollercoaster swoop before he flips them on again.

“Jim!” my mother scolds as we laugh at the utter recklessness and audacity of it all.
****

We slowly turned our backs on the ocean and the moon to scan the sky behind us for shooting stars. The little one leaned against my legs, shivering a little. A line of flashlight beams snaked its way along the headland path and down log steps. Snatches of laughter and occasional shouts made their faint way towards us.

“Let’s go back.” He said.

We walked holding hands, four across this time. Passed invisibly into the shadows as the teenagers whooped and hollered their way past playing flashlight tag. At the bottom of the steps, headlight cupped in his hand, Michael illuminated the path with pinpricks of light. We headed back from the dark towards the light and conversation of fire and friends.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Please click here to see a photograph of Kalaloch Beach by Leonel Torres.

Please click here to see the moon rising over the headland at Kalaloch Beach by Leonel Torres.

Imprint — Thumbprint

I didn’t feel any pain as the knife slid first through the bagel and then through the tip of my thumb. Severing it almost clean, just a small hinge of skin held it in place. A cry of shock, not of pain. No swearing. The rush to the closet, supplies flung everywhere. I grabbed gauze and a washcloth, wrapped the bleeding thumb securely in the bandage, then the cloth, and rubber-banded it into place. I yelled for TK to run next door to the neighbor’s, to ask her to drive us to the Emergency Room.

N____ can be counted on to be prepared for every eventuality. She pulled up to the house, her cooler-sized first aid kit balanced between the two seats in the back. We hopped in. Me, still not feeling any pain but waiting for it to kick in, breathing hard; TK calmly reaching over and patting my knee with her small hand. It wasn’t the first time she’d witnessed a parent-sized injury.

****

I am a skilled and practical driver. I’ve driven the route to the hospital through the narrow, traffic-laden geography of city many times. Some of those trips required both speed and strategy: while in labor with TK, and based solely on physical sensations of the roadway under the car, I called out shortcuts to my husband as he raced us through the dark streets, arriving mere minutes before TK was born.

I know my way up there.

N____, however, is a very cautious driver. She would probably prefer not to drive at all if she could avoid it. She is a person who drives at, or slightly below, the posted speed limits. She will not be hurried and, knowing this, she tries to distract me by brightly making small talk.

N____ pulls slowly into the empty street, comes to a complete stop at the stop sign, and drives north through the neighborhood.

I would have turned south.

She continues on, sure to stop at each of the next two corners, finally turning west onto a major arterial which has, as I well know, three long, congested traffic stops between it and the highway.

I would have cut south through back roads and turned towards the interstate at least two miles closer to the hospital.

In the time it takes N____ to reach the first intersection, the one with the longest light, I would have been at highway, gauging its traffic to plan my next move.

We are a quarter mile in the wrong direction. I would have been long gone.

I want to ask where the hell she’s going, but it is getting more difficult to keep pressure on my thumb. I know as well as anybody the first rule of first aid: apply pressure to a bleeding wound. I’m lightheaded and a little freaked out, but I am also aware that N____ is doing me a kindness on a sunny, summer afternoon in Seattle when no one else can. She is doing her best and I just need to keep my mouth shut, press my thumb into the roof of the car because it’s too tiring to keep the pressure on it any other way, and breathe.

****

Grinding minutes later and we’re still at that first light. The car is inching forward. A long line of traffic waits for the light to change, and when the occasional car turns right, we move haltingly forward just enough. My thumb has started throbbing and pain is searing its way into my consciousness. I listen to but can’t hear N____ and TK talking. Occasionally I’m asked, “Are you doing okay?” Her concerned eyes inspect me from the rearview mirror. I make sure to focus on her question, “Uh, huh.”

The light finally changes. Cars in front of us start forward, then pause as they turn to let pedestrians make their excruciating way across the six-lane street. We are three car-lengths from the intersection when the light turns red again.

****
He is on the corner as he is every day. Awkward cardboard sign, something scrawled upon it in Sharpie. It’s hot. He has no hat, thin white hair and scalp exposed to the glare. He leans towards the window of the first car, says something, backs away. The next car and the next car; he makes his way along the sidewalk. He sees the open window and me watching him. He perks up and walks towards us. “No, no, no,” I plead to myself. “Not today…” And there he is at the window, bending down to look at us, to ask.

His face is unexpectedly smooth behind the gray stubble of a beard just starting, his skin the shiny pink of a burn victim’s, though he has not been burned except by the sun. Watery blue eyes, small and alert, take us in. His sign droops as he leans on the car.

Before he speaks, N____tries to head him off. “We’re headed to the ER!”

“You’re going to the hospital?” he asks.

“Yes! She’s hurt.”

He moves closer. To me, “Are you hurt?”

“I sliced my thumb. I can’t give you any money. See? I have a bandage.” I’m nauseous now; I don’t want to explain. It doesn’t occur to me that I don’t have to.

“Is this your mom?” he says to TK. She nods.

“That’s terrible. That’s terrible you got hurt.”

“Yes. But I’m going to get taken care of.”

He looks at me with concern. He steps back, adjusting his sign.

“I’ll pray for you,” he says. “I’ll pray for you.”

The light turns green.
****
The day passed as expected. It took us a long time to get to the hospital: we hit every red light; we had to take alternate routes to avoid congestion caused by the annual Sea Fair celebrations; we stopped so N___ could wisely rewrap my tight bandage. While my thumb was stitched back together by the doctor, N____ and TK went for lunch, bringing back a bagel sandwich for me. (Bagel? “You’ve got to get right back on the horse,” says N____) Home, then movies, then dinner kindly brought over by our Good Samaritan.

****
The next day I turn north as TK and I drive to the store, stopping at the corners, turning west on the major arterial that I almost always avoid traveling. TK says, “Why are we going this way?”

“Oh, I’ve got something I want to do.”

We slow for the wait at the light, inching forward in the line of cars. He is on the corner as he is every day. Awkward cardboard sign drooping when he stoops at car windows. I hand TK a couple of bills.

“Give those to him when he comes to the window,” I tell TK.

“Why?” she asks.

“Because he did me a favor yesterday.”

“He did?” She’s puzzled. “Okay.”

The man approaches the window. TK gives him the money, and he looks at us both without recognition. We are just two more of the hundreds of people he sees every day. There is no reason for him to remember us.

I wave my bandaged hand at him and say what I wished I’d said the day before.

“Thank you.”

And the light turns green.