It was just happenstance, when I pulled into the parking lot
for my yoga class, that I found a spot next to a van of which
the side door was open and a man was standing next to it while two young boys
were waiting with an old red wagon at the rear of the van and a woman was just
beginning to walk around from the driver’s side . . . and I somehow already
sensed what was to come out of that van door.
Once outside of my car, I saw the man, supposedly the father,
reach into the back seat to lift out the family dog and place him carefully/tenderly
in the wagon which the two boys held steady – and by then I had already
retrieved my yoga mat from the rear of my car, and I saw the sunglassed face of
the woman, the supposed mother – the boys and the father wore sunglasses too –
but the mother’s grief could not be disguised by her sunglasses, for her lips
trembled and she could not look toward me.
It just so happened, without any contrivance, that I was to
walk in step with them toward the building where we both went – they, toward the veterinary
clinic on the right; and me, to the yoga studio on the left – but before we
diverged, in those few steps, I instinctively wanted to place my arm around the
mother – but I held back, since no words or acquaintance or eye contact had
been made between us – and perhaps it is my imagination, but I almost think she
had leaned toward me in the way I wanted to lean toward her, but that she also
held back as I did . . .
Instead, with no thought as to the appropriateness
or inappropriateness of the authentic emotion I held, I said to her, “I’m
sorry” – and that is when her emotion poured forth; and the boys too, betrayed
by the purpose of those sunglasses on them, they too began to cry; and the
father, stoic as he tried to be, could not deny what he was feeling and began to melt in the face . . .
The few steps we shared in the parking lot ended as quickly
as they began, and I veered to the left while they veered to the right – and my
parting words, not wanting to leave them in that condition but all I could say in the short space of time and distance we still shared, my last words to them were, “I understand” – and just as I said those
two words, the lame dog, who looked more like a very kind red wolf than a dog,
that lame dog brightened up in the eyes and put one leg out of the wagon to
escape it, perhaps to go to my side of the building – all the strength it could muster – and the two boys jumped
to put its leg back in, and the mother yelped softly as though this were all a
mistake after all, and the father slowed his pull of the wagon and turned
around just to be sure, but the dog
submitted . . . or had used up its strength.
As I continued my solitary walk to the yoga studio door, I felt the tears
well in my eyes and my head naturally bow. Once inside, I kept my sunglasses
on, for the tears were escaping from both corners of both eyes – a betrayal to
myself and to all the giddy noise making women inside the yoga studio
lobby. I shook off my flip flops and
found the room I was to go in, my sunglasses still on, while I greeted the
instructor and briefly noted what I had just seen – “Ohhhh . . . I had to do that,” she whispered with such emotion that
I bent down to unfurl my yoga mat without looking at her.
Once the room was darkened and the drone of
the instructor’s voice had begun and I was alone on my mat, I took off the sunglasses
and lay on the mat with my eyes closed, a few burning tears making a path down
each temple and pooling uncomfortably at each inner corner – my sleeve dabbing
at them over and over, only to be replaced by more – an inconsolable dabbing – and all through yoga class I could only
think of those few steps that carried so much weight between us – people and a
dog I don’t even know – and of those few words that were so inadequate but all
I had to give – I’m sorry and I understand – no solution, no excuse,
no stay of execution, no escape from the red wagon – how powerless we are to quell
the most obvious and natural and universal of pains – nothing I could say or do
to make anything different for them.
