Memoirish Archives - Page 3 of 4

A walk in the neighborhood

I try to walk daily. At least one walk of 20+ minutes, every day. My overall exercise goal is 45 minutes daily, though, so I typically go for longer walks to try to get it all done in one go. If I don’t, I can usually make up the rest of the exercise goal by another shorter walk, or general housekeeping (laundry, cleaning, going up and down the stairs, etc.)

Lately I’ve been sick; coughing and nasal congestion, ugh. Not fun. This is the second time this year I’ve had a respiratory illness and I didn’t usually get these that often before the pandemic started. I did test for Covid when this first hit but it came back negative, so my streak of “never tested positive for Covid” continues. But, yeah, this is probably Covid or one of the other stupidly-ridiculously-contagious respiratory infections that are going around, happy happy joy joy.

That being said I did go for a walk this afternoon. Because of the way my brain works, I have worked out several loops of varying length. I have developed these over time and they all meet certain criteria: the paths, when mapped, can’t cross over themselves at any point, and can’t repeat any section. I don’t know why, y’all, that’s just how it works, and by that I mean both the pattern and my brain. I do have some parts that carve out circles inside of larger circles but they don’t cross, I swear. The paths get kinda weird but it’s one big shape.

Side note: what’s the topological or geometrical word for that kind of shape? I can’t recall and it’s kinda distracting. But I’m writing this as one big long typing session so I don’t want to break off to do a search for it. Maybe it’ll come to me by the end.

I try to alternate whether I do the loops clockwise or counter-clockwise but I think my walk tonight started in the same direction as the one yesterday; into the neighborhood, away from the major street. I had my earbuds in, listening to a podcast, as I do. I had my walking shoes on (Brooks Adrenaline GTS) and walking shorts. I did take my phone, which I normally don’t do; usually just my watch and driver’s license.

The long straight section this loop starts with is on a secondary road, mostly residential but there’s one building I suspect is an office building, or maybe it’s housing for elderly folks or folks in treatment? There are often those minibus kind of buses in the parking lot. Almost every time I walk past, I think, I should look this up on Google Maps to find out what it is. Next interesting building is a fire station, and today the firefighters (all men as far as I could tell) were out washing the engine, which felt wholesome. They waved and I waved back.

I passed an Asian temple of some kind, private, gated, a non-descript modern building. A bit later, turn down a side street, a couple of turns on an unimproved road, and past a park. Tonight I wasn’t going past the park; I turned to cut the loop short. Ten minutes later I’m on another unimproved road (that’s how you can tell I live in SouthEast Portland; we don’t get pavement nor sidewalks) and then past the fenced in yard filled with chickens, a couple dozen of them.

The chickens pay me no attention.

Another long walk on the road (no sidewalks here either), avoiding the ocassional car going past, listening to the guys on the podcast talk about tech and cars. When I get back to the main street, I realize that I need some extra time to make sure I can close my rings, so I add a long in-and-out stretch into a residential area. The sidewalks are also occupied by a group of neighborhood kids on bikes and scooters and they don’t seem to know how to avoid me, so I have to actively avoid them. I don’t mind at all, they’re not being hostile, just energetic and innocent.

Done with that section, I go back to the main road. I pause the podcast because it, plus the noise of traffic, are too loud for my stuffed ears. And soon I’m back home again.

The Future Is Retro Now

General

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This old bar, on the last Friday before Christmas, was full but not packed. I picked the window table, but the chair facing away from the view, so I could see the folks sitting at the bar, and the other patrons. Though I could turn my head to look at the sidewalk and the street with constant traffic.

Was Multnomah Village ever this busy when I lived here, 22 years ago? It doesn’t seem like it.

And there wasn’t a corporate for-profie medical clinic across the street, that’s for damned sure. That whole idea feels like dystopia to me, alone. It sits next to the frozen yogurt shop, which metaphor escapes me right now.

I sip my strong Irish Quaalude and poke at my pocket smartphone and think about the end-of-the-world politics of the country in which I live. The reality TV star is going to have the power to order nuclear launches soon. We’ll find out about the next war when he taps out 140 characters or less and posts it to Twitter. How many retweets and faves will the Armageddon get?

22 years ago I was renting a basement from a co-worker not far from this bar. It was a money saving idea for both of us. We worked at Powell’s and idly dreamed of unionizing and I did my job, terribly and despondent. I was at Powell’s, off the clock but still hanging around, the night America elected Bill Clinton, the Comeback Kid from Arkansas, and my roommate tried to cheer me up (I was not political but still very cynical) by saying, “Hey! The good guys won one this time!”

In comparison with the presidents who followed him, maybe Bill Clinton was a good guy. I’m still not 100% certain, though. My idea of a good guy would be someone with politics like Bernie Sanders, but maybe a person of color or a woman so they’d actually speak for the most vulnerable in our country with the voice of experience.

22 years ago I would sit in this bar with a sci-fi book and read and eat and drink. I remember it being mostly empty. I remember the fancy dark wood paneling. I remember the upside down clock over the bar. I remember tasting gazpacho for the first time and wondering why a bar that touts its Montana roots would make a cold Spanish soup. It was good soup, though. Tasty. Gazpacho is not on the menu tonight, however.

Tonight, I’m sitting in the bar, tapping out my memories on a pocket supercomputer that’s constantly connected to a global information network, eating and drinking. Fancy wood paneling intact. Upside down clock still there. Montana roots still evident, at least on the menu. Evidence of totalitarian economy on view out the window.

This Christmas season, I’m feeling like I’m finally getting the dystopic cyberpunk future I was promised all those years ago.

White Wine In The Sun

General

Christmas 1996. The family gathered around a dining table, in Cancun, Mexico. Clockwise from left: Dad, Aunt Carol, Max, Lisa (sister), Bill (brother-in-law), Betsy, Tom, David, me, Mom. — Christmas 1997. The family gathered around a dining table, in Cancun, Mexico. Clockwise from left: Dad, Aunt Carol, Max, Lisa (sister), Bill (brother-in-law), Betsy, Tom, David, me, Mom.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

The picture above is one of my favorite Christmas memories. My family, seated around a table in a dining room in Cancun, Mexico, eating Christmas dinner. No gifts (except for Max, my nephew, who still believed in Santa Claus), just all of us, good food, booze, and warm sunny beaches.

Starting in 1996, my family began a tradition of celebrating Christmas with vacation trips, almost always to warm, tropical places. It began when mom won her first battle against cancer, and has carried on in some form ever since.

The first trip was in ’96, I believe, and the family went to San Diego and Tiajuana. I had just started a new job, though, and could not go with them, so I house-sat for my sister in their new house in the West Hills. We got an ice storm that year, and I ended up trapped by a fallen tree, and missed some work.

Calling in Sick From Mexico

The next year, the year in the picture, I was able to afford to go, except for not having enough vacation time to cover it. I had left that job for a short stint doing phone support for a different company. I’ve never told anyone about this, but I fell into a deep depression, and basically didn’t show up for my new job for 3 or 4 days. Luckily I was able to go back to my previous job, but in doing so I lost my scheduled vacation time, even though the trip was paid for already.

My solution was to go on the trip, not tell my boss, and then call in, making up a story about being stuck at the beach and unable to return. When I got back, my boss, a very patient woman who was probably the most empathetic and understanding manager I’ve ever had, asked me point blank if I went on the planned Mexico trip. When I admitted it, she just shook her head and said, sadly, “we could have worked something out.” I earned some demerits (company policy) and lost a promotion, but remained at that job for almost another year.

The Alphabet Game

It was all worth it, to spend Christmas with my family. Now I have the memories, and the stress of that job is long forgotten.

That trip was the year David (Bill’s brother, my sister’s brother-in-law) and I played a drinking game where we drank one drink for each letter of the alphabet. In one day. It was epic. He and I and my sister and her husband were sitting around in the afternoon and noticed that the names of all the drinks we were drinking started with the letter B, or included the letter B? It’s a little unclear. But we joked about drinking the alphabet.

Lisa and Bill dropped out, but David and I took it as a challenge. We made it to the letter S (I believe that drink was called the Seven Seas and featured that many kinds of rum), or possibly R? I barely remember making it back to my room. In the morning, I woke up to Max pounding on the door, because it was Christmas morning, and it was time to open presents.

This Year, and Next

This year, I’m house-sitting again, in a different house in the West Hills. My dad and Carol are going to Carol’s kids’ house for Christmas dinner. My sister and her family are on a cruise in South East Asia. And I’m sitting here, remembering Christmases past, and vowing, like always, next year I will go away, to a warm sunny place, and celebrate.

Merry Christmas, everyone. I hope whereever you are, and whatever you do, you’re surrounded by people you love, warm, safe, and happy.

The Season of All Natures

General

You lack the season of all natures, sleep.
Macbeth (3.4.167)

My sleep pattern of late, of the last month or a bit longer, has been disrupted and wildly inconsistent.

Generally, on a work night, I can manage to drag myself to bed around eight and a half to eight hours before the alarm is set to go off. As I crawl into bed, I will congratulate myself for leaving myself enough time for a good night’s rest, plenty of time.

The next hour or two, however, is spent trying to get to sleep. I toss and turn, fretting about money, about the stresses of my commute and the fact of being a contractor, but especially worrying about the politics of our time. This is usually when I realize my sleep has been horrible at least since around Election Day.

When my mind spins off into those bouts of anxiety, I will try again to drag it back to a blank state so I can drift off to sleep. After many tries, usually several hours after getting under the covers, eventually, sleep comes.

Then I dream.

I don’t have recurring dreams; it’s never the same scenario that plays out, but the dreams are haunted, and anxious, and upsetting. They’re dreams of disconnection, dreams of fear, dreams of loss; and they force me back to consiousness, repeatedly.

Once awake, I’ll check the time, or not, and roll over and try to go back to sleep.

At some point, typically with only a couple of hours until the alarm is set to sound, I will usually fall into a deeper, more restful sleep.

And then I dream. But this time, it’s nicer.

They’re not recurring dreams, but these dreams, the dreams I have when I’m at what feels like the deepest level of sleep, the level I only reach after what feels like hours of effort, share a theme. They’re dreams of connection. Dreams of peace. Dreams of warmth.

Then the alarm goes off, and I am dragged away from that gentle place to the real world, the world with a long commute to a job in a giant corporation where I have no guarantee of a future to earn only a little more than I need to pay my bills.

And it’s all I can do to not just roll over and try to go back to that warm, welcoming place I was just dreaming of.

These days, every once in a while, but more and more often, I do just that. Type an email to ask for a sick day, a mental health day, and then pull the covers up and try to go back to the safe, connected, loved place I was dreaming of.

Sometimes I reach it again. Mostly I don’t, though either way, I end up spending 12, 13, or more hours in bed those days.

Which is a problem, of course, of course. I can see that. I will work on that.

I have to work on that, because this isn’t working.

Things for which I am thankful: A Thanksgiving Day post

General

Like many of you, I’ve found it really tough to be thankful for 2016. Almost from the first day, this year has thrown so much bad news at us. It’d almost seem weird if we don’t all have some level of depression.

But today, at least in the US, we’ve set aside a day to give thanks. Even in the darkest times, there is still some light. Here’s a short and woefully incomplete list of things for which I am thankful. Some may be silly, some may be profound.

I’ve discovered I really like Kettle Pepperoncini potato chips. Just discovered that this week, actually. They’re yummy.

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Of course, of course, I’m thankful for my friends. I don’t get to see any of them nearly often enough, but thanks to the miracle of always-on internet they’re never far away. My closest friends are close because they know me well, after having spent years, even decades, with me. And from them knowing me, I’ve learned more about myself.
I’m thankful for video games. Much more involving than movies or books, games have given me moments of beauty, moments of sadness, and moments of triumph. Oh, that I could write as well as some of the stories that I’ve lived through and agonized over decisions for.
This unbound dremora wandering the halls of the College of Winterhold seems almost… bored.

In particular, I’m thankful for Skyrim above all others. I’ve spent over 1,100 hours playing around in it, and the design of its open world has created some encounters that I’m sure were never dreamed of by its designers. I should write about those someday.
I’m thankful for my dad, and my sister, and the family that surrounds both of them. They’ve all known me my entire life, have seen me through wins and losses, and never fail to help me when they can. I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for them.
I’m thankful for computers, without which I may have had to get a real job. I like using them, I often like tinkering with them to see what else I can make them do, and I especially like showing other people how to use them or fix them. I love knowing things (I am a white male in late capitalist America, after all) but what good is knowing things if I can’t share that knowledge?
I’m thankful for the weird people in my city, the ones who protest abuse and corruption, the ones who write and dance and sing and paint because they couldn’t not do it, the ones who think opening a business catering specifically to cats or selling that one delicious thing they know how to make is the best idea. The folks who glue thousands of things to an old car and drive around just because. I love you all, and this city, and the world, would be a poorer place without you.
I’m thankful that despite everything, including (let’s be real) my own laziness and poor decision-making, I still have a roof over my head in a part of town I love. Next year I may have to leave this cheap run-down apartment in Sellwood, but for now, for today and the near future, I am here. It’s my base of operations from which I plan and dream and observe this crazy world. I’ve lived here longer than any other place in my life, and it, more than any other place, is home.

I could go on, but that’s a good start for now. I need to get showered and dressed and drive across the river to see people I love, eat too much food, and avoid talking about politics, in the grand tradition of our country.

Happy Thanksgiving to anyone and everyone reading this. May you always have a roof over your head, good food to eat, and friends and family that love you, until the end of days.

The 13 Parts of My Work Day, Which Occur Daily, or in Some Cases Weekly at the Least, to Which I Most Look Forward (Chronological Order)

General

1. The brief moments of being warm in bed, having woken up before the alarm goes off, wondering why I even bother setting an alarm if my brain is just going to wake me up anyway, but knowing if I didn’t, I would sleep in too late and miss work, because brains are mysterious and mischievous.
2. Taking a hot shower.

3. Smelling the coffee being brewed.

4. Drinking coffee, especially that first sip. This is listed separately because it might not happen until #5 or later.

5. The calm 5-10 minutes before leaving for work, sitting in my dark office bathed in the glow of my computer screen.

6. The actual drive to work, listening to music or podcasts, enjoying the lack of traffic at 5:00 AM.

7. Hearing people’s accents from around the country, but especially Tennessee.

8. Bacon from the cafeteria on my first break.

9. Being able to explain something to someone in a way that helps them understand said thing in a way they didn’t previously, and particularly their delight in response.

10. The chicken strips from the cafeteria on my second break, which is basically my lunch time, since my second break (in an 8 hour shift) is at 11:30 AM, which are delicious and cheap, especially with ranch dressing or barbecue sauce.

11. Not the drive home itself, since there is more traffic and requires more attention, but the fact that I am driving home, instead of taking the bus or riding my bike, primarily because of how much less time it takes.

12. Getting home while there is still plenty of daylight outside if I feel like going out there and doing things.

13. Getting paid.

Me, Grocery Shopping

General

There are two grocery stores in my neighborhood, in walking distance of my apartment. I don’t own a car. One store is closer but generally more expensive; the farther one, while still expensive, is a longer walk.

I almost always buy bacon. I just do. It’s part of my favorite breakfast. I’ve been buying the same kind of bacon for a long time. Both of the stores carry it, and their prices (and sale prices) are generally in sync. If it’s on sale at the close store, it’s probably also on sale at the farther store, and at a lower price.

Last weekend, being out of bacon, I went to the close store to get some things, and saw that bacon was on sale. I didn’t buy any, because I wanted to get it at the best price. Today I had some time to shop, so I headed out for the farther store. A nice walk in the warm summer sun.

The bacon was also on sale… at a higher price than the closer store, by about 50¢.

That bacon was my main reason for going out of my way. Do I pick up the other things on my list and the bacon and call it good?

No. No, I do not.

I only picked up the items that are cheaper. Looks like I’ll be making another trip back to the first store.

Hope that that sale price is still good and wasn’t a weekend special. Sigh.

If only there was an app for these things.

Guessing Wrong on Purpose

General

I was sitting in the warm sun in my parent’s yard next to my mom, watching my dad grill a chicken with a beer can up its butt and my Aunt Carol working in the garden, when I realized that every conversation I had with her could be my last one. It was a Sunday afternoon, May 27, 2001, and she had been fighting lung cancer for about 4 years, but she was 72 and the fight was difficult and it had become clear to me that she would lose, and probably soon. I was right; mom would be dead just 13 days later.

Mom was always very skinny, our family inside joke made fun of her “chicken legs”, which sounds mean now that I type it out. But having her lungs fill up with tumor and not being increasingly unable to breathe had accentuated her thinness. But not frailty. She had a fierceness that showed in her sharp humor. She accepted our teasing and returned it and it felt like love sometimes.

I remember the moment I decided to set aside denial about her dying very clearly.

“What, if anything, do you wish you could have done?” I asked her.

Her face turned to me but I couldn’t see her eyes directly; she was wearing giant movie-star sunglasses and a floppy hat to shade her pale skin and white hair from the light. She didn’t smile, and she didn’t frown.

“I always wanted to be a torch singer.”

I did laugh. “But you can’t really sing.”

“Like in that movie, the one with the Bridges brothers, that actress, you know.”

“Julia Roberts?”

She swatted at me. “Don’t do that.” I would often guess wrong on purpose whenever she asked me to remember a piece of trivia.

“Sandra Bullock?”

“Brian. You know who I mean.”

“Michelle Pfeiffer. The Fabulous Baker Boys.”

She settled back in her lawn chair. “Yes. So glamorous. On the stage, a piano, a spotlight.”

“You could have learned. Taken singing lessons.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

Mom was the second-oldest of 13 children, and her parents, straining to raise so many kids, had apparently married her off young, 16 or 17, to her first husband, Bud Bodvin. They had a daughter, Donna, my half-sister, but the marriage ended in the late ‘50s and she returned to her parent’s home, a divorced woman with a daughter, at a time when that was seen as a scandal. Single moms didn’t go out in sequined gowns to sing torch songs in nightclubs then, not even in progressive Portland.

“Things would have turned out different, for sure. What ever happened to Bud, anyway? You never talk about it.”

She gave me a sideways glance. Said nothing.

“I might not get another chance to ask you.”

She waved her hand, brushing away memories. “It was a long time ago. He was so much older than I was. I was 17. It didn’t work out.”

I kept watching her face. She didn’t turn to look at me, watching dad at the grill, who was talking to Aunt Carol, mom’s younger sister, who had moved in to the house after the first round of cancer, to help with cooking and chores.

“What was he like? Was he tall? Short? Blonde? Dark? What did he do?” She scoffed. “If it was so long ago, then the details don’t matter now. It’s a story. I like stories.” I pleaded.

“He was… rough. He had a temper. I couldn’t stay. My father didn’t approve.” Her jaw was set. I had pressed as much as I could. That was all she would say, I could tell.

“So you met dad. I’ve heard that story.”

Dad had been traveling across country selling magazines in 1959, and one night at a diner in Portland, OR, waiting for a buddy who was trying to get a job in the kitchen, dad had struck up a conversation with the waitress, my mom. In the late spring sun, I saw my dad, wearing shorts and a t-shirt and flip flops, wearing out, graying hair, hands rough from a lifetime of pulling wire as an electrician.

“What did you see in him?”

“He was so charming.” Mom’s voice held a tiny note of surprise, and a tiny note of regret. “He was funny, and persistent. And dad loved him.”

“He asked you out, and showed up at your house.”

“And I wasn’t there.”

“You weren’t? Where were you?”

“I was out on another date. You knew this.”

“I did not! On another date? With who?”

“A dentist! I can’t remember his name now. But when I got home, there your father was, sitting in the front room with Grampa. ‘You’re going out with Bob tomorrow night,’ he told me. I was so angry. I never saw the dentist again.”

I tried to imagine dad as a charming young man. Although I can easily picture it now, at the time, our relationship was much more strained and distant right then. One of the reasons for that, which mom and I both knew but did not normally speak aloud, could be inferred by the staging of this scene: me and mom at one end of the yard, dad and Carol at the other end.

Mom was dying. I was, and am, an atheist. I know that there is no life after this one, and as a consequence, I know that every moment with someone else could be the last time I see them, or speak to them. If there is something I want to tell someone, I need to tell them, I need to not hide or wait, because the moment could be gone.

Mom and I watched dad and Carol for a moment.

“You know, right?” I asked.

“She’s my sister. Of course I know.”

“It’s awful. It seems so… disrespectful.” My eyes were filling with angry tears.

“I don’t have any interest in it, not anymore. I’m not going to be around forever.”

I was silent, my face hot. I couldn’t speak, and I couldn’t look at her.

“At least he’ll be with someone, and if it has to be someone, it’s better that it’s my sister.” She reached over and held my hand. Her voice was steel, not from meanness or teasing, but a simple statement of fact, aimed at her youngest son, hoping I could hear her.

“They won’t be lonely. They’ll have each other.”

It has taken me years to hear her.

I wrote this post on Mother’s Day, 8 May 2016. I didn’t post it right away because I wanted to run it past my family first, give them a head’s up, because I touch on some family issues. But my main point wasn’t to dredge up old secrets, it was to remember how clearly mom saw things (and to remind myself that I didn’t, and who does, one hundred percent of the time, really?)

Ghosts of Brian

General

A photo posted by Brian Moon (@lunarobverse) on May 13, 2016 at 9:34pm PDT

Last night, because of an odd-for-me schedule, I found myself downtown in Portland, on a warm May Friday evening, around 8 or 9 PM. For a lot of boring reasons, I haven’t spent a lot of time downtown, wandering, with no particular place to be, not recently. My normal mode lately is to go, get what I need done, and return to Sellwood, my home neighborhood, as quickly as possible.

There was a time, several times, in my life, however, when that was not the case. Downtown Portland was a destination and a playground for me and my friends. Simply hanging out at Pioneer Courthouse Square, or walking or driving up and down Broadway. Movie theaters. There were late-night bookstores, bars, and dance clubs. I could write a book. Many books.

Last night, in an introspective mood, I went looking for that same feeling. I started by going to Powell’s City of Books, still a world-class bookstore, one of the largest in the country and possibly the world, on several measures. No matter where you are in the world, if you’re a reader, you may know of Powell’s, since it’s an online bookstore that rivals Amazon and is often mentioned in the same breath. That website came after the physical bookstore chain, which itself started by taking over an entire city block, expanding out and up and down and becoming a weird maze of shelves and books and cranky, furtive, hippy, diverse, booksellers.

Powell’s is not the only place I wandered as a kid, far from it. Just stepping off a bus, or waiting on the bus mall for a trip back to the suburbs, or, later, parking the car and wandering around. I could talk about the Broadway Theater or the Fox Theater, The Metro, the Blue Aardvark dance club, the Virginia Cafe (the original one, tucked away on SW Park between Morrison and Yamhill, not the new one across from Central Library), the X-Ray Lounge or Satyricon or Roseland, or Tom McCall Waterfront Park, on a summer night on the river.

Powell’s, though, Powell’s is central.

My beautiful readers, the story of Powell’s could fill a room full of books all by itself. It’s difficult to settle on just one. And my life history is entwined with it, too, and not just as shopper and shop. For an all-too-short time, two years, summer 1992 until summer 1994, I was an employee, until I was fired. It was a rough time in my life, and the main reasons were that I was still trying to get a handle on this “being an adult” thing. Paying my bills, doing my job, not blowing all my money on strippers and pizza. I was in my late 20s, and I was a mess. I was crushed by being fired, but honestly, looking back, I deserved it. I would tell early-90s Brian so many things, but I am not sure he would listen, because I would only be telling him the same things my co-workers, friends, and family were telling him. As my dad said at the time, after I told him I was fired, “I’ve been fired from jobs before, but I’m not sure I’ve ever been fired from a job I loved before.”

Losing that job broke my heart, tossed me into a pit, and cost me several friendships. Shortly after, I was forced out of the basement apartment for failing to pay my rent, prompting me to live out of my car and hiding my shame from everyone around me, although I’m pretty sure they all knew. I would shower at my parent’s house, carefully timing it when my dad was at work, because mom was more sympathetic.

Eventually I did get a new job, but it took a few months. I got hired on as a temporary worker at Intel, putting replacement Pentium chips into boxes, to repay customers who had purchased flawed Pentiums, on a swing shift. From there, I made the transition to technical work, and began my career. But it was a rough and rocky time, beautiful people. I get the sads just thinking about it.

I had been fired from Powell’s 22 years ago, but I never stopped going there. Even after being cast out for failure to adult, the idea of that giant multi-level building carved from the heart of liberal Portland was too enticing to avoid. Through the years I’ve seen it grow and modernize. The architecture has become more refined. Instead of writing prices in pencil on the first page, computer printed labels with bar codes tell if a book is new or used.

But there are still faces in the aisles that I recognize as co-workers from those summers two decades or more ago. It’s easy for me to imagine 28 year old Brian straightening up, flying right, and becoming a lifer there. A different life but maybe a very similar Brian, in a more stable place and state of mind?

Empathy

General

I was walking home from the bus stop, holding a diner cheeseburger and fries, trying not to slip on the remaining ice and slush.

Ahead of me on the sidewalk, an older woman (or maybe I should say a woman of around my own age) and a young man, maybe a teen or early 20s, were hugging each other fiercely. Their arms were wrapped tightly and I could see, under his warm stocking cap, that the young man’s eyes were closed tight.

As I approached, I could hear them, over the hiss and rumble of cars driving by; both the woman and the man were crying. Sobs, gasps, that choking sound when someone is trying, unsuccessfully, to hold back the sadness.

The sidewalk held only the three of us. The office we were all in front of was unlit, empty. The cars might as well have been robots.

I think they noticed me and it broke their hug. They pulled apart and started to walk away in the opposite direction, holding mittened hands, talking softly, their eyes red, their voices trembling.

I have no idea what caused their sadness. I reflected that I was glad they at least had each other in this moment.

And that thought alone was enough to bring tears to my own eyes.