Eric K

When I walked into the office, Cindy was sitting at her desk blubbering with make-up running down her face. A few other people, including the chain-smoking, sandy-haired senior who she had an unrequited crush on, were standing around looking grim. No one spoke up so the idea that Cindy was being histrionic flashed through my mind. Perhaps they were uncomfortable as she was prone to reacting emotionally to the smallest of disappointments.

With no explanation forthcoming, I asked Cindy what was happening. She looked at me with black-smudged and red eyes and blurted out, "Eric is dead." There were two Erics in my life at that time, and this one was a "lesser" one. He wasn't less in any sense of his personal value, but rather in terms of how long and how well I'd known him.

This Eric, Eric K, was a member of the psychology club to which I also belonged. My main experience with him was traveling to a Hare Krishna temple in West Virginia on a trip that we took as a group in order to experience a vastly different culture without having to leave the country. We saw a golden temple there and ate vegetarian lasagna that tasted very strange to me. Eric had copper red hair, a cheesy mustache, and blue eyes. His nature was gentle and soft-spoken and he was polite in assessing the quality of the funky lasagna. Now, he was, quite confusingly, dead in his twenty-first year on the planet.

Through sobs and streaming tears, Cindy stammered out some incomprehensible details about Eric's having tried to rescue a girl who was being abused by her boyfriend. Eric and a friend were walking through a parking lot and a man was trying to drag a woman into a car by her arm. The boyfriend stabbed Eric in the neck and Eric's companion in the chest. The companion survived his wound, but Eric bled to death in the parking lot. His life just drained out onto the ground.

Sometimes I think about Eric and what his life might have been had he not decided to help a woman in distress. He wouldn't have died, but he would have lived knowing he didn't step in when he might have to protect someone who appeared to need protection. The most bitter part of my memory is knowing that his killer got off because the girlfriend claimed that Eric and his companion were threatening and aggressive in their attempts to help her. I wasn't there, but I'm very comfortable calling her a liar. There was no way that gentle soul with the cheesy mustache meant to do anything other than help. R.I.P. Eric. You are not forgotten, even by those whose lives you touched in a cursory fashion.

137 Steps

She's petite with pencil thin legs. Her hair is long and black, but she usually wears it pulled back. She seems to favor print pants that hug her lower body and legs and frequently wears a hoody or jacket no matter what the weather. The bump in her belly seems misplaced both with her age, which can't be much more than 25 and could be much younger, and her physique.

Every day, she paces back and forth across the parking lot in front of my apartment. She does this morning noon and night. The same 137 steps are traced back and forth across this small, barren, pragmatic space. The whole world exists beyond that lot, but she paces there like she's in a prison yard.

I want to ask her why she doesn't walk over to the shopping mall that is just three minutes away or walk in the park which is about five minutes from this asphalt cul-de-sac, but I don't want to invade her privacy or appear to be disapproving. A few times, she has made eye contact with me or my husband and has smiled once. After that cursory recognition, she has kept her eyes on the ground when we happen across her, as if acknowledging our presence too many times during her repetitive trek will reveal that she seems imprisoned within the length of a parking lot.

Anticipation

Early in the morning, I wake up before he does. I look over at his face. It looks slightly droopy in its state of complete relaxation, but that is as much about his beard as his age. Usually, his shoulder is free of the sheet he uses for cover. The bare skin entices me to reach out and touch it, but I resist.

The price of waking up first is this longing for what is close at hand, but untouchable in the moment. It is desire not yet, but soon to be, fulfilled. It carries the sweetness of anticipation.

Shadow

An atypical wind blew as I rounded a corner and blew my umbrella inside-out. I inverted it back to its former form, but one support was permanently bent in the wrong direction. To prevent any further mishaps, I put it away until the breeze died down. I closed up the compact ersatz parasol and struggled to secure it with it's aging, fuzzy Velcro closure. Once successful, I hung it from my left wrist by the loop on the handle.

As I rounded a corner, I swung my arm slightly and the top flung off of the the handle. Though I can't seem to remember the fact, the screw that secured the two pieces was lost more than a year ago. I bent down to pick it up and noticed that two women were sitting on colorful towels on the sidewalk directly in my path. It took a moment, but I figured out that they were lifting small hand weights and counting outside. This choice was no doubt spurred by the hotter than usual spring day.

I stepped off the sidewalk to accommodate their workout and said hello to them as I started to pass by. The one on the right, a woman with beautifully clear very dark skin, asked, "Aren't you usually walking with a man?" After being momentarily stunned by her intimate knowledge of my habits despite not knowing me, I smiled and told her that I usually walked with my husband, but he was at work at that time.

I asked her if she lived around there and she pointed back at a tidy, smallish yellow house behind her. I started to ask her if she owned one of the many friendly cats in the area, but halted myself when I noticed a beautiful grey and white cat sitting several feet behind her next to a tree. She told me that was her cat and it was named "Shadow."

Shadow was not one of my usual feline acquaintances on this residential walking tour, so I asked if she was friendly. Her owner said that she was bothering she and her friend earlier, but she had exiled her to the spot next to the tree. I wished she and her companion luck with her workout, and as I went on my way, she said, "You're doing good," in reference to my constitutional. I replied that I was not doing as well as she and her friend, who looked fitter than me by far.

A Star

She looked down at the umbrella dangling from my left wrist and asked, “Is it going to rain?” It was a silly question because everybody knows that it never rains in California in the summer. I told her that it was for the sun, not for the rain. She looked perplexed and then slightly vexed.

Her last name was “Star”, and she was renting the house in which we’d just completed a month of cat-sitting. My husband and I were temporarily residing in a sprawling Bay Area home for the cost of scooping out a litter box on a daily basis and forcing allergy pills down one cat’s throat daily. It was a good deal for us, less so for the cat

The Star and her husband were forking over thousands of dollars for their summer there in addition to doing cat duty. They had something or other to do with Stanford University and surely she felt smart enough to know that an umbrella on a sunny California day did not mean rain. To her, I was just a delivery person who was diverting her from the process of moving into her temporary home and embarrassing her with my parasol.

To end her discomfort, I offered her the key that I’d just walked a little over 40 minutes in the cruel sun to deliver. She took it from my hand with a terse smile that showed a sense of relief that this brief social altercation would soon be over and then she bid me farewell. The door was closed nearly in my face and I turned to walk home. At the end of the walk, when the shade ran out, I opened my black umbrella and emerged into the light of the star-less day.