Reasons to Be Cheerful

One morning, as I stood at the bus stop waiting for the 7:05, my neighbor, Horowitz, drove over my left foot with his butter-colored Volvo. I shouted. I shook my fist. Then I limped home to show my wife, Myrna.

I’ve had a long history of bearing tread marks, so my mishap didn’t come as a huge surprise to Myrna. She put down the obituaries, took off her reading glasses, and bent over for a closer look.

“What was it,” Myrna asked, “a truck?”

“No—Horowitz,” I said, pulling off my left shoe and studying the upper. “The nerve,” she said.

That morning, I went back out to the bus stop to catch the 7:35 and wondered if there was something wrong with Horowitz’s vision. But when he drove over my foot the following morning, at 7:05, and again the morning after that, I began to think Horowitz might be terribly maladjusted. Maybe he had an oddly developed sense of humor.

Maybe he didn’t know his running over my foot hurt me. Maybe the Volvo, a sleek GL sedan, just needed realignment. And for those first weeks, I thought about asking Horowitz to stop. I thought about reporting him to the authorities. But then I realized that his driving over my left foot every day was the natural and likely culmination of a life full of injustices, large and small, and I gave myself over to resignation, that inestimable salve, taking extra comfort in the fact that Horowitz didn’t drive one of those pricey sport utilities.

***

Over these last years, I’ve grown to appreciate Horowitz. I need him the way Myrna needs a smoke the second she rolls out of bed, the way some people need a morning cup of coffee. I tell myself that because of Horowitz, I am doing OK; better than that, in some tiny measure, I am victorious. For there’s no denying my spirits have risen over the months, buoyed, I suppose, by the thought that if I can withstand these daily abuses, then surely, I am stronger for it, stronger than my un-trod upon co-workers.

Good news: though at night I may need to soak my foot, thanks to the lightness of the Volvo’s frame–that sentinel of the best in Swedish design– I’ve never suffered a broken bone. More good news: on some days, I’ve noted, the front end of the Volvo will lurch away from the curb. I may have to lunge for the tire, then, leaping with my left foot extended. But, with a prickling of joy, I’ll see that in the glimmering of a second, when the tread of the tire is about to miss my shoe, the Volvo will right itself and crush my foot.

Sighing deeply with gratitude, I go to work, satisfied, feeling as if I’ve already accomplished something important and essential. 

***

I laugh sometimes when I recall how I used to think Horowitz was rude, his running over my foot with the Volvo in second gear a mark of malice or bad manners.  Now, I consider Horowitz one of my closest friends. We shake hands in the grocery store, never acknowledging our intertwined paths, the sanctity of our ritual. Instead, he asks me about Myrna, and I inquire about his wife.

“Middling, her health is,” he always says, and I picture her soul with boneless pliancy testing the air for flight, hovering in between good health and bad, while her body, below in bed, is not quite sick, but not entirely well either. It has occurred to me that my waiting for the 7:05 has given something to Horowitz as well, and this thought fills me with hope, makes me feel as if I have, at last, found one act of kindness I can perform for a fellow human being. I feel, too, it’s such a small thing, this standing at the corner, a small thing that I can give to Horowitz. And if his driving over my left foot gives me such a charge, I can only guess at the thrill it gives him. 

***

One day, Horowitz didn’t show. My panic–colossal. I learned, after some frantic investigation–several calls to his office and some peeping through his garage windows– that Horowitz was simply on vacation. That was all. But when he came back, he didn’t look well; the skin of his face seemed to grip at his bones like leather over-cured. I sent

him aspirin and cold remedies. “You must take better care of yourself,” I said to him a few days later in the frozen fish aisle. But all that next week, as I waited for my bus, I worried for Horowitz and prayed I’d hear the splutter of his Volvo coughing to life and see the old, familiar pale-yellow frame of his car sidling around the corner. When it did, at precisely 7:05, I’d sighed, unaware that I had been holding my breath. 

***

Several weeks later, on a Tuesday, Horowitz didn’t show again. His Volvo sat cold and covered in his driveway under its blue tarp. Relax, I told myself, he’s on another vacation. Get a hold of yourself. But after four days without Horowitz and two boxes of antacid remedies, I had to acknowledge my worst fears. I went home on that fourth day, intending to call in sick to work, for I was just that, sick in the heart, down to every last capillary, sure that something dreadful had happened to Horowitz. 

Myrna met me at the door with the newspaper opened to the obituaries, Horowitz’s name highlighted with her lime green pen.

“I’m sorry, Mort. I really am,” Myrna said, handing me the paper.

They say we’re born twice, and I believe this to be true. For I felt with Horowitz’s passing that I had died, once for each of us. I couldn’t bear to look at my closet full of crushed left shoes nor Horowitz’s Volvo sitting in his driveway, offering all the hope of a broken-down telephone booth, the last one on a long, long highway. Each day, I stand out at the bus stop, lunging with my left foot toward the tires of passing cars and even trucks. But the motorists, perhaps more alert and wary of a lawsuit than Horowitz had been, artfully dodge my best attempts, and I have never been so depressed in all my life.

It is sad, a little pathetic, even, to think that this was what I had been living for, my life having been ground down to such a minor moment. But the importance of a thing comes from the weight it bears upon the bones and later, much later, in the spirit.  I still wait for the 7:05, but now it is with a terrible fear cribbed between my lowest ribs and an ache of nostalgia thrumming through my metatarsals. What will I do without Horowitz’s butter-colored Volvo muscling over me, an oiled mammal given the music of a bad muffler? Please, I whisper, wringing my hands. I need that weight, the press of gravity reminding me that I am alive. In a world like this one, it is all I have.