A Place to Form
Sitting on a park bench in Sausalito looking out into the bay, I couldn’t help but overhear. About ten yards to my left, a lady dressed in Lululemon, white Asics sneakers with arcing pink stripes on the sides, and a ball cap with her ponytail poking through the hole in the back had claimed a seat like mine with a view. She was feverishly talking on her phone.
I probably wouldn’t have even noticed her were it not for the acutely familiar tremor in her voice. After listening for less than a minute, I could almost predict what she was about to say.
“What they suggested just isn’t financially feasible,” I heard her explain. “I want to respect his privacy . . .” “So, what should we do with his car?”
"Bench and Seaside" by Steve Buissinne
“It’s overwhelming,” she said in big and small ways more than once. And then continued without commitment, “I just don’t know where to start.” The woman in the telephone tunnel repeated herself a lot.
I sat frozen on my parallel stoop looking out at the ocean as words flew out of her mouth in fits and starts. While she talked frantically in circles, I built her life inside my mind. I assigned her a husband at work, a couple of kids with over-scheduled evenings who were, currently, at school and siblings who were a bit younger than her with big jobs on the opposite coast. She lived nearby, I decided, and had dressed for Pilates but today she didn’t go. She had numbers to dial and questions to ask about things she never imagined needing to know. The park bench near the water is just where she wound up.
I knew her though I didn’t. We wore the same kind of different shoes.
The conversation that I could only hear one side of chased itself. Clearly the random assist-giver on the other end of the line was trying to wrap things up, but the daughter-turned-parent-keeper couldn’t quite find a way to let go. “You have no idea how thrilled I am to have found you,” she blurted into the phone, sometimes as a sentence beginner, sometimes as a sentence closer, sometimes as a thought extender between loads she couldn’t pick up yet. Her gratitude, interspersed with fear, was wrapped in ends that didn’t meet.
I kept thinking about how I might want to help her if she ever hung up the phone.
The same blue water stretched out in front of us, this rattled stranger and me. We sat under the same sun with the same iconic bridge in the distance muscling its way through low-slung fog, and yet, the view was not the same for her as it was for me. Could she even feel the breeze?
I thought, for a minute, that I might go and sit beside her when she finished up her call. I might tell her that I’d been there. That, I, too, had run after the wind. I might ask her a couple of starter questions, open the door to let her talk about “all the things.” So much of what you have to come to grips with has no shape until the words are said out loud. Maybe I could just hold out my hands and give her impossible a place to form.
"Sun behind clouds setting over the ocean" by Dmitriy Piskarev
I put together a game plan while staring out at the Pacific, but when I glanced back at the bench with a rough outline in my head, she was gone.
As quickly as she had arrived on the scene, she’d left it. I didn’t even see her walk away.
I looked long at the bench still laced with the angst that she’d been sitting in, then back at the water’s grandeur and the promise of the sun that had fought through the stubborn clouds. Then I mouthed the only words I could have mustered anyway.
“I know.” “I knooooow.” “I know.”