I turned as the man fell from his walker. I was sitting at a picnic table down in San Anselmo by the creek drinking a beer and eating pizza with my young daughter. I often saw the man down there. He sat on a bench outside the pizzeria with his wife and his nurse when the weather was nice. It was dementia that had him. 

I rushed over to help, but he yanked me down. A couple guys sitting nearby, bicyclists dressed in Lycra, pulled me up and the three of us managed to lift him. 

Before he fell, my daughter stopped to stare at him as he sat on the bench. She was fifteen months old and in the habit of doing that. He stared back. After about thirty seconds of the staring, we walked away. The longer she stared, the more disturbed he grew. 

We got him back in his walker, but he latched on to the wrist of one of the cyclists. I attempted to pry his fingers from the cyclist’s wrist, and he swung at me, limply, with his other arm. A man at a table nearby called the paramedics. 

As if escaping a trance, the man’s grip loosened, and the cyclist pulled his arm free. He took firm hold of his walker and, followed by his wife and nurse, started to make his way in the opposite direction. The direction he seemed to believe he needed to go. I watched until I lost sight of them behind the cars parked along the road. Two paramedics arrived, halting to a stop from a mid-sprint. We pointed in the man’s general direction, and away they ran.

I never saw the man again. I saw his wife once in that same spot on the bench outside the pizzeria. I introduced myself, reminded her of the day with her husband and asked how he was doing. She took a deep breath and her face lit up somewhat before explaining that she’d had to put him in a home where he could receive constant care. Though she missed him and visited most days it was clear the weight of the burden lifted was enormous.  

I found myself wondering, each time I returned, weeks, months later, why he chose that bench. It did smell wonderfully of pizza. It’s possible the smell reminded him of something. A date with a beautiful woman so many years ago. Maybe his wife. Or perhaps another pizzeria where he spent time in his youth or where he might have worked. Or maybe a place in general. Or a time. Or a place and a time. Or it could have been nothing at all. His wife may have chosen. It was a nice place to sit in the sun when the weather was nice, and there was a view of Mt. Tam in the distance. The soft feathery light at that time of the late afternoon fuzzies the edges. Dreamlike. So strange to think how the same can happen to a mind. 

For me, a ping to the past can be brought on by the shower. The split second when the water bursts out. That clean fresh smell returns me to showering outside at the beach on the North Carolina coast. That wood-walled shower and her, that summer I moved away. Dark red hair sticking to her shoulder. The water rolling off her breasts. And all of the petting and the clawing at like a sort of violence. 

But that was a long time ago. And while the memory lingers its relevance to the present barely registers. That young woman is now a mother, and a wife, and I’m a husband, and a father. Separate like two cords laid out on the sand and plugged into nothing. And while I am the same person I was then and so is she, no other similarities remain. 

My daughter has reached the age that I believe I will always remember her being. Small and mischievous with her golden hair angel haloed by the sun. Walking swiftly to and from with no destination of which to speak. Until her arrival in this world, I felt no responsibility to anyone. Now, I have no greater fear than my own mind flickering out into darkness. Of catching a scent on the breeze that reminds me of a place, a time, that held the most meaningful stuff this existence has to offer, only for the sounds to dull, the images to blur, and the people to no longer be there.

…

Wilson Koewing is a writer from South Carolina. His books JADED and QUASI are available from Main Street Rag/Mint Hill Books and Anxiety Press, respectively. His latest short story collection ROLLING ON THE BOTTOM is forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree Press.