"Hope is a revolutionary patience."
~ from "Bird by Bird" by Anne Lamott
Walking my dogs earlier today I felt the promise of Spring. It's not necessarily a change in the weather - it's more a feeling I get when all the trees and the birds and even the sidewalks that are so familiar to me begin, perhaps, to cast their shadows a bit differently. And things seem, well, more alert somehow.
I take the bus home from work on Friday and Saturday nights and, for the most part, I enjoy the ride. It's late, 2am-ish, so the streets are fairly empty and the bus careens along like an express train. It takes me 20 minutes to get home. The same ride during the day would take an hour because of traffic, double-parked cars and having to stop at every other corner to pick up passengers. At this late hour in Brooklyn most everyone riding the bus is either drunk or coming home from work.
I'm often very tired so I play little games in my head to keep myself awake. Last night I was deep in to my book and one of the games I often play while reading is one where I try to figure out where we are along the bus route, without looking up to see, just by trying to mentally/sensorily connect the terrain with the exact street location as we ride along. For example, the streets running alongside Greenwood Cemetery were super bumpy due to construction for the longest time so that was an easy identifier. Now, I've refined my ability to include subtle inclines, or declines, in the street like the one that happens right around 36th street.
Well, as luck, and exhaustion, would have it I was sound asleep long before we reached 36th street last night. I had an awareness of the fact that I was sleeping somewhere deep in my subconscious -
I could hear my smarter self saying "waaaake up, waaaaake up - loooooook out the window - you don't want to miss your stoppppppp...it's realllly cold out"
I recall looking up at one or two points and, at first, seeing the street sign for 51st street and then, just a minute later, 63rd street. I knew that waking up was crucial at this point because we'd be at 80th street, my stop, in a minute or two.
I,eventually, opened my eyes again at 89th street. I jumped up, trying to look casual, and took a quick look around the bus and saw that I was the only passenger. I walked up to the front and said to the bus driver,
"Can you let me off on the next corner?"
He does...
"Thanks a lot", I croak. Have a great night!!"
DAMN. DAMN. DAMN.
It was freezing and windy as I've ever known New York to be, EVER.
I couldn't believe I overshot my stop. I couldn't believe the bus driver didn't wake me - not that he would have any reason to. I hunkered down and braced myself against the wind and walked. Now, I don't know about anyone else but at times like this I have a tendency to go far in to the recesses of my mind. All kinds of things come up for me and I'm not talking about things like what I'm going to eat for breakfast tomorrow. I go directly to the deep end of the pool that is my mind.
The most predominant of these thoughts last night was -
"Was this really necessary in the scheme of things? Is this really, truly where I am supposed to be right now??? Would my life play out differently if I had not slept past my stop????"
The good thing is that I tend always to think positively regarding the twists and turns in my life so aside from being a little grumpy, tired and cold, I was open to these late night ponderings.
It brought to mind the time three and a half years ago when I left my apartment on, yet another windy, cold day to run an errand at the pet food store a few blocks from my apartment. On my way back, as I was waiting to cross the four lane avenue right up the street from where I live, I noticed, directly across the avenue from where I was standing, an elderly man with a walker waiting to cross towards me. He seemed under-dressed to me. No scarf, his coat open at the neck leaving his throat and chest vulnerable to the elements. My internal discourse cranked up a notch and as the light changed in our favor I wondered if there was something I should do to help him. He started to move, very slowly, and it was immediately apparent to me that he was in serious danger of not making it to the other side before the light changed again. As I started across I sensed that the drivers were aware of him and willing to wait. I reasoned that this man got himself out the door on his own and maybe stopping to help him would offend him in some way. I walked past him, still strongly questioning what I should do. As I reached the sidewalk, I started to walk towards my corner and took one more peek at him and then hesitated a few more seconds before I made a sudden u-turn back in his direction reasoning and rationalizing my decision still. The weird thing is that I had a sense that the timing of my decision was important.
I took two steps off the curb when, out of what seemed to be the clear blue, a car sped by me close enough that I felt the door handle brush by my arm. While all the other cars sat still at the now green light, this guy never realized what was going on as he approached the intersection from a block further back and suddenly switched lanes to get around a truck that was stopped and waiting for the old man to cross. He couldn't see around the truck, so he never would have seen me. It was all too obvious to me that if I'd made the decision to make that u-turn three seconds earlier, I would have been hit by this speeding car and it would not have been fun.
I got to the old man and asked if I could walk with him and he looked over-joyed. His eyes were tearing from the wind. We walked together and I asked him where he was going. He said,
"Oh, just up the block to the local diner for my breakfast and then to the barber for a haircut."
He said he came here from Greece over fifty years ago. He missed his family but he loved it in Brooklyn. It was his home. I couldn't tell if the tears in his eyes were still from the wind or not. I was, I think, still feeling the shock of the close call with the car as we walked. I knew, however, without a doubt, that I was meant to meet this man. I offered to walk him up the block to the diner but he really wanted to walk it alone. We stopped on the corner and he offered up some very kind words and thanked me as he walked away.
I walked down the street to my place and truly felt like I, at that moment, existed in two dimensions. A "Sliding Doors" sort of feeling - (this is a film the premise of which is how a woman's life plays out in two scenarios - one, where she makes a train and the other, where she just misses i)t.
I know this might sound odd but when I opened the door to my apartment, I could feel the emptiness of the other scenario - the one where the car and I impacted.
Life slows down when real life presents itself. I know that when my Dad had his open heart surgery fourteen years ago I can remember walking out of the hospital in to the stream of "real" life - day to day life, the one where we are plodding ahead, ahead of where we actually are with no real connection to the moment we are in - and feeling like I was standing still as everyone else shot by. I couldn't find a place to safely merge back in to the lane of life.
It's that feeling that I felt today when I felt the promise of Spring. A feeling that came to me because, at some point, during some past Spring, I stepped off that moving sidewalk and looked around me long enough to notice where I was, and it came back to me.
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