Wearing a yellow hardhat and inattentive stare, a PennDOT signaler stands along a paving crew and absentmindedly executes a series of drop spins with her little orange flag, so obviously lost in the recollection of some two, five or fifteen-year-old halftime marching band performance that you can all but hear the crackle of the drum line. The tempo of the music that only she is hearing dips her knee on every second beat and rocks her slightly in her tar-smudged Timberlands.
Just downtraffic of the PennDOT crew, a groundhog, dead but intact, still a day away from the first wave of flies, lies half inside and half outside of a circle drawn by a surveying crew. His brown fur, dull but still inviting in a "go ahead and pet my tummy" sort of way, is striped with a single, vivid arc of pink Krylon Quick-Mark road paint. I'm confident that no one pets his tummy.
Two women at the front desk of an empty dentist office are talking about the approaching holidays and one discloses to the other her strategy of gradually accumulating small gifts as stocking stuffers, but accidentally describes them as "stuffing stalkers" and sends her co worker into a surprised burst of snot-shaking laughter. This confuses the woman, who looks to me and then to her laughing companion and asks, "What? What did I say?" This makes the co-worker laugh much harder.
Weeks earlier, in a different dentist office, I'm let in through the locked door to the treatment area by woman who is the last employee in the building and who is talking on her cell phone as she holds the door for me. I smile and nod.
Because there is no other sound in the place other than her voice, and despite my polite disinterest in what she's saying, I gradually come to realize that she's describing to someone her recent experience of being in a hospital room with someone who, in turn, codes, is set upon by a crash team, is jolted and injected and ventilated, and is ultimately pronounced dead within the space of minutes. By the time I finish transferring an armload of cylinders into and out of a rack in a back office, the call has ended and this woman, who I must now ask to let me out of the office and, if it's not too much trouble, sign and print her name on this invoice, has begun to cry very, very hard.
Instead of spending a Saturday afternoon in any sort of productive way, I try to lull myself into a nap by lying on the couch and weeding through my phone contacts. My finger hovers over the "delete" key as I read the contact information of a person whose name I don't immediately recognize. I eventually remember him -- a social worker who is totally blind and whom I'd met only once at a job I used to have. In the notes of this contact entry, I've mentioned that he has a Rush poster on the wall opposite his desk because he is either a deeply devoted Rush fan, or a vocal Rush critic who shares a workspace with a deeply devoted Rush fan who has a sort of dickhead sense of humor.
I know that this man will continue to exist whether or not I delete him, but I'm also absolutely positive that once I touch the "yes" button in the "are you sure?" dialog box, that I will never, ever, think of him again. From my limited perspective of the universe, he will cease to exist. And since my perspective of the universe is the only one I'm ever going to experience, I'm deciding an absurdly large thing which is entirely inconsequential to every other living being who ever has or will exist. This disparity fills me with dread and for some reason scares me into keeping his number.
I hasten to leave the dental office before the laughing woman can collect herself and explain what the other has said. I want them to exist in my memory forever as they are.
Since the hose I use to dispense liquid oxygen becomes as cold as -300 degrees Fahrenheit and often flops around noisily as its metal re expands, I assume that's what the pronounced "clunk" is that I hear from the back of my truck as I sit in the driver's seat filling out some paperwork in an apartment building parking lot.
Moments later, a woman walks past my side of the cab, startling me a bit. She's moving quickly, and as she gets further away, I can see that she is dragging a long white cane so that the tip engages the asphalt ahead of and slightly to the right of her path. When that tip engages the raised edge of the driveway, she follows it to the street where she continues down the right edge of a moderately busy roadway, her cane scraping along the edge of a drainage rut. And I'm watching her, because I'm fascinated with how well she is interacting with her environment, how at home she seems, and also I'm wondering how she is going to detect the illegally parked car which is twenty feet ahead of her, now ten, and now five, and now she walks right into it.
The impact with which she hits the car is audible even from this distance. Now, from my vantage point, pulled as far as possible to the right of the apartment building's roadway in a large vehicle which I had unknowingly put in her usually unobstructed path, I realize that the sound I heard earlier was this woman walking briskly and squarely into the back of my truck .
She has now navigated around to the front of the car which she hit with a force that would have left me rolling around holding one or both of my knees, and she stops. She bends over to pick something up. She places the thing into her purse. And then she picks something else up and places that thing in her purse. Seeing a redemptive chance to help, I start the truck and head down the hill, but as I get closer to the place where she's dropped her stuff, I start to imagine what the footsteps of a rapidly approaching stranger might sound like to a woman with a visual disability walking alone. And so I pull over, well uphill of where she is, and watch her like a creep.
I wonder if the Rush poster could possibly still be there after this many years.
In the eternal moment before I approach the crying woman at the desk, I fidget around in the office, picking cylinders up and putting them down, folding and unfolding the invoice noisily so as to remind her there is someone else in the building. I notice that when I'm not doing anything purposeful with it, my right hand twitches its first three fingers in a rapid and familiar pattern. I think it does this frequently, and now I recognize it as the trumpet valve fingerings for an ascending C scale. As I think about it, I'm decades away in some chilly and pristine October.
Later that afternoon, on my way home, when I'm alone in my car, I swear at myself for starting to cry while I think about the groundhog.
Just downtraffic of the PennDOT crew, a groundhog, dead but intact, still a day away from the first wave of flies, lies half inside and half outside of a circle drawn by a surveying crew. His brown fur, dull but still inviting in a "go ahead and pet my tummy" sort of way, is striped with a single, vivid arc of pink Krylon Quick-Mark road paint. I'm confident that no one pets his tummy.
* * *
Two women at the front desk of an empty dentist office are talking about the approaching holidays and one discloses to the other her strategy of gradually accumulating small gifts as stocking stuffers, but accidentally describes them as "stuffing stalkers" and sends her co worker into a surprised burst of snot-shaking laughter. This confuses the woman, who looks to me and then to her laughing companion and asks, "What? What did I say?" This makes the co-worker laugh much harder.
* * *
Because there is no other sound in the place other than her voice, and despite my polite disinterest in what she's saying, I gradually come to realize that she's describing to someone her recent experience of being in a hospital room with someone who, in turn, codes, is set upon by a crash team, is jolted and injected and ventilated, and is ultimately pronounced dead within the space of minutes. By the time I finish transferring an armload of cylinders into and out of a rack in a back office, the call has ended and this woman, who I must now ask to let me out of the office and, if it's not too much trouble, sign and print her name on this invoice, has begun to cry very, very hard.
* * *
Instead of spending a Saturday afternoon in any sort of productive way, I try to lull myself into a nap by lying on the couch and weeding through my phone contacts. My finger hovers over the "delete" key as I read the contact information of a person whose name I don't immediately recognize. I eventually remember him -- a social worker who is totally blind and whom I'd met only once at a job I used to have. In the notes of this contact entry, I've mentioned that he has a Rush poster on the wall opposite his desk because he is either a deeply devoted Rush fan, or a vocal Rush critic who shares a workspace with a deeply devoted Rush fan who has a sort of dickhead sense of humor.
I know that this man will continue to exist whether or not I delete him, but I'm also absolutely positive that once I touch the "yes" button in the "are you sure?" dialog box, that I will never, ever, think of him again. From my limited perspective of the universe, he will cease to exist. And since my perspective of the universe is the only one I'm ever going to experience, I'm deciding an absurdly large thing which is entirely inconsequential to every other living being who ever has or will exist. This disparity fills me with dread and for some reason scares me into keeping his number.
* * *
I hasten to leave the dental office before the laughing woman can collect herself and explain what the other has said. I want them to exist in my memory forever as they are.
* * *
Since the hose I use to dispense liquid oxygen becomes as cold as -300 degrees Fahrenheit and often flops around noisily as its metal re expands, I assume that's what the pronounced "clunk" is that I hear from the back of my truck as I sit in the driver's seat filling out some paperwork in an apartment building parking lot.
Moments later, a woman walks past my side of the cab, startling me a bit. She's moving quickly, and as she gets further away, I can see that she is dragging a long white cane so that the tip engages the asphalt ahead of and slightly to the right of her path. When that tip engages the raised edge of the driveway, she follows it to the street where she continues down the right edge of a moderately busy roadway, her cane scraping along the edge of a drainage rut. And I'm watching her, because I'm fascinated with how well she is interacting with her environment, how at home she seems, and also I'm wondering how she is going to detect the illegally parked car which is twenty feet ahead of her, now ten, and now five, and now she walks right into it.
The impact with which she hits the car is audible even from this distance. Now, from my vantage point, pulled as far as possible to the right of the apartment building's roadway in a large vehicle which I had unknowingly put in her usually unobstructed path, I realize that the sound I heard earlier was this woman walking briskly and squarely into the back of my truck .
She has now navigated around to the front of the car which she hit with a force that would have left me rolling around holding one or both of my knees, and she stops. She bends over to pick something up. She places the thing into her purse. And then she picks something else up and places that thing in her purse. Seeing a redemptive chance to help, I start the truck and head down the hill, but as I get closer to the place where she's dropped her stuff, I start to imagine what the footsteps of a rapidly approaching stranger might sound like to a woman with a visual disability walking alone. And so I pull over, well uphill of where she is, and watch her like a creep.
* * *
I wonder if the Rush poster could possibly still be there after this many years.
* * *
In the eternal moment before I approach the crying woman at the desk, I fidget around in the office, picking cylinders up and putting them down, folding and unfolding the invoice noisily so as to remind her there is someone else in the building. I notice that when I'm not doing anything purposeful with it, my right hand twitches its first three fingers in a rapid and familiar pattern. I think it does this frequently, and now I recognize it as the trumpet valve fingerings for an ascending C scale. As I think about it, I'm decades away in some chilly and pristine October.
Later that afternoon, on my way home, when I'm alone in my car, I swear at myself for starting to cry while I think about the groundhog.
No comments:
Post a Comment