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Cindy (aka: "oceanlife")
Cindy was a widow, and the last time I had been to the Botanic Gardens was when my son was three, and I thought seeing the cherry trees blossoming would be a beautiful thing to do together with her. There was, as we spied each other from across the corners on 2nd Avenue at East 83rd Street, the signs of mutual recognition, which means a flash of joy in spotting who we were the first time we met; and I, for one, because of this, did not put much stock in Cindy's relational parameters.
Her point of view, which she had established in our email correspondence that went back sporadically a couple of months, was that our not becoming romantic would "avoid future pain." While it was true and obvious that I lived a hundred miles north of her, this I saw as a localized ploy to fend off a more global fear of beginning any relationship that might, if it were meaningful, carry with it grief's inherency of potential loss, a fact that was plainly part of Cindy's personal history; and I, given her admiration for me, based soley on our emails, could perhaps be, or become, such a person in her life.
Getting to Brooklyn from the Upper East Side took forever, and even though I got lost driving there, neither she nor I was vexed. Where neither criticism is deployed for my getting the way all screwed up, nor my feeling criticized for the same felt, these, too, are good signs for the beginning of any relationship. Standing in line on an early Saturday afternoon in April to buy tickets, we no doubt looked like spring lovers, as did the many others who seemed to me equally lovestruck.
You would not have guessed that we had just seen each other one hour prior for the first time. I stood close to her, and she stood close to me. While I did not hold her hand or arm, an occasional grazing touch from me to her would have made on onlooker think that we were no doubt intimate.
Nevertheless, I could see that Cindy and I had different eyes for wonder as well as politics. Me, I am mesmerized by the giant carp that one sees lolling about in the pond, grosteque and beautifully. Cindy barely wanted to glimpse. Maybe it was due to the packs of families overlooking these monstrous-looking fishes that put her off, and the fact that Cindy had neither a husband nor children, who could say? And, as our conversation wandered somehow into the Dalai Lama, she wanted to know why I liked him. The question was put to me critically, and I ended up feeling a little defensive of him before a woman I was still trying to woo. These two sentiments were incompatible, so I let his Holiness slide.
There was one picture that both Cindy and I took along the trail, she on her phone and me on my digital camera. I'd brought the latter just in case we'd hit it off and I'd wanted something to remember her by. There was a tree; I believe it was an American Sycamore. Its bark was carved up and down and all around the trunk, as high as a knife in hand could reach, and as low to the dirt as letters could go, spelling out couples' now anonymous initials.
She took it, and so did I, but we did not take a photograph on this trip through the garden of each other for memory's sake, where the cherry blossoms were just beginning to open, or any other where we had come a week or two prematurely, before the full bloom, before the full warmth of spring had actually hit.
# 7
