Bricks

Posted on December 17, 2005 in Driving

The world is out there, at the tips of your fingers or as close as the lens of your eye.

When Laura from the DBSA national office talked about what she would regret if she were suddenly taken from life, I thought back to a discovery I made earlier in the afternoon. I was driving down Beach Boulevard in Huntington Beach. The center divider approaching Talbot is bricked over. Rain started to fall as I stopped in front of the Good Shepard (sic) Cemetery to wait for a left turn arrow. Rain fell and then stopped.

I leaned on the truck door and gazed at the the aborted shower’s drops lying on the bricks. They were distinct: you could — if you had the time and wanted to do so — count the collisions of water with clay and keep the tally on your fingers and toes. Then a light changed and cars came in the other direction. As each automobile passed, its shadow or reflection caused me to see more drops on each brick. They’d been there all the time but because of the angle, they were invisible. It worried me that the rain might start again and obliterate the patterns, so I took in each of the passings so I could enjoy this hitherto undiscovered phenomenon.

At the far reaches of my peripheral vision, I noticed the back end of the car in front of me lurching ahead. I turned my line of sight to the fore. I followed the pack around the bend. And the earth and my head changed positions relative to the other. The bricks were still half-wet, but I could no longer see them.

Every now and then, I read something in a book about a minute matter which caught the author’s eye. It makes no sense to me, sometimes. Then I find myself idling in traffic or at a bus stop or on my deck and I see what the author meant. It’s there, no farther than the lens of my eye or my nostrils or my fingertips because the senses are all about Touch. Photons hit the eye. Pieces of nature crash against the insides of the nose. “Ah-ha” comes from my throat. I know. I know!

I have never read another’s report of what I saw on Beach Boulevard today. Perhaps, as I present this to the Great Society of the Web, I have marked something new. But it doesn’t matter. While I sat along Beach Boulevard, waiting for the left turn light, I saw rain spatters appear and disappear as cars passed close. And when Laura talked about regret, I thought about them. What if I had died a minute before?

At my death, I will surely regret all the things I didn’t see even though I have no idea what they might be.

All those things that are right there.