Once again, it has collected debris. There are sticky patches inside my cranium where random thoughts get stuck on their way to oblivion. Pockets of festering notions and doubts and misbeliefs, all waiting for a chance to escalate into Problems.
Walking isn’t a surefire cure, but it often helps. One of the nicest features of my town is its pedestrian and cycling path that borders my neighborhood, then follows the river through a string of parks.
I haven’t gotten to the shaded, riverine part yet; I’m still pacing determinedly along the pavement running alongside a roadway. This is the part where I pump my arms, focusing on ramping up my heart rate and recruiting my major muscle groups.
I’m out here for my health, after all, and I’ve only got so much time. Deadlines are a thing. Meanwhile, the chatter continues beneath the roof of my skull:
There’s got to be a better way to start that third book in the series but I don’t have the revision notes for the second book yet . . . but what if we go to war with Iran . . .why don’t I go ahead and buy those black linen pants in my cart, am I still waiting to dress like a grownup, will my adult kids ever blah blah blah blah . . .
It’s like the opposite of meditation. I speed up, hoping to outdistance my thoughts. I concentrate very hard on not concentrating on these incipient Problems.
All these years on this planet and I still haven’t gotten it right —
Suddenly, the spigot on my stream of unconsciousness shuts off. Because there, walking down the path toward me, is the L-shaped man.
I’ve seen him before as he makes his way along the walkway; it seems to be a regular route for him. He’s always alone.
He moves fast, faster than me, in fact, almost hurtling along as though forward momentum might topple him onto his face if his feet don’t keep up.
That’s because the L-shaped man is literally shaped like an upside-down L. Or like the numeral 7. He’s not merely stooped; his upper torso appears frozen at a 90 degree angle from his lower half. His hands would easily drag the ground were he not using them to operate his phone, which he does while periodically darting his head upward from its turtle-like position. To check, I guess, for obstacles.
I have no idea how the L-shaped man became L-shaped. Possibly a spinal condition, some form of kyphosis. Perhaps he was in a terrible accident and when it came to putting his body back together, this was the best anybody could do.
Or maybe it’s something congenital, or it began in his youth and grew more severe with time.
The only thing about the L-shaped man that breaks my heart more than the fact of his apparently inescapable L-shape is the thought that he might have gone through childhood like that.
His is one of those deformities that causes an involuntary flinch before I can stop myself, followed by a horrified fascination, the kind that once drove crowds to circus freak shows.
I don’t want to acknowledge such an impulse, but there it is anyway, some product of one of my lower brain regions. The L-shaped man is startlingly different, an immediate challenge to the senses.
I want to be better than that. Maybe this time I’ll have a chance to say hello to him, to exchange a dignified recognition of our shared experience here on this path. It might be nice for him to have a passerby simply say hi without making a big deal about it or giving him the side-eye or a too-big smile, I think.
But the L-shaped man doesn’t look my way. He’s pursuing his own goals and he’s in a hurry. His legs scissor purposefully, plunging ahead beneath the curving plane of his torso.
In another moment, he has passed me by.
The L-shaped man doesn’t need my greeting, or my smile of any dimension, and he certainly doesn’t need my thinly veiled pity. It’s not his job to make me feel better about my reaction to him. I chide myself and keep walking.
But I can’t resist looking over my shoulder, just for a second. From behind, the L-shaped man looks like the bottom half of a person has detached itself from the rest of its body and is intent on escape.
Questions crowd out my previous thought-drivel: how does he get dressed? How does he sleep? Does he do his own cooking? How could a kitchen or bathroom or any part of a house be adapted to make life in his condition manageable?
Over it all, a bewildered, childlike inner voice: Why can’t someone fix him?
The L-shaped man certainly doesn’t need this from me. I wonder if it would mean anything to him that, once all the knee-jerk responses are out of the way, I experience toward him a surge of admiration.
Mind you, I don’t know the man at all. Just because his body is arranged differently doesn’t automatically make him a nice guy. He’s not a figurehead or a stock character; he’s a fully fledged human being and could just as easily be an L-shaped jerk as an L-shaped saint.
Either way, though, or probably somewhere inbetween, he keeps going, and I admire that. He plays the wildly unfair cards that life dealt him and continues to take on the world as it is, as we all must. He doesn’t hide, doesn’t apologize, and I doubt he’s using his phone to whine to anybody about whatever the hell is wrong with him. He’s got enough to do, just getting where he’s going.
As, I recognize, do I.
I’ve reached the dirt path that ducks into the shade and runs beside the stream. I slow my pace, watch a mother mallard shepherd her tiny battalion of fluffy ducklings to a sheltered spot below the riverbank, and listen to the music of the river and the breeze whispering through the cottonwoods.
I’m grateful to the L-shaped man. Because he has straightened me out.
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