FEBRUARY FOG
(concerning a trip from Grand Rapids, MI to Holland, MI)
When I walk over some patch of swollen dirt, down the length of a slimy sidewalk and come to my car, see my reflection exhale that opaque slither of breath in the driver’s side window, I'll get in and want to turn on the windshield wipers almost immediately. You must turn them on to wipe off the mist that sits on your car like you imagine moss would on a redwood root.
There is mist on every window. Even the back, and even though your car has a rear windshield wiper, you don’t turn it on because today, a misted back windshield feels right. It seems right to keep it fogged when the air and the melting snow and the back windshield and everything is fogged. I think about my mind, and how it is fogged, maybe the most mist-coated thing of all, and so today it seems right to drive to Holland with a misty back windshield.
On my way back from Holland, I stopped at Meijer. It was, by now, starting to get late but I (had some cleaning to do the next day and) decided to stop for a cleaning product called “Goo Gone”. Entering Meijer I was surprised to see a greeter still working. I actually did not see him until I heard his greeting. The greeting that he gets paid to give. This is a man who greets people as his profession and I don’t know if it’s him, or that job, or Meijer, or that I’m weird, but interacting with those greeters, hearing that man’s voice and turning and seeing nothing and looking down to see his docile form in a wheelchair, I am saddened. I am moved by an emotion I do not fully understand. It seems this is a sadness, not for him, but for the whole, seething world: the oily grayness of a thawed out February, a crumpled Red Bull can stuck in a storm drain, someone pressing a winter-cracked hand into their eyes, his wheelchair, his stutter, my ungratefulness, my brash voice, for everything and everyone that is feeling or has ever felt pain.
Is it fair for me to say that there is a profound loneliness that comes out of these people? It rides on their very greeting until it touches your ears and stirs, like a spiritual song in the temple of your body, every bit of your own loneliness. They are there like gatekeepers, speaking to any who enter and no one speaks to them. There are few that are willing to look them in the eye and see in them their greatest fear. These greeters are employed by such a distant company to humanize it, but instead, they seem to confirm the fluorescent reality that we are so lonely.
I asked this man where I might find “Goo Gone” and he tells me where to go and when I come back by him with no “Goo Gone”, he is concerned that I did not find it. He tells me of another section I might find it, but when I tell him I don’t have time to go back look for it, he asks what I need it for. I tell him tape.
It is the residue. Old tape caked to the hard plastic surface it was stuck. I can’t get the tape off. Even if I scrape it enough for it to crack off in bits, it still leaves residue. So, it sits on the plastic like fog. It coats it with its thin, gray layer.
He leaned forward in his wheelchair, and leaned back and he might of smiled when he told me a secret. He lifted a wilted arm from his lap, he barely pointed at me and before he spoke, the whole sprawling mess around me seemed to freeze: he said the secret is oranges. Their juice will cut through the gray residue. Squeeze it out, let it run, the sweetness, that natural acid, the juice of an orange.
