Glimpse Impression

The car moved towards me in the parking lot this morning when I arrived.

It was still dark, and the lights on their tall poles threw their long cone-beams down onto the damp asphalt. I heard it before I saw it, a rough, laboring engine in an older vehicle. I stopped to let it pass before crossing the lot. The light fell on the car and showed me the driver.

Single mom, I thought. She was young, with still-wet hair plastered down on her head, her face full of the kind of worried concentration that comes from paying bills with credit cards, accepting donations from food pantries and smug relatives, and from worrying that she’s too impatient with her little son because he looks so much like his father, that sonofabitch.

The car moved past me; the driver never looked at me. A sharp tang of stale tobacco smoke sat in the cool air and I walked through it in passing. I felt guilty for my momentary belief that I knew her life entire, or perhaps I tried to make myself feel guilty because I knew I was correct and didn’t want to be correct.

She’s so young. And she will soon be so old.

I knew as I unlocked the door to the office that I had to mention her to someone else, to those who read this blog. I do not know why this is important to me, but this is just one of many such things that puzzle me about myself.

The light is coming up in the east now, and I am wondering where she works and what she does and what her evenings are like. I am thinking of a small rental house hidden in the passage of many years, with low-wattage bulbs and the smell of frying potatoes coming from the kitchen, and the comfort of re-reading a comic book for the twentieth time.

Father, bless the young ones who are building memories that will one day pluck at their older sleeves.

~ S.K. Orr