I was getting tired of my dog walk routine, passing the same middle-aged houses, nodding back to the usual nodding pedestrians, and surrendering every so often to that terrible canine urgency to water the crucial bushes and hydrants. But wild, unpredictable fellow that I am, this time, when Dogboy and I reached the second corner, I turned us left instead of right and freshened up the route completely. Different houses came into view, different bits of gossip came to mind –- here is where the political wacko lives; there is the nostalgic house we never visit anymore because our friends have moved to Texas; here is the house we almost bought when we moved to town. And there, the house that held the garage sale where our daughter might have been, or was almost, accidentally killed. Seeing that spot was like finding a sad anniversary marked on the kitchen calendar.
It had been an otherwise completely innocent and beautiful late-summer day, bright and breezy and warm, in a neighborhood brimming with gentle wheeler-dealers who had turned the contents of their basements out onto their lawns. Optimism was in the air; some people were clearing away the chaos of their personal possessions, and others were snagging bargains to add to their own dusty closet shelves. And everyone was chuckling about the odd 8-track tape, the smarmy knickknack, or hopeless exercise machine. We finished a quick look at one particular driveway cornucopia, then I walked on ahead with our two year old while my wife said goodbye. An ancient wooden ladder on the sidewalk held the hand-lettered garage sale sign. When we passed, our little one looked up at the odd thing. As she turned away, a gust caught the cardboard sign and pitched the whole rickety contraption over toward her. The ladder accelerated and the edge of its top plank flew down like the blade of a well-swung axe. The spot on the sidewalk where it hit had not been empty when the ladder began to fall.
Nobody saw this close call but me. The little one never noticed, and the garage salers only knew that their sign needed to be stood back up. I remembered the first picture we had of our daughter, the ultrasound taken in utero, a profile of her head so perfect that we recognized the likeness after she was born. In that strange and otherwordly picture you could see that the curving bones of her forehead were so thin and fragile. I realized she would have been helpless under the ladder’s blow. But as she trotted down the sidewalk, her exuberance was untouched.
Every so often we pass a certain place in the road or we turn a certain page of the calendar, and maybe we hadn’t planned to remember, but we do. Whether the loss was personal or widely shared, whether the wound is still fresh, whether it was a tragedy or merely a close call, we remember the fragility and spirit of our fellow human beings. And we remain hopeful about each of the turnings in the road and each of the calendar’s blank squares -– each of those days whose meaning has not yet been penciled in.