As I ate I noticed a female grackel picking her way beneath the tables. I realize that of all creatures the female grackel rouses in me deep feeling. She is brown and ornery and slightly tattered. She does not look or move with the aggression of the male. She is not shy about sharing your table or your food, but she is quiet.
In the afternoon rush hour began to accumulate around us. I felt the busyness that Arlington can acquire sometimes. I felt complacent and sheltered because the air was crisp and the right temperature, I was eating as I had for so long wished. I had somewhere to go, but in brief flashes over time, I have felt disembodied and unsure.
Like this afternoon, I took a wrong turn and ended in a brand new neighborhood. It gave me a strange, lost feeling I don't understand. A neighborhood waiting to be lived-in. Someone growing up there would feel as I do about piney woods and humidity. Perhaps those treeless streets and razored lawns would give one a pang of home. Curious, disembodied feeling.
And earlier today, I found myself standing, as I so often do when waiting for a run to finish, when there is nothing to insert in that small span of waiting, and felt myself drift back over the years, feeling myself as much a part of any of them as the year in which I now live, wondering where I was and how I got there in a race of thought difficult to explain. I ended the moment in a curious sense of detachment, for I have tried in my better moments not to own time or question its intentions.
I felt at Potbelly that I was a drifter too. I try to learn what life teaches me, but I am so slow to learn. That is the trade-off of a thick head and iron-hard self. I relinquish and gain so slowly and laboriously.
I opened the door for the lady a couple of times on her coming and going and noticed that in her walker, in a pouch, was a Pomeranian. It looked extremely happy to be where it was.
And I noticed when I rose to put away my things, and looked into the lady's face, that it was shockingly unlined. She smiled at me, and as I reflect I wonder if only crazy women smile at each other. I smiled in response feeling for once that I had experienced an equal exchange with a stranger.
As I brood over the park I realize that every day I am trying to open the hand, through whose clenched fingers the grains of time ever spill. I do not know the solution to myself, only that if I could loose the time completely my empty hand would really be holding the whole world.