At the whim of a hat

I met a man once who changed my life. I didn’t know it at the time and he certainly never knew it. I wondered whenever I thought about our meeting if he remembered me too. I like to think that he did, but you never know in this world.

I was sitting on the hood of my car while steam poured from underneath. It was the June of the summer in which I turned 19 and my car had finally overheated, something it had been threatening to do for weeks. I pulled over in a parking lot and my car finally died in the fire lane, right in front of a gym. The volunteer fire squad was helpfully just finishing their workout and helped me to push my car a little farther out of the way (it being stuck in the fire lane and all). I kid you not, I was sitting on my car all damsel-in-distress like and out comes the damn fire squad.

I met many more people coming in and out of the gym that day. One was an elegant looking older man. He was coming out of the gym, and had the air of someone who had worked out and stayed fit his entire life. He was friendly and said something to everyone who was in his vicinity when he came out. When he saw me, he stopped and put his gym bag down. He smiled broadly and walked all around my car, his smile growing brighter every minute. I just watched, wondering what on earth he was about to say to me. He asked me some questions, my name, had I seen Harold and Maude, why did I drive the hearse? There wasn’t anything remarkable about his questions; they were the standard ones I got from everyone who wasn’t afraid of my car.

What left the lasting impression was what he said when he left. He smiled, held out his hand for me to shake, and simply said, “I’m glad to have met you.” He had a satisfied look on his face and nodded to himself, smiling. He walked away then and I thought about what he’d said. I got back to worrying about my situation and almost forgot the elegant old man with the warm smile whose life I had made a little better. Now, when I wonder things like, “what am I good for?”, “will I ever do anything that ends up being worth all of this trouble?”, and “is life always this hard?” I also think about the old man whose life had to have been full and whose demeanor indicated accomplishment and experience and how an 18-year-old girl, sitting on the hood of her aging car on the first 95-degree day of a rather unremarkable summer, impressed him.