This Happened
Sometimes, the Universe lines up in mysterious ways, clicks into place, and pulls you out of your doomscrolling or whatever is bugging you long enough to remind you how truly good life is and that miracles occur when you are awake to them and that love is the air we breathe.
My friend asked me over for lunch last Sunday. This is my very dear friend who caused my book of poetry to happen and who is one of the most interesting people I’ve ever known. On my way out the door, I don’t know why, I had this urge to take one of my books with me, even though she has a bunch, and I inserted a little broadside of a poem I’d printed in my shop many years ago that I didn’t think I’d given her before. The poem is called “This Opportunity,” and it’s about a dad trying, not very successfully, to connect with his teenaged son. I threw the book and poem on the passenger seat on top of a few issues of REM and took off, halfway in a trance of poetry, which somehow has loomed larger than ever in my mind lately, since the Spring Poetry Celebration this last Sunday, the fiftieth anniversary of that affair. It was incredibly good and inspiring…a whole day of deep listening to the free writing, free thinking, deep feeling of our amazing, devoted poetry community here. And also I’d had a reading at Gallery Bookshop the night before and it was really fun and good and I was feeling happy about that, too.
I was driving along, as I said, in this swirl of words and meanings, rhymes and not-rhymes, driving on autopilot along a road that didn’t require too much attention, when a gray fox suddenly shot out of the weeds lickety-split and sprinted across my path, about a yard in front of my car. It sure woke me up; it made me kind of shaky, actually. It seemed so impertinent to interrupt my dreamy state like that, but I had to brake, and I needed to pick my way over the insane potholes anyway.
A very short time after the fox dashed out, I spied a gangly young guy walking toward me on the other side of the road in a white tee shirt and jeans. I looked at him and he looked at me, more deeply than you would usually look at somebody walking along a road, and I had this feeling that something was wrong. It seemed like he looked at me and kind of shook his head, as if I’d made a mistake.
I passed on east, but the exchange bothered me a lot and, uncharacteristically, I found a driveway and pulled a U-turn and drove back and stopped beside him in the middle of the empty road. “Are you OK?” I asked. He looked away and said, “Yeh. I just can’t be with my family right now.” I said, “Do you need me to do something for you?” He looked at me and said, “Why did you stop?” And I said, “You just looked really sad.” He got very quiet, then said,”Do you really care?” Almost like an accusation. And for some reason, I said, “Yes, Honey.” Then he put both his hands up to his face and burst into tears, apologized for that, but I just said, “Come on, get in the car.”
“Will you take me back to my dad’s?” he said, and I said sure and asked him if he would hold the little stack of poetry and magazines in his lap while I flipped a U again and drove him to a driveway not very far back down the road. I was going to be late for lunch, but it didn’t matter. He told me a few things about what was eating him, and I remembered when I was sixteen and there was discord in my house and how terribly I was affected by it and how much closer to the surface emotions were then.
I left him off at a fork in the driveway where he said he could walk the rest of the way. He handed back my stack of writing as he was getting out, and I said to him, “Here, here is this poem I wrote and printed in my shop, and here are some of my magazines with local stories in them. You can go hole up in a room and do some reading, OK?” He took the papers and said, “You’re really an amazing person. You wrote a poem?” and then, “Can I have a hug?” Believe me, I wanted to give that kid a hug, and I did. “Love you, kid,” I said as he exited my car. “I love you, too,” he said.
See how the Universe lined up there? If my friend hadn’t asked me to lunch; if I hadn’t put the broadside in the car; if the fox had not woken me up to be alert for a troubled child walking down the road; if the poem was not perfectly apropos to teenaged disaffection…I could have driven on…I could have missed it. But I didn’t miss it. I didn’t miss the miracles last Sunday. Really.
