Sometimes I Fantasize About Carrying Two Umbrellas

I do a lot of walking, and naturally, the statistics of getting caught in the rain increase exponentially the more you walk.  I’ve also found that we are 387%* more likely to get caught in the rain while traveling without an umbrella, though I may be biased or just habitually underprepared.

Either way, I’ve had my share of unplanned showers.

One cool summer day, I was so thoroughly soaked from the two-mile trek from church that all I could think about was getting home, kicking off my waterlogged flats, and wrapping myself in as many layers of warm, dry things as I could fit on my body.

I was so close I could taste the sweet Cocoa of Victory . . . only to be thwarted by the Gandalf of traffic lights.

While I stood there with rainwater in my shoes and the tease of imaginary cocoa on my tongue, the disagreeable light permitted passage to plenty of cars, but would not yield to button-pressing pedestrians at the crossroads.

So I waited.  For a lull in traffic.  For a light.  For a sign.

And then, just like that, someone with an umbrella leaned over to shield me.  It was generous and neighborly, of course, but it was also comical, because I was unmistakably drenched.  I may have said, “Thank you,” but I kind of wanted to say, “It’s too late for me.  Save yourself!”

It was one moment in time on a small town street corner, but after my bleary-eyed journey squinting between raindrops that I would never outmaneuver, it felt like the climax of a war film.  I was the would-be martyr resigned to self-sacrifice only to be slung over the hero’s shoulder as he limps to the barracks, except my hero had already outmaneuvered the enemy with a scrap of supported fabric.  Instead of limping to our glory, we stood still, side-by-side, two neighbors huddled under an umbrella for one, exchanging greetings and gratitude and smiling up at a traffic light as though to persuade it with kindness.

When we parted, my neighbor was apologetic, but the gesture and the brief reprieve had already brought me more than enough joy to accompany me home.

Within a month or so, I had the joy of paying the act forward twice, once at a bus stop where the rider had been waiting in the drizzle long before I arrived, and once at another street corner in a sudden downpour.  I’ve been learning both to accept others’ generosity and aid and to find joy in receiving, but it felt good to be able to offer others that neighborly love.

Then, whenever I walked in the rain with my umbrella, I became more and more aware of the other pedestrians: whether or not they had umbrellas or raincoats, whether or not the rain seemed to weigh heavily on their bodies and their spirits.

That was when I began to fantasize about carrying two umbrellas.

I imagined giving one away to a different stranger in every storm.  I started spending long stretches of my walks pondering the ethical implications of carrying multiple umbrellas and giving them away.

Would it be cumbersome?  Wasteful?

Presumptuous?  Insulting?

A life’s mission?  An expensive hobby?

An overestimation of the trouble of rain?

An underestimation of folks’ contentedness in the rain?

If there was any way to overcomplicate the daydream, I found it.

Weeks later, in another storm, I walked my boyfriend to the train station.  We took my two umbrellas.  I almost sent one home with him, but he said he’d have little open-air walking to do after boarding the train and he would be fine.

Soon the passengers disappeared, and I was alone on the platform except for one older gentleman with empty hands.

It took a minute to register the circumstances, but then, without any guilt about the overabundance or uncertainty about the gesture, I offered him the second umbrella.

He didn’t speak English and I understood only enough Spanish to know that he was in awe of the storm, but we easily established that he lived along my way home.

As we walked together, he commented on the rain, and I agreed, wagging my waterlogged shoes over the ground to indicate that I could feel the water swishing around my feet.

We laughed.  I was laughing because I was doing a ridiculous dance, but I imagine it looked just as ridiculous to him.

It’s a beautiful thing to experience—that moment with a stranger with whom your only common language is life itself; the moment that you realize it’s more than enough.  What we couldn’t share in words we shared in umbrellas and grins and squishy shoes.

Once we arrived at his building, I almost told him to keep the umbrella, but when he handed it to me, I accepted it back.

These days, if I remember to carry an umbrella at all, I will try to carry two.

---

*Research is ongoing.

The Portrait of Samantha

One winter's day in England, I woke up and the sky was bright blue and I leapt for joy. But the day was even more extraordinary than that, and it involved food and chance-meetings with memorable strangers. And food.

Between a delicious Nutella crepe from Michel's and a movie at the Odeon, I spent a couple of hours wandering through the city. Most everyone I knew in town had evacuated for the holidays, and I was determined to begin my month of general solitude by finding ways to appreciate where I was even in the absence of familiar faces. Heading along St. Aldate's, I doubled back a little and decided to take the "scenic route" past Christ Church - past its trees, its veinous vines and its forbidden grass (so tempting) - toward the Thames.


Naturally I had already devoured my crepe of chocolate love and hazelnut happiness, so with slightly sticky but otherwise conveniently free hands I unleashed my camera on the world, taking the clear skies as an opportunity for shutterbuggin'. My camera at the time was decidedly moody and decidedly not compatible with Britain. It didn't function well with grey any better than I did.

Along the broad path, an elderly woman rested on one of the benches, a great willow tree behind her and the leaves of the tall oaks enveloping her in shade. She wore a light green hat and a cozy white coat, layered over which was a white apron. On her lap she worked at a large piece of paper, already quite far along with branches of graphite splaying across the sheet.


We exchanged greetings at a distance; shared our satisfaction with the weather. I regaled her with my bit about my anti-cloud camera and was pleased to see her smile, even though it didn't seem she needed a reason. She was simply pleasant, enchanting. Before long we were thoroughly engaged in conversation, and she showed me bits of her work. She considers herself an artist and a poet, and "perhaps a sort of philosopher." She loves nature. She ponders humanity, life, innocence. She pointed me in the direction of the last poem in her collection, one about youth.

"I wrote that after I saw a child skipping ahead of me one day," she explained. "I was a child once. But where did I go? I swallowed myself."

Hm. Paraphrasing there. I suppose philosophy is one of those things that sounds equally cryptic whether or not you've quoted correctly.

She would draw the trees from one college campus after another. Often the images would eventually be scaled down to be placed on cards. She spoke of one young woman who asked her to design her wedding invitations. The couple were married in a forest and have since lived in a tree house somewhere.

The trees must have been her favorite. She would speak to the trees; she would hear them. I'm not one to believe vehemently that plants and inanimate objects have personality or communication, but then my science professor that year had told me that I anthropomorphize everything, and he generally needed to explain whatever neurological process I'd just butchered in actual scientific terms that would not lend emotion and motivation to ions and synapses. I decided not to tell him that I've also named half my appliances, or that I speak aloud in a specifically quirky voice to signify translating for my dog. And when this woman admitted to me that after dropping a spoon she set it down elsewhere and said, "I'm putting you in solitary confinement!" my inward chuckle was quickly quelled with a thought of - well, a moody camera. Let's leave it at that. So I won't judge.

I listened. Just listened.

She extracted a card from her unusual portfolio, full of scribbled pages and scraps of fabric. "I saw these two little acorns and this is what they told me," she said. She opened the card, and inside with another image of the acorns it read, 'We will be two trees.' She smiled when she read it.

She described Joseph, an oak, and Samantha, the great willow behind her. There were several designs incorporating Samantha in particular. She'd written a book about her called The Portrait of Samantha, and seemed to feel especially fond of her. She said that one day, Samantha asked, "Do you think I'm beautiful?" and so she drew her, as well as a self-portrait, and placed them side-by-side, and Samantha thanked her.

She seemed to remember every person, every face, every name; what's more, she knew each of their stories, as though no life were to go unnoticed or forgotten. That young man is a maths student from America; he has another year here. The runner over there - he comes by the river every day at this time. They all acknowledged her in passing with smiles and salutations.

"This man," she later explained, nodding unobtrusively down the path to a man in a long black coat, "was a professor at Christ Church. He's retired now, and he's become an alcoholic. Falls asleep sometimes here amongst the trees."

As she continued I listened silently, both intrigued and concerned, not daring to glance at him and trying to find a balance in remaining respectful of both the speaker and the unknowing subject.

"Look," she whispered more fervently, her brows raising into her wrinkled forehead, and finally I did.

The red of his entire face only accentuated his bulbous nose and droopy eyes. A bit of saliva or such dribbled at the side of his lip a good way down his chin. What most captivated me, however, was the addition he had made to his long black coat: a flower, an entire flower complete with about 18 inches of its stem, held assumedly through a button-hole near his lapel. He looked absolutely sorrowful, as though in perpetual mourning. Slowly he passed us, and I thought he was going to continue to plod down the path without a word, but he nodded to us and said quietly, "Good luck," before departing.

There was little more to our visit. We talked more of art and writing. Suddenly it seemed not to matter that inside I knew my passion for both was dwindling; it was exciting just to share the appreciation for it with someone. Without knowing all this, she told me, "I can see the writer in you." It was an unexpected comment - one that, along with all the intriguing parts of the afternoon, gave me a subtle spark of the creative passion that I'd so missed. It isn't often that an acquaintance acknowledges something, anything, in you. I should add this to my repertoire of day-brighteners. I should be so fortunate to lift someone in that way.

Her name was Zoe Peterssen, and on a whim I later searched for her online. Apparently people have spoken of meeting her in this fashion at least as early as 1998. Learning this, I only feel all the more honored to be a part of this decade or so of people who have been somehow enchanted with this woman, so much so that she has been immortalized not only through her work but also through stories told everywhere.

Before I left I bought one of her cards, one of the portraits of Samantha. I liked it because it was in fact the tree behind her as we spoke that day, but also because it had made an impression on me as I looked through her collection.

Inside it reads simply: 'Not alone.'

Perhaps God speaks through the trees; perhaps through portraits of them.

---

This is a revision of an entry from my old travel journal, December 2008.

Open Doors

One winter night during my first year of undergrad, I began to walk home from the shopping center, exasperated with the wind and cold and a few petty things that had happened while I was out.

The last utter annoyance was the way cars had twice barreled through the crosswalk just ahead of me, despite my usually successful New Yorker's "Pedestrian's Rights" mentality. I didn't so much as feel validated in my aggravation, muttering to myself with my scarf wrapped around my mouth, as I just savored the warmth of my breath remaining around my covered lips, but venting still felt good.

As I passed the bus stop, a bus picked up the one waiting passenger and left. Immediately, another bus pulled up to me and the doors opened. I explained to the driver that I wasn't waiting for the bus, but he asked if I was headed for the college and offered me a free ride. I hadn't planned on it, I didn't mean to wait for it, but there it was.

I gave him the Are-You-For-Real eyebrow, but, feeling calm and reassured, found my feet climbing the steps. He said he was going in that direction anyway, so we would both get where we needed to go and I could avoid the cold.

When I thanked him, he told me, "Don't thank me. Thank Him," and pointed above him. "He's given me so much," he said. "It's good to pass it on."

Without my prompting, he drove past the main entrance to the college and stopped at the bottom of the hill at the half-hidden entrance near the dining hall. I went straight to dinner and never enjoyed a bowl of campus soup more than I did that night.

I called my mother since she had recently had a number of similar experiences - random acts of kindness - in the midst of her father's illness, and I almost cried as I told her.

It's the same feeling as receiving a visit or a note from a friend, or sharing a mutual embrace, or seeing a student I've never met smile at me in passing and wondering if they've confused me with someone they do know or if they just felt like smiling. It's cheesy or corny or whatever cynicism and too-coolness makes us think about it, but it's the kind of thing that lifts us before we hit bottom.

Good things come back to us. They even come to us when we aren't sure that we deserve them. Look for them and you'll see.


Some of you may remember this story from January 2007, years before AmenAbility was even a twinkle in my eye, but I wanted to tell it again. I will also refer back to it in an upcoming post and decided that this was simplest.