Sometimes our benefactors appear in strange and annoying guise.
It was three o’clock, the peak of a hot Saturday afternoon, and after I had finished my shopping at Martin’s, the largest grocery store here in Front Royal, I drove across the street to write at MacDonald’s for a couple of hours before returning to my daughter’s house. Yes, I know people who write in public spaces traditionally choose coffee houses and cafes over fast food restaurants, but a small, refillable drink at the Golden Arches costs little compared to the iced coffees or Americanos served elsewhere. Anticipating some relatively quiet work time, I placed and paid for my order, a diet cola, poured the drink from the machine, and stepped outside for a cigarette before taking my computer from my bag.
It was three o’clock, the peak of a hot Saturday afternoon, and after I had finished my shopping at Martin’s, the largest grocery store here in Front Royal, I drove across the street to write at MacDonald’s for a couple of hours before returning to my daughter’s house. Yes, I know people who write in public spaces traditionally choose coffee houses and cafes over fast food restaurants, but a small, refillable drink at the Golden Arches costs little compared to the iced coffees or Americanos served elsewhere. Anticipating some relatively quiet work time, I placed and paid for my order, a diet cola, poured the drink from the machine, and stepped outside for a cigarette before taking my computer from my bag.
And there he came, limping across the parking lot, the same man I encountered here yesterday, short, rotund, mid-seventies at a best guess, with long white hair and a white, scruffy beard, dressed in a tan shirt as wrinkled as his face and khaki pants with a rope cord in place of a belt.
The day before, when I sat in a booth pushing to knock off a book review, I caught sight of this same man out of the corner of my eye. He was roaming the restaurant, stopping at every table, talking away like some demented WalMart greeter who had stumbled into the wrong establishment. I avoided looking at him, but he stopped by my table anyway, leaning forward, cockled knuckles resting on the tabletop. For the next two minutes, he told me the location of every electrical outlet in the room in case I needed to recharge my computer. I thanked him, but I kept glancing at the screen of my laptop, and he finally took the hint and drifted off to a table across the room.
Now he was passing two feet away from me, going into the restaurant.
We said hello as he passed. He asked how I was, I said I was fine, and then I returned the question.
Polite. But a mistake.
He stopped in his tracks and began complaining about a sore spot on his heel that had popped up yesterday and made walking his dog difficult. “I’m talking class nine pain,” he said, and reached for the bottom of his trousers. For a moment I was afraid he was going to yank up his pants leg, remove his shoe and sock, and show me the back of his naked foot.
Then I caught a break. A pregnant woman, her friend, and two little girls walked out of the restaurant, and the man turned to them. “Miss America,” he said, pointing at some logos on the girl’s t-shirt. Then he shifted his aim and pointed the finger at the pregnant woman’s belly. “Three to five days,” he said.
This approach to a woman with a belly is always a dangerous tactic, and I was surprised she took no umbrage at his prediction. Maybe they knew each other. “A week,” she said.
He then began recounting to her how accurately he had predicted pregnancies in the past. “Once I told a woman she would deliver at 9:00 the next morning,” he said with enormous pride, “and she said she had a Cesarean scheduled for the next morning at nine and accused me of looking at her medical records.”
At this point, I slipped behind him into the restaurant, refilled my cup to the brim with ice and cola, hoisted my backpack to my shoulder, and pushed again through the door. Had I instead taken a booth as planned, I am convinced I would not have seen the end of him. As I drove away from the restaurant, he was still talking to the woman. Her face wore that trapped look, like an innocent at a party cornered by the biggest bore in the room.
Now, of course, I was stuck. Where would I go to write?
For lack of a better alternative, I drove toward my daughter’s house. Right now ten children ages eleven and under are living under Kaylie’s roof. I can easily write with all that hub-bub, but I needed to focus, and gaining the sanctity of my basement apartment entails running a gauntlet of questions—“Grandpa, where are you going?” “Grandpa, can we do soccer drills?” “Grandpa, why are there rainbows?”
Then, within half a mile of my daughter’s house, I saw the church with its covered picnic shelter.
This church shelter is where I am now writing. If the wind were a little less severe, I might well be writing in Paradise. Let me explain.
To my left across the highway is a mossy old cemetery with sunken mounds, crooked tombstones, and American flags marking the graves of veterans. Beyond the cemetery are blue hills backed by a cloud-topped ridge. To my right lies a pasture with a grizzled barbed wire fence, broken in places, and a small stand of oak and dogwood trees surrounding a gray, tumbledown shed with rotting gutters. The wind gliding from the far hills rustles the leaves in these trees, and the leaves glitter as they turn in the wind from sunlight to shadow.
Before me is one of those ubiquitous churches you find across the countryside of the American South: white clapboard, tin roof, stained glass windows, and a steeple topped with a ball and cross. The crickets are just beginning their evensong. The shelter in which I am sitting is clean as a monk’s cell with its ranks of green picnic tables, spotless cement floor, and scrubbed, empty trashcans. The only sounds are the passing cars, the wind, and the crickets. The air smells of grass and heat.
Odds are I won’t return to that particular MacDonald’s as a place to write, but I owe that garrulous old man a debt. Without him, I would have spent the past hour or so sitting inside a plastic restaurant pungent with the odors of fries and burgers and noisy with voices and beeping machines. Instead, I have listened to the wind, contemplated God in the church and death in the gravestones, and felt my heart wooed by the fields and distant hills.
So thank you, old man. And if by some weird, million-to-one chance you are reading these words, let me offer one piece of advice: Never again point at a woman’s belly and call her pregnant. Someday—and this I guarantee—that trick is going to dump you into a world of mortification.
The day before, when I sat in a booth pushing to knock off a book review, I caught sight of this same man out of the corner of my eye. He was roaming the restaurant, stopping at every table, talking away like some demented WalMart greeter who had stumbled into the wrong establishment. I avoided looking at him, but he stopped by my table anyway, leaning forward, cockled knuckles resting on the tabletop. For the next two minutes, he told me the location of every electrical outlet in the room in case I needed to recharge my computer. I thanked him, but I kept glancing at the screen of my laptop, and he finally took the hint and drifted off to a table across the room.
Now he was passing two feet away from me, going into the restaurant.
We said hello as he passed. He asked how I was, I said I was fine, and then I returned the question.
Polite. But a mistake.
He stopped in his tracks and began complaining about a sore spot on his heel that had popped up yesterday and made walking his dog difficult. “I’m talking class nine pain,” he said, and reached for the bottom of his trousers. For a moment I was afraid he was going to yank up his pants leg, remove his shoe and sock, and show me the back of his naked foot.
Then I caught a break. A pregnant woman, her friend, and two little girls walked out of the restaurant, and the man turned to them. “Miss America,” he said, pointing at some logos on the girl’s t-shirt. Then he shifted his aim and pointed the finger at the pregnant woman’s belly. “Three to five days,” he said.
This approach to a woman with a belly is always a dangerous tactic, and I was surprised she took no umbrage at his prediction. Maybe they knew each other. “A week,” she said.
He then began recounting to her how accurately he had predicted pregnancies in the past. “Once I told a woman she would deliver at 9:00 the next morning,” he said with enormous pride, “and she said she had a Cesarean scheduled for the next morning at nine and accused me of looking at her medical records.”
At this point, I slipped behind him into the restaurant, refilled my cup to the brim with ice and cola, hoisted my backpack to my shoulder, and pushed again through the door. Had I instead taken a booth as planned, I am convinced I would not have seen the end of him. As I drove away from the restaurant, he was still talking to the woman. Her face wore that trapped look, like an innocent at a party cornered by the biggest bore in the room.
Now, of course, I was stuck. Where would I go to write?
For lack of a better alternative, I drove toward my daughter’s house. Right now ten children ages eleven and under are living under Kaylie’s roof. I can easily write with all that hub-bub, but I needed to focus, and gaining the sanctity of my basement apartment entails running a gauntlet of questions—“Grandpa, where are you going?” “Grandpa, can we do soccer drills?” “Grandpa, why are there rainbows?”
Then, within half a mile of my daughter’s house, I saw the church with its covered picnic shelter.
This church shelter is where I am now writing. If the wind were a little less severe, I might well be writing in Paradise. Let me explain.
To my left across the highway is a mossy old cemetery with sunken mounds, crooked tombstones, and American flags marking the graves of veterans. Beyond the cemetery are blue hills backed by a cloud-topped ridge. To my right lies a pasture with a grizzled barbed wire fence, broken in places, and a small stand of oak and dogwood trees surrounding a gray, tumbledown shed with rotting gutters. The wind gliding from the far hills rustles the leaves in these trees, and the leaves glitter as they turn in the wind from sunlight to shadow.
Before me is one of those ubiquitous churches you find across the countryside of the American South: white clapboard, tin roof, stained glass windows, and a steeple topped with a ball and cross. The crickets are just beginning their evensong. The shelter in which I am sitting is clean as a monk’s cell with its ranks of green picnic tables, spotless cement floor, and scrubbed, empty trashcans. The only sounds are the passing cars, the wind, and the crickets. The air smells of grass and heat.
Odds are I won’t return to that particular MacDonald’s as a place to write, but I owe that garrulous old man a debt. Without him, I would have spent the past hour or so sitting inside a plastic restaurant pungent with the odors of fries and burgers and noisy with voices and beeping machines. Instead, I have listened to the wind, contemplated God in the church and death in the gravestones, and felt my heart wooed by the fields and distant hills.
So thank you, old man. And if by some weird, million-to-one chance you are reading these words, let me offer one piece of advice: Never again point at a woman’s belly and call her pregnant. Someday—and this I guarantee—that trick is going to dump you into a world of mortification.
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