A Few Steps

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. 

I’m sorry and I understand – the only words this non-angel could muster in those few steps she took with a grieving family and their dog.  I repeated them over and over in my mind, as though they were a mantra, all through class, each time imagining the loving arms of some real angel or goddess or invisible being that could hear me from my yoga mat in the darkened room and go to the clinic next door and somehow do the thing that I could not.