Your Name on the Side of Your Truck
Your name was on the side of your truck, which I'm sure made you feel important.
You taught me lessons you were surely unaware you were teaching.
Your name was Glenn, you were a decade or so older than me, with a boyish flop of brown hair, and unhurried eyes that drooped with fleshy lids; you had the reminder of a scar across your cheek, and a smile that surfaced mostly never.
But you had your name on the side of your dusk-blue, 200,000-mile, worn-down pickup truck, and that was enough.
I mowed lawns for you for a summer in high school. Me pushing your Snapper Hi-Vac walk-behind mower, sweating in the blazing sun, you arriving to point out tufts of uncut grass and ragged edges on flower beds, barely looking at me while fussing with the grass bag.
At the end of the summer, with the final two weeks of pay due, you became a ghost, disappearing - poof! - you and your truck with your name on it.
A small grift, stolen from a kid with cramped hands and arms still vibrating from wrists to elbows.
You taught me betrayal. Disbelief. Distrust.
Maybe you figured it wouldn't matter much. My parents had a big house just down the road, while we spent our days mowing the lawns of people who had considerably less.
Maybe you thought I didn't need the money, so neither here nor there on the ledger of life.
But your name was Glenn
and
it said so
on your truck.
A few summers later, I saw you and your truck three cars in front of me at a traffic light.
I followed you, as if an international spy giving chase, hoping that you peeped me in your rearview mirror and feared the ruse was up. But somehow it wasn't meant to be - you slipped away, a quick left into traffic I wasn't able to break.
You didn't even look in my direction. And I wanted to know why.
Maybe it was the clerical error of someone ineffective at paperwork; maybe you had a crisis of money, choosing between me and your sick relative.
Maybe some clients jilted you and it was a debt you delayed until it disappeared.
Fifteen years later and I'd forgotten all about you, Glenn. You were just a tiny nick in the tapestry of life's interactions. But there you were, a short distance away, on a plain sidewalk, on a nondescript street, walking, your truck with your name on it nowhere to be found.
I knew it was you, even without the mowers or the itch from the sunburn or nostrils overpowered by the smell of gas and sweat.
Your T-shirt replaced by a long indistinct light brown trench coat. Your bare eyes now shrouded by thick-framed glasses with Coke-bottle lenses.
You held a crumpled brown lunch bag, soiled by an insignificant oil stain.
Your hair was thinning, uncut, unmanaged.
Your tie was cheap, and uneven at the ends.
You looked down at your feet.
Your shoes the color of mud.
I watched you and your life crawling to or from work, slow and sad. I wanted to cross the street to stand up to you, to remind you of me.
To twist the knife, to deliver you shame, for dollars that led you nowhere.
Look at you now, Glenn. Look at you now, I would say.
Where's your truck with your name on the side of it?
But I remained frozen, watching you from afar, your sheer loneliness caught in my throat. Your shoulders hunched as you walked toward nothing.
Fifteen years isn't too late to forgive, is it?