Direction

FORWARD

Two middle-aged women were driving home from Tahoe and it was snowing, and it was because of the snow and a ridiculous amount of traffic that they’d been stuck spending an extra night at their writing retreat and they were just a little bit testy with one another, for various reasons, despite the fact that they love each other, but this time, and unlike the night before, they made it smoothly past the highway patrol checkpoint because at a gas station way back in Truckee they’d paid a young man, with unfortunate skin to install the chains they weren’t sure were even going to fit, but the chains did fit, and now the women were on their way home on a gray and snowy morning, driving as fast as they could go with chains, which is not at all fast. They weren’t talking because of the irritability I mentioned earlier, but instead, were looking out the window at the silent, snow-covered trees thinking silent but appreciative thoughts about how lucky they were to be driving home through the mountains on a Monday morning.

When the snow gave way to slush and they saw two truck drivers at the side of the highway removing their chains, the two middle-aged women pulled over, too, and got out and were pelted by big slushy snow-rain drops while they looked at the chains on their tires and muttered various versions of hmmmm and wondered what, in the absence of a knowledgeable young man, they were going to do about de-installing their chains. The women didn’t exactly scratch their heads but neither were they setting about the task at hand with a can-do attitude, which is probably why the driver of the truck right behind them, wearing a short sleeved T-shirt that didn’t quite cover a beer-belly noteworthy in size, and a baseball cap with a manly, possibly Republican logo approached and said, “Need help?” When both women nodded vigorously, the possibly-Republican truck driver, with no jacket or tarp, and with ungloved hands, laid himself down directly on the slushy gravelly shoulder of the highway and, with considerable effort and freezing hands, proceeded to remove the chains. When he was done, but before he could scoot back to the warmth of his truck, one of the middle-aged women said, reaching out with a folded-up twenty dollar bill, “Here, sir, have yourself a nice breakfast…please, on us.” The truck driver jumped back as if struck and quickly raised both hands as if to communicate an emphatic HALT.

“Please,” the women insisted, but by then he was halfway back to his truck, and he kind of yelled over his shoulder as he climbed up into the cab: “Pay it forward. Right?”

So the woman with the twenty nodded and vowed to keep that bill separate from the other bills in her wallet and to watch for the first opportunity to pay it forward but when she got home, finally, to her warm home in Berkeley (a town with lots of street people young and old carrying signs requesting spare change) she was immobilized by this vexing question: would it be better to give that twenty to someone who would also pay it forward? Or should she give the twenty to the first person who asked, who would more than likely be the overly assertive but relatively well-dressed “homeless” man with the lawn chair and cell phone who has taken up residence outside Zachary’s Pizza on Solano and pretty much terrorizes every passerby?

While she waited for her mind to be made up she went ahead and gave the Zachary’s Pizza man a dollar, and the schizophrenic man outside Peet’s a dollar (which she usually does anyway) and the terribly troubled old woman on Shattuck a five—but none of that was likely to be paid forward.

That twenty got mixed up with the other money in her wallet, and maybe was converted into quarters for the new parking machines the citizens of Berkeley find so irritating. But she’s still watching for an opportunity to pay twenty dollars forward. She will definitely jump on the first opportunity.

BACKWARDS

When a middle-aged woman’s disabled daughter, at the age of 22, moved to a town two hours away, the two of them began text-messaging immediately. Some of the messages were funny and some were somewhat dire and many were cries for help and others were just sweetly newsy—and even after seven months, the woman can’t quite press the button on her iPhone labeled ‘Clear All’ because sometimes she feels like paging back and back and back, all the way to that first text message last August when the story of her daughter’s unexpected leap into an independent life first began. What’s the character limit, she wonders now, and how will it feel when she and her daughter reach that limit, and the history of the last seven months in short bursts of text finally evaporates into the ether?

SIDEWAYS and UP

Mona, the smallest of our two dogs, can’t, without human assistance, make the leap up to the Kasbah (our household’s favorite comforter-covered leisure location) so we’ve devised the following system: one of us lowers her hands over the side of the platform and positions them near the floor one Mona-width apart. Using an endearing combination of canine maneuvers, including forward, backwards, and the especially smile-producing sideways, Mona inserts herself into the waiting human mechanism and gives a little pre-leap to indicate her readiness for ascent.

This never fails to cheer me up.