A Tribute to Ben

 

Once there was a young lady school marm who was feeling stressed.  She had woken up and remembered all of her responsibilities and how much she wanted to succeed in fulfilling all of them and how impossible it seemed.  She did the best she could before she had to leave for school, but she could not get the right video files for her good lesson idea.  She headed out to parking lot later than usual, worrying because it had snowed all night and she didn't know if her car would make it out of the parking lot.  Just the day before she had been stuck in her parking spot at school and had spend five minutes pushing futilely against her car before someone stopped to help her.  If her car was stuck now, this early in the morning, who would help her?  She was already running late, and the roads were probably terrible.  She had parked her car on the opposite side of her apartment complex the night before, looking for the spot she was least likely to get stuck.    

As she looked at the sea of snow around her car, her heart let out its last gasp of hope like a deflated whopee cushion.  She trudged through the eight inches of snow in her low dress shoes, feeling the snow and cold soak into her pant legs and into her shoes.  She turned the key and listened to her car, never a fan of cold, choke to life.  With a hurried sigh she grabbed the ice scraper and began to clear her windows, thankful that the snow was loose and not frozen into ice.  She worked hurriedly in the early morning lamplight.  It could have been ten at night or four in the morning.  The parking would have looked the same as it did then, cold, quiet, and empty of any shapes but the cars sleeping under their blankets of snow while more snow drifted through the dark sky and lamplight to tuck them in.  As the young teacher brushed the snow off of her windshield, she looked up and saw an extraordinary sight.  A young man was climbing silently over the wall of the aparment complex parking lot, like Augustine stealing peaches.  He dropped lightly and easily onto snow, as if he did this every morning.  She laughed happily and called a good morning.  He responded just as cheerfully, and while she finished clearing her car, the two chatted as if she was not in a hurry and he not just returning from a graveyard shift at a drug rehab center and if it was not at all weird for two strangers to talk like friends in a deserted parking lot full of lamplight and snow.  He stayed long enough to make sure she wasn't stuck, shook her hand, introduced himself as Ben, and said maybe he'd see her coming over the wall again some other early morning.

   

It's hard for meetings in the privacy of early morning surrounded by stillness and snow to not feel surreal.  He appeared literaly from nowhere and quickly relieved the worry on my mind that I could do the least about myself.  As I told him when he offered to stay out in the snow a few minutes longer after a long night to make sure I could make it to work, he was "an angel come over the wall."  

    

Thanks, Ben.