Journals of Journeys Journals of Spiritual, Emotional and Life-Altering Journeys

Luckily I live in a state that, despite its liberal litigious nomenclature, welcomes a well-intended Samaritan—to a degree. And so my story goes.

I’d been strolling along the shaded wooded path of a beautiful city park not far from where I live when I came upon a car that glowed. Not because it was possessed or had been touched by some deity—but rather it’s lights were on. I drew closer, scouting for signs of it’s owner and came to the conclusion they must have gone off and forgot to turn off their lights, I decided I would test the door and if unlocked, reach in, turn off the lights and unlike today’s children, I didn’t feel a need to be recognized for my acts of good will and would simply take pride in knowing I saved some poor soul a heap of grief.

The car, a late model champagne colored four door sedan (I’m horrible with knowing right off the bat makes, models and years of cars. So long as they get you where you’re going, who cares? I’d be an awful police dispatcher: “Be on the lookout for a blue ’99 Ford Nova – does Ford make Novas? See? I’m awful at that!) It seemed rather harmless, not something you’d be leery of like if it was an old panel body van without windows that anyone would know from watching crime shows is where bodies are left to rot. There wasn’t a little voice screaming in my ear to be careful or to run in the opposite direction. Step by step the manufacturer’s emblem came into view – a Honda or maybe a Hyundai, something that started with an H. There aren’t models that start with an H, are there? Well, maybe. Hybrid? Or is that a model? Did I mention I’m really bad at this?

What did strike me, though, was the bumper sticker slapped onto the bumper. It was obviously stuck on in a hurry without care to assure it was straight or possibly, I reasoned, too much care and it wound up lopsided anyway. It reminded me of a bumper sticker my Greta read on a car while riding in the backseat of our family car when she was a small child. “Make love, not war.” It hadn’t made sense to her then and she found it quite curious that my late husband, Mel, became quite perturbed when she asked how one goes about “making” love. She shared this with me after the wake for my late husband, Mel, God rest his soul. We had quite a pleasant little laugh remembering those days.

Still approaching the car, I began sorting through the occasional passers-by, looking for someone I’d suspect as the owner. An old hippy maybe, with long hair, handmade clothes, possibly cinched at the waist with a cord of hemp, sandals, a big droopy bag filled with books or an assortment of picked flowers from a walk while communing with nature. Or maybe a modern day hippy, a college age student with dreadlocks or brightly colored hair that clearly came from a bottle. Piercings, tats, dark clothes as my granddaughter, Shane, would say—my brain became tired from trying to picture whose owner the car—ah yes, a Hyundai Elantra, shoebox on wheels—belonged to. As I began to ponder what the “new” hippy looked like, feeling more and more like my great grandmother whose attempts to stay “hip” became fodder for the family’s laughter at the dinner table and left me feeling horribly saddened for her, I drew too close to waffle with my indecision any longer. I would either reach out and pull up on the newfangled handle that requires you to push your fingers in and under rather than the old kind I so miss that allowed your hand to come from beneath or on top as you pushed into the button with your thumb or, as I often was prone to doing, my hip; or I’d simply walk on by. The absence of footsteps, car tires rolling across the pavement or whispered conversation of anyone coming from around the bend and the bushes that made the path turn invisible, I reached out and … froze. What if the car had an alarm?

I peered through the windows in search of the locks to see whether it was unlocked. Hard telling because like the exterior handles, the locks were equally elusive. I did notice there weren’t any stickers announcing the car was guarded by an alarm and didn’t see any blinking light on the dash. It pays to listen to your children and grandchildren prattle on about all the expensive options they pay through their teeth to add to their cars. With a deep breath, my legs primed to sprint to the nearest clump of bushes knowing I wouldn’t be able to get much further than that, I pulled on the handle. It opened without protest and I wouldn’t have even noticed through my squinted eyes it had if it wasn’t for the weight against my arm.

Curiously amusing, a heady mixture of fresh off the loom fabric, recently hardened molded plastic and translucent motor oil wafted out. I suppose that shouldn’t have surprised me, yet it had. I honestly suspected the aroma of, well… dare I say, marijuana. I mean it made sense. Chiding myself for such a preposterous notion I nosed around in search of the switch that turned off the lights. They weren’t in their usual place or at least in the same place as those in my trusty Pontiac station wagon. I’d remembered when my late husband, Mel, rented a car shortly before he passed on two years ago this October and complained bitterly we’d have to drive only during the day because he couldn’t find the lights. It was our niece, Shelby, who’d pointed them out for us. Well, me actually and only after I begged her and made her promise not to mention it to poor Mel. It was embarrassing enough we had to stop and ask for directions when we passed into Connecticut and were on our way to White Plains, New York. I couldn’t stand the idea of putting him through even more with his heart growing weaker and all.

My fingers worked across the dash, groaning out in painful protest. It was time for my arthritis pills and caused me a moment of frustrated sadness when I realized my walk had been extended well beyond what I had planned and would mean it would be just that much longer before I would be afforded any relief. And as much as I could have gone about feeling all sorry for myself, I wasn’t being of any help to this poor soul and was only making the situation worse as I stood there with the door open and the little light on the roof of the car turned on, no doubt draining what little was left out of the battery’s juice. None of the buttons made sense. I thought I had found it and pressed the gadget only to watch in horror as the windshield wipers began to swish across the polished glass, dragging about bits of seedpods that had fallen from the trees above. And then it came to me, this was a new car and being that as it was, surely there was an owner’s manual in the glove compartment. I closed the door and walked around to the passenger’s side, taking care to wait for oncoming traffic while searching a moment or two for anyone belonging to the Hyundai. A whole slough of cars siphoned by reminding me the construction slated to begin at eight on the dot must have begun. My heart pounded, my mouth drew lemon-puckered dry because eight meant I was precisely forty-five minutes behind. I hadn’t expected this would take such a long time, but now that I was well into it, I might as well see it through. Heaven forbid a well-meaning neighbor watched me from behind her sheers taking careful notes of my turquoise earrings dangling from my sagging lobes like tear drops (given to me by my great niece, Alexandria), the matching Heddy knit tank top beneath the Egret white cotton safari-styled button-down camp shirt, walking short slacks in my classic beige and, as always, sensible no-nonsense brown oxford walking shoes, would ring up the police to report me as a thief. And while I was quite certain any sensible policeman would see I wasn’t capable of stealing as evidenced when my pockets tipped inside out would reveal, it would be their duty to haul me in and book me until it all could be sorted out. I doubt very much I’d survive even an hour in a holding cell and this thought spirited me along to finish up the good works I had set out to do. Oh how I hated myself at that moment for being such a busybody! My sweet Mel, rest his soul, was right, sometimes I’m too much of a do-gooder and get myself into a peck of trouble all for naught.

As I waited for the line of cars to pass on by, I peered into the back window and saw a curious object just begging to be inspected. I reasoned it could have been the owner’s manual I was in search of and was reminded of the time when my sister’s late husband, Marcus, had purposefully left their manual in the back of their Chevy Impala on the floorboard so that when he was caught in traffic or stuck waiting for a long, lumbering train of well over a hundred cars passing by, he’d flip through it. He was such the mechanic, dear sweet Marcus, rest his soul. What harm would it do to reach in and examine it, especially if my wait for the string of cars would only result in a longer wait before I’d be afforded relief from the rising pain in my joints that could have been cut in half or possibly more if I just reached in and checked? None, of course and so I pulled the door open and bent over to reach it across the back bumpy bit and into my twisted fingers. Alas, it was only a school binder of sorts. Not one of those fancy, three-ring binders like the kind I had used when I went off to college where you could add and remove paper at will, picking and choosing the colors and sizes of lines to meet your own tastes—or professor’s requirements; but rather a curious plastic sheeted simple folder with a thick cardstock weight paper in the inside. Like the Elantra, it was new. It had a simple, even shine without even so much as a scruff across it. And when I pulled it open, it resisted as if it had never been shown the sun’s light before that very moment. Only it must have since sticking out of a flap of sorts was a sheet of paper. Lined paper with those little torn jagged edges I find so revolting. Whenever I see them, I’m compelled to pick them off until the side is as smooth, crisp and even as the other like a mother eradicating her teenager’s zits from his face the moment they glare angry and red from across the bowl of corn puffs drowned in milk. I would have expected the writing across the page to have been equally messy, filled with a thunderous roar of strokes that bent helter skelter across the once pristine white now mixed with smudges of the dried blue ink page. Instead the writing wasn’t unlike my own, flowing all in the same direction, perfect loops, smooth lines not too long and not too short topping off Ts and simple dropped dots above the i instead of those silly circles you could drill a nail through and still see around the quarter-inch head or what I feel are equally repugnant when mixed with cursive: bubbly hearts. This was the writing of someone who had spent the third grade day in and day out practicing each letter of the alphabet in cursive until it was perfected and a gold star was affixed beside your name on the bulletin board just next to the classroom door. There wasn’t a name on the paper that I could see, although it could very well have been on it but hidden away beneath the flap or on the backside. Either way, it wasn’t the manual I was looking for and a gap was coming in the traffic passing by, so I returned it to where I hoped I had found it and made my way about the car.

Unfortunately the pause in traffic didn’t provide me with ample time for my ample hips to squeeze in between the door and the interior while attempting to pry open the glove box whose latch eluded me for the longest spell of time. Driven by the notion I was being carefully observed by that well-meaning neighbor, I slipped into the passenger’s seat and let the door close next to me. Bending down to better examine the compartment’s latch, I didn’t notice a figure approaching the car. It wasn’t until I heard a secreted lever hidden in the car’s doors make a funny ratcheting noise that I looked up and spotted someone quickly approaching.

I’m the first to admit my eyesight has greatly deteriorated over the years and has rendered me practically useless without a set of thick lenses perched atop my nose for nearly half my life. Yet despite my heavy reliance upon and consistent use of them, I still don’t like their weight. Every opportunity I get to remove them, I take advantage of and this was just one of those times. My close friend, Rowena, chides me for not wearing them during my daily walks saying that I’m missing out on the beauty of all that’s around me, the rich purples of the Birds of Paradise Mrs. Beasley grows in her garden, the scarlet hues of the wild berries’ leaves along the path and the sunset array of colors bursting from the trees in the late fall. I contend that with them, I’d be too caught up in the colors and all that I can see that I wouldn’t appreciate the sounds that come to me when I go for my walk, like the children giggling gleefully as their mothers or sitters push them higher and higher in the swings on the playground or the cardinals whistling about in the treetops busy with their work or wooing a mate or the gentle thwack of the paper being lofted onto the porches by the paperboy riding on his old hand-me-down bicycle that squeaks only loud enough for ears acutely tuned such as mine. Had I been concerned with Rowena’s criticism of me, I might have been able to afford myself enough time to scramble free of the car and save myself an enormous amount of embarrassment because I would have been able to see the person making a beeline for the car with those nasty glasses pinned to my face.

As it was, once the latches moved about, the gig was up, as the kids today would say. There was not even the slightest chance I could move quickly enough and even if there had been, the second wave of traffic since I’d settled my weary hips into the fresh new seat prevented me from escape. All I could do was sit there looking quite embarrassed watching as the blob of peachy-white topped with a spray of dark grew larger. In the seconds that passed, my ears filled with a static that reminded me of when my mother would set about tuning in the radio every Sunday evening before Abbott Mysteries came on and I could swear I could hear my dear Mel calling softly from the heaven’s above. My tongue thickened, threatening to swell up large enough to choke the last breath out of my lungs. I felt dizzy and as much as I wanted to close my eyes, all I could do was stare stupidly at the blob moving towards me.

The door swung open and the blob, shape beginning to form into a face with more recognizable features, peered in at me. I breathed in a delicious scent of jasmine realizing that wasn’t the earthy fragrances from the outdoors wafting in when the rich full scent of vanilla wafted about my light head. The kids today have a name for the toilet water they use; even claiming the right combination can change your mood. They call it aromatherapy. I can now see why, because despite the fear that balled itself in my belly and scratched defiantly at my innards, I did feel the strange sense of happiness.

“Gee, Grams,” the tinkle singsong voice of my Greta’s youngest floated in with the tantalizing scent she was wearing. “I’ve been looking all over for you! It may have been well past noon before I would have found you if I hadn’t spotted the lights I left on by accident.”

“You’ve been looking for me?” I asked, confused.

“Of course! Did you forget?” She pushed her keys into the ignition and then turned toward me, looking at me as if she was waiting for me to say or do something.

“Grams, your seatbelt?”

Ah! How silly of me! I fumbled about a bit and with the careful help of my granddaughter, got myself settled in.

“Ready to go see the doctor about renewing your arthritis medication?”