(Continued from a LinkedIn post published July 2, 2024. To read this story in one go, click here.)
As the days grew longer in Nîmes, I sometimes rode my bike after dark. Rather than purchase a battery-powered headlamp only to buy a new set of batteries every week, I paid a little more upfront for the tire-powered version. The mechanics of the generator were that when its tiny wheel pressed against the bike tire traveling fast enough, the tire’s forward motion turned the generator wheel to send an electric current to the headlamp. It was an ingenious and economical contraption whose only flaw was the drag its highly frictional contact inflicted on the bike tire. For that reason, I only pressed the generator wheel against the tire when I couldn’t see in the dark. After the bulb stopped working altogether, I permanently disengaged the generator, falsely promising myself I would stick to roads with streetlights when riding at night.
The day my bike pump “told” me to Look, Listen, Remember, and Not Regret, I once again pledged to break my slothful pattern. The problem with making and breaking that commitment was that while it was one thing to notice something out of place in my particular worldview, it was quite another to know how to respond to what, by my early twenties, I had come to think of as a prescient prompting. So when, at the top of a steep and windy hill the same night, my bicycle pump put its invisible foot down, I heard the voice for a second time that day, but this time a little louder.
“Headlamp!”
While not exactly ignoring it this time, I chose not to go down without a fight.
“Headlamp? What about it? It’s broken; can’t you see that? Hasn’t worked in weeks. If you’re asking me to engage the generator, it will only slow me down.”
“Headlamp! And don’t forget your little blunder with the pump.”
And that was that. After sheepishly dismounting my bike and pressing the headlamp generator wheel-to-tire—
“I’lI mostly be coasting downhill,” I rationalize. “I’ll hardly notice the drag.”
—l begin my decent. As the road winds, I feel my gravity checked by some outside force. But I haven’t a second to complain because my headlamp flickers to life, and no sooner have I picked up speed. And as it does, a too-fast-approaching two-ton camion swerves around a bend in its ascent, crossing momentarily into my lane. Seeing my tiny light—I instantly pray he does—the careening truck’s driver cranks his wheel a hard right to miss me narrowly.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” harrumphs my newly working headlamp.
When you plop down your picnic anywhere within the acres and acres of lawn and woods that flank the reflecting pool on the Washington Mall, you are instantly swallowed up by tens of thousands of your closest friends camping there for the same reason: their picnic blankets and fireworks already laid down. Like a crowded Memorial Day beach, our entourage gingerly threads to a clearing large enough for four families and over a dozen kids to lay out our kit. Territory marked, a base camp established, and holiday possessions roughly arranged, Emmy begins to pop off dinner lids when Bill’s wife Calleen lets loose a mother bear gasp.
“Bill! Where’s Mark?”
There is a moment in the life of every parent when the future of their child flashes completely before their eyes as if they, themselves, are facing imminent death. All eight of us know this moment implicitly and immediately mobilize. Our informal team leaders, Calleen and Robert, rapidly tick off points of the compass to everyone but me as I’ve mysteriously gone walkabout. I’m already heading straight for the Washington Monument.
“You know what he’s wearing. Walk in the direction you are facing right now.”
As the other parents fan out across the mall, I battle doubt and disorientation to constrain my field of view to the ocean blue of a size-four ‘T’ and a little pair of khaki-colored shorts for a solid three minutes. As I accelerate my beeline, hundreds of faceless strangers I am determined to keep in the periphery of my tunnel vision come and go like so many retinal flashes. Rushing past what seems like head-high branches in a thick wood, I can almost feel the scratch of each unremarked face as it brushes against my own, afraid even to turn me to the left hand, turn me to the right, for fear I might break the spell I have been under since base camp.
“Am I not hunting for a face? How am I so gripped in a straight-line deadrun?”
As the panic seeps into my cheeks, I walk even faster. I eventually make out the end of the line I have drawn and what could pass for a cattle pen fence. On the other side of it is the reflecting pool that stretches between Lincoln and Washington. Fruitless or not, the fence marks the dead end of my blindered race against time.
And just like that, there they are, ocean blue and khaki, the colors I have been straining to see for a full four minutes, leaning against the fence in a posture that spells, “If I could get just get a toe hold on this fence I would surely break it down.” Squeezing closer—people are now moshing shoulder to shoulder—the colors resolve into the back of Mark Egan’s shirt and pants, their wearer wishing he could squeeze out of them if that’s what it takes to make it into the water.
“Come on, Kiddo,” I say. “Time for dinner.”
Six weeks ago, Mark asked me to attend his wedding. Seated with the groom’s family, I tear up to consider that Kari and I are the only members of his party not connected to him by blood. He won’t remember the day I was bid to gather him to dinner. (When Bill sends me a current email address, he’ll at least have this record of it.) As we sit in that holy place, every detail of my tunnel vision sprints to the wall and returns to me in living color. In a flash of irony, across not a cattle fence but a holy altar, Mark is again showing me his back as he gazes longingly into the water brimming from the eyes of his beloved. I need no imaginary pen this time, no notebook, no inner voice to tell me the colors he is wearing.
This post is a continuation of a LinkedIn Newsletter article excerpted from a story published on this blog on July 4, 2023. To read the original story in one go, click here.