UNHURRIED

Thursday mornings, I walk down the east side of Capitol Hill for my 8:00 AM piano lesson with Peter Mack, my teacher and friend, who lives in a Tudor home set amidst a lush garden that backs up on the UW Arboretum.   Walking to Peter’s, I pass a residence hidden behind a thick hedge into which is erected a roughly weathered poster-board with a sign: Please Post Here Poems, Scribbles, or What You Will For Unhurried Passersby.  What little is posted there is brief and weather-worn, suggesting whoever tacked it with the available tacks has long since gone their way.  I learned from Peter that the homeowner is Paul, an elderly (my age) gentleman  long retired.  I could have guessed it from other monuments on his parking strip. Hanging from each of two trees: a rusty lawnmower and a flat-tire bicycle.  Both are clearly out of commission.  The passersby may be hurried, but surely Paul has seized full leisure.

To a writer, there is something beseechingly abandoned about a blank surface inviting messages. I feel called to post a poem, much as a graffiti artist is summoned by a blank wall.  Now, a one-time inclination has morphed into an obsessive commitment.  For months, every Wednesday evening, in addition to practicing my piano piece for Thursday morning, I also write a poem to post on my way to or from my lesson.  With each posting, I would take down the poem from the prior week and toss it into the recycle bin always sitting on the parking strip.  That is, I did that UNTIL I met Paul walking out of his gate while I was pushing the fourth thumbtack on my new poem.  He thanked me for posting the poems but continued to scold me for taking them down.  That was HIS job. Besides, I sometimes removed them before he had a chance to read them.  Surely this man is unhurried. After his admonition, I left the poems in place until the entire board was wallpapered with poems by Mary Kollar.  Enough!  Today, I removed them all, stacking them like a deck of cards one on top of the other and returned them in one corner with one nail at the bottom of the board.  Only today’s poem remains dead center.

I have a little contest of wills with Paul.  Who is in a hurry to write, to read, to take down what is posted?  I am the one usually in a hurry, walking crisply up and down the hill, looking straight ahead or a short distance ahead so I don’t fall.  I must have walked beneath that hanging rusted bike and lawnmower for weeks before I noticed them.  Today, I decided to slow down, take longer to get home, enjoy the sun shining warmly on my shoulders – the unhurried passerby.  Up the steep hill home, I stopped for coffee that I sipped on a picnic table outside the Volunteer Park Café.  I wrote in my journal about the puffy haired spaniel leashed to the table where I sat.  I was alone and yet somehow with the other outside patrons and their dogs.

Continuing on up the steep hill, I passed a dense and colorful ribbon of orange California poppies mixed with tall daisies thriving in a narrow strip between sidewalk and property fence.  Two fat bumblebees worked away at the center of an orange flower.  I focused my I-phone camera on their buzzing, while thinking, “Who plants such a bevy of flowers OUTSIDE their backyard fence?  Only someone who wants to share with passersby, not to hoard beauty where only they could see them. “

My stopping to focus the camera blocked the sidewalk from two young women pushing a stroller with three toddlers inside. “Oh my!” I gasped.  “A three-seater cruiser.”  The women laughed, and a child slid from his seat to hold the woman’s hand. He complained of sticky fingers she explained to him came from the pine tree he had climbed in the park.  I imagined his fingers in mine, having taken my grandson to that same park two decades ago.  Three children, two women and I felt like a spontaneous community.

Spontaneous Communities:  How often do we create them at bus stops or check-out lines in a grocery store?   It occurs to me that Paul’s sign is not about slowing down so much as connecting with each other.  Easier perhaps, at a slower pace, but possible within an imagined reach.