The old man
She has a meeting every Wednesday morning. It is not a business meeting, exactly, more like group therapy. It is important to her. It is an obligation that she wants in her life.
She’s compulsive about punctuality. She knows exactly how long it will take to get from her house to the meeting place, including her stop for a drive-thru sugar-free vanilla iced latte. There is another route, and if she were the type to suffer easily from boredom, she would probably alternate week to week.
But she prefers the blue highway to the main highway. She turns onto the road less traveled at the wine barn. Farmland now for ten miles or so. Often she sees the kind of wildlife that you can see in fields. A coyote in the hedges. A real partridge family. An owl, late returning from its night stalking.
And this old man. He is always walking beside the road, just about the place where the speed limit goes from 50 to 40 mph for no apparent reason.
All summer and fall, he walked from point unknown to point unknown, as far as she is concerned. Probably it took her weeks to even become aware of him, like they say you don’t respond to junk mail until the twelfth mailing. But she is aware now.
He is old but robust enough to take this walk from somewhere to wherever. He has a walking stick but usually carries it parallel to the ground, like a weapon. Maybe it is just to ward of marauding teenagers with rings in their noses and brows.
He wears bib overalls. She thinks he may have been a farmer in this valley for many, many years. Or else he’s a California retiree who has purchased a designer farm-ette and merely likes to look the part.
One Wednesday morning, she smiled at him as she drove passed, not quite down to the 40 mph reduced speed. He smiled back. The next Wednesday morning, he waved. She waved back. Now she looks for him, like she looks for the latte stand and her turn-off at the wine barn.
She is prone to worry, so he has added a new arrow to that particular quiver. Does he have a family that would miss him if he went walking one morning and never came back? Did he once have a loyal dog, an old Shep who died one night in his sleep under the porch? Does he walk the road on any day but Wednesday? And not unlike the tree in the forest, if she’s not there to see him is he really there at all?
He is part of the minutiae that makes up her day. And she’d be a little more lost without him.