Conversation in a Park

Perhaps a softer world awaits. There are signs for it. Like the sunset last evening, quite ripe and full of magenta. Like peaceful protests in incendiary tinder. Like the horns, flutes, drums and crazy noisemakers that sound at seven; an expression of gratitude, like all the hearts in windows. Or like these Bewicks wrens and song sparrows in the bigleaf maple — just try to gag them and see how far you get.

And I’m not the man I was, so that’s something. That is, I’m learning to love the one inside. She’s not exactly smart or articulate, and she’s hardly said a word these 60-odd years, until now, but I like sitting with her.

Like the man who’s joined me on the bench, who tells me he has a building project, and calls himself a “farmer carpenter”, which to him means not losing sleep over a quarter-inch of space between cribbed 2X4’s. Then says, “It’s amazing the shit we lose sleep over.”

I listen. His project, he knows, is both immersion and distraction.

“That’s grief for you,” he says, “so many things to cast yourself into after losing a partner.” And this is where things go silent except for a sob he’s caught in his throat.

Then he asks, “Did you know Mother Theresa, near the end, wrote a confession? I’m not a Catholic, not a believer, really, but when I read her confession about no longer feeling God’s presence, she became a real person to me. And then, somehow, I could believe again. Strange.”

“Does that make sense?” he asks without pausing for an answer, and goes on to ask, “Was I, I wonder, a good partner? I mean, Jesus, we could really press each others buttons! Then one day, I decided not to argue any longer. Like that. Like I hit a switch. I don’t know, maybe it was an experiment. Thing is, it changed the air, you know? Changed us. We were always close, but then closeness grew bigger, newer, stranger. Does that make sense?”

We look across the pond where a couple walk with their arms linked.

“Grief hasn’t taught me anything I didn’t already know, although I have to admit, this knowing is a far cry from that past knowing.”

We watch ripples from the wake of a duck.

“The thing about Mother Theresa was that despite losing God, she kept on working. Now that’s something,” he says.

We look over the pond. I see the one inside me hold up a frail rose.