Walking up one of San Francisco’s kinder hills, I saw tiny bits of green glass on the asphalt beneath my car. In a rare state already, I simply instructed myself to be sure not to drive over the glass. As I looked upward, I saw a few remaining pieces in the lining of my window, and the gears in my brain gradually turned like those of a homemade machine. “My window’s broken,” I thought. And just as slowly, I realized that everything I had in that car was gone too. It began to sprinkle. “Oh,” I thought, almost smiling, dumb and loose. The best time one could have everything taken from him is moments after he says goodbye to the one thing he wishes he could have back. Stuff is easy to get, and you can get it all your life.
When one daring drip tapped me on the nose, and the chill of the city sent my reeling eyes searching for my coat, I realized it too was among the everything I was now missing. “It’s time to go home,” I whispered. And in I climbed, noticing beneath more glass a brown fur-lined coat just inside the broken window that smelled like a junkie’s habit. It made perfect sense, he traded silver for gold. I fetched his coat, brushed off the tiny chips of emerald, and held it up slow like a precious baby girl. “Thank you sir,” I said with pretend pride. I carefully wrapped the fur collar round the top of my door and slammed it shut, to the immediate sound of tiny particles tinkling down the inside. I didn’t have a window, but I had drapes. I called a friend about getting it fixed in the city, but the brown fur-lined window would have to whip and whistle all the way to the edge of Illinois. The buttons tapped and tapped, keeping these clinched hands awake.
As I finished asking for the name of an auto-glass establishment, a uniformed man approached from behind and startled me with the strangest question.
“Are you Robert? Is Robert you?”
I had come all this way, and spoken with only two. And up until that moment, just one person knew my name. I nodded my head and got off the phone, shocked and empty. “I have everything Robert. You’ve got a lot of good stuff.”
For whatever reason, the man that made his attempt on my belongings had been spooked the moment he broke the glass, leaving his coat and the spoils. The officer couldn’t find me, so he took it upon himself to store each of my belongings in his trunk. He commented that everything seemed valuable in its context. “I even grabbed the atlas and your sleeping bag, cause I figured by your plates you must be really traveling.” He returned my six-cell flashlight, which he classified as a weapon with a wink. He returned my boots and called them nice. He put each bag back in, with care, and I stood stupid with big eyes.
“You know officer, till today I hated cops. Hated ‘em all,” I confessed, “but I gotta say, you restored my faith.” He laughed. “Faith? Did you ever have any?” It was a fine and fair question. “Not in cops, no. But thank you.” He waved his hand with ease and wished me happy trails. I almost hugged him. I felt odd dissatisfaction, realizing that this was the worst day to have everything that didn’t matter back. I just couldn’t be as thankful as I should’ve been. The contents of his trunk were helpful and amazing, but he didn’t know magic. I was hungry for the road, with the firm knowledge that going is one of only the things I can keep.
Crossing the Golden Gate moving north, I had the saddest wisest smile smeared across my face. That cop gave me something to love about tomorrow. He reminded me again, that there’s one thing I’ve become very bad at. And that one thing is anything that doesn’t involve me. He knew my name, but didn’t have to tell me with words. And that’s a lot easier than knowing it for yourself, and having to tell someone that already knew. I hated it, it crushed me between the sturdy orange supports above the sea, but I smiled because I’m only twenty-four, and there’s time to keep knowing.
As my tired car dove into the wet headlands up north, looking for the wide water before I turned east, I encountered one more surprise. Another stranger with the same gift. I was shown the middle-most finger of a brown and bearded man, standing and not walking, dressed in orderly and well-kept clothes by the side of the road to the sea. He mouthed words to me I’ll never know and gave me disgust that I couldn’t discount. He didn’t look crazy, he looked smart. I looked around. He was looking at me. But I had been driving with fair and slow precision. There weren’t any offensive stickers on my car, he couldn’t see my Kansas plate. All was ordinary. What was it that bent him from me?
I didn’t even shrug, cause I didn’t need to know. After all he might have seen something in me that I didn’t, and I knew it might take a few minutes, at least, for me to put it all together. It was not until Sacremento that I noticed my high beams had been on since Haight and Laguna. There is no day that I have been more aware of both my greatest strength and my greatest weakness. The strength of course that I find the truth. The weakness, that I find it so slow. I looked that man in the eyes and bit my bottom lip, turning for the water I hoped was holy and saying to us both I know.