Thinking of You

Last Thursday I got home from work around the usual time, turned off my usual car and started towards my usual front door. But my routine was interrupted by someone saying “What’s up, bro?”

I looked towards the general direction of the voice, and there, sitting on the little football that delineates my dead lawn from the neighbor’s dead lawn was a young man— I recognized him as one of the people living in the house at the back of my neighbor’s easement—and returned the pleasantry.

“Wh’sup buddy?“

I took a few steps towards him, and could see that he had spent the better part of today crying, drinking, or maybe both. He was maybe in his mid to late 20s, gauge earrings, a grown out fade, work pants and shoes but an old skater t-shirt that probably used to fit better.

“Separation, bro,” he said. “I think I’m getting a divorce.”

The aging meme of Kermit sipping tea and suggesting it’s none of his business flashed in my head… but it was clear this guy needed to talk. So I just said, “What’s been going on?”

For the next thirty minutes, I stood there on my dead grass, mouth shut, ears open, hands clasped in front of me listening to this poor guy’s tale of woe. He painted pictures and shared details of his star-crossed relationship with a girl he’d met in high school; their young child, their ups and downs, their successes and failures, their dreams and nightmares. And as the pieces of his sky fell in clumps around us like sopping wet cardboard, I just stood there listening.

I didn’t have a solution, and he wasn’t asking for me to have one. He just needed someone to listen I suppose. So that’s what I did.

My kid finally came out and rescued me, asking with all the innocence and cluelessness of a child what I was making for dinner. And the guy just said “Thanks, bro,” gave me the pandemic phist pound, and walked back up the long easement to his anything-but-usual life.

And I went in and made dinner for my family. Watched a little fall baseball on TV. Read my kids a little James and the Giant Peach. I learned long ago, in different jobs and in different circumstances of life, that I’m willing to run towards another person’s pain, dwell near it, even help that person process it, but I won’t make it mine.

It’s the difference between sympathy and empathy, between passion and compassion. Like all the folds of space and time in my layered existence, I have my own memories and maladies, some buried deep and some just a scratch under the surface. It’s the difference of being there FOR someone, and being there WITH someone.

As Khalil Gibran wrote, “the oak tree and the cypress do not grow in each other’s shadow.”