The Grasshopper on Writing, Sunday Edition
Something different
Earl Walking
A true story
I saw Earl walking, just the other day. He was with a woman, which was unusual, and he was wearing a hoodie with the hood up. They came towards me, just another couple walking, but as I walked around them he looked at me and made an expression I could not imagine Earl making.
He gave me the briefest knowing look. And then they were gone. I didn’t look back or speak, I guess I couldn’t because I was processing something that could not be processed.
Just to be clear, Earl is dead. He died alone in a car crash in the Nevada desert at night a few years ago. He never drank so the guess was that he simply fell asleep and drove off the road.
In that part of Nevada there is nothing for miles on end, just hills and scrub trees and brown earth. A few years ago, after his death, I took a cross country train trip to San Francisco that passed right through the small town where he and his brother ran a fireworks business. Battle Mountain.
I saw a sign from the train but by the time I realized it was this place I had heard of, it was gone. One of those one intersection towns. I realized on that trip how many of them there are, spread across the flyover states in places I cannot imagine living in.
I was probably a little delirious with lack of sleep when the train glided through Battle Mountain. I’d had the crazy idea that I would sleep in my train seat during that three day trip and found out too late that I simply couldn’t, so by the time we reached Nevada I was haunting the observation car at dawn after trying to sleep there too.
I was like a ghost by that point and now it seems I had seen a ghost, walking down the street and smiling a ghostly smile.
You read about haunting, a strange old word, but that smile was literally haunting and I had the feeling he knew it.
Earl was a man with no guile. Simply a brilliant guy, who with his equally brilliant younger brother, could not follow any normal route through life. Yet when we saw him on their infrequent trips back here, he seemed as normal as rain. Quiet rain.
But the ghost of Earl, if that was what I saw, had apparently learned something from death, something that amused him.
For a while after that I wondered if I would see others making cameos back in life, but no such luck. To be honest, Earl was one of the only ones I didn’t mind seeing, the others could stay wherever they had gone.
I thought I might run into Maureen, an old girlfriend whose house was always the first place the brothers visited when back in town. I imagined myself casually telling her I had seen Earl just a few weeks ago. I wondered how she would react. Earl had always been in love with her and no one else that I knew of, but he was not the type to act on it.
She knew it but didn’t act on it either.
So, not only was Earl a ghost, he had been walking hand in hand with a woman whose face I did not see. The entire encounter took place in the few seconds it takes to walk by someone on the sidewalk. Just long enough for eye contact and that enigmatic smile.
Yes, that was the obvious word, enigmatic. I guess I avoided using it as I always try to avoid cliches when I tell a story. They make it sound calculated, as though I’d been formulating it and waiting for the right moment to tell it as though I was relaying an anecdote off the cuff.
But it was enigmatic.
The word is defined as ‘difficult to interpret or understand; mysterious’. And the usage example they provide is ‘he took the money with an enigmatic smile’. When I thought about it, this was the only usage that I could come up with. He gave me an enigmatic smile as he passed by. But he did.
Like the Cheshire Cat, that smile is all that remains of the encounter, hanging in the ether, then winking out, a dead star.
I think we all see dead people sometimes. Usually it is someone alive you see out of the corner of your eye and you think they are someone you knew. But then they come into focus and there is really no resemblance. They have their own look, nothing like anyone else.
So those things are just mind tricks. That’s where the difference lies. This Earl, whatever it was, was Earl and he knew me, though little more than a moment passed by, a billionth of a second, for Dogen says each second contains billions of moments or maybe it was a minute or a day which has that many.
Dogen was very specific about the number, but he was a joker, his jokes meant to jolt us out of our self-absorbed existence. It is a common Buddhist thing to define time and space in unimaginably large numbers, numbers so massive they are like universes unto themselves.
So it is interesting that the Earl moment, that tiny fraction of time, is still with me. I can see it.
Thanks for the message, old friend, cryptic as always.