zara

Zara surprises me when she walks out of Walmart holding only one small plastic bag. It isn’t even full. I tell her I don’t see many people leaving Walmart without one or two overloaded shopping carts. She says she hadn’t really been there to shop. 

“I just like to sit at the cafe for a couple of hours,” she explains. “I like to see and be seen.”  

It is my first day driving for Uber and Lyft. And so only the first of many times I will encounter a stranger who lives very differently from me or the other people I’ve known before.

So Zara sits at Walmart nursing a cup of coffee. She takes in the swirl of giddy desire and fretful anxiety as it wheels around her. Then, having seen and been seen, she is done, the experience consummated. She emerges exuding the glowing tranquility of someone at the end of a ten-thousand-dollar New Mexico spa retreat. 

“Were you seen today?” I ask.

“I was,” she answers. “By a student and his mother. He seemed excited. The mother, not so much.”

“You’re a teacher?”

“Preschool.”

“How do you like it?”

“I love it! Kids are artists. Nobody’s messed them up yet.”

I tell her I agree; that my favorite job ever was teaching sports to little kids when I was in college.

Zara nods.

“How long you been doing this job?”

“Actually, today’s my first day!”

“How’s it going?”

“Good, people have been very kind.”

“Well, you seem like a pleasant person.”

“Thank you. I hope to be.”

Zara sits and drinks a coffee. Zara sees, and Zara is seen. 

And Zara writes. I learn this after volunteering that I’d retired from my career to focus on my writing. (It would be more accurate to say that, having been ejected from my career, I was delighted to focus on my writing.)

“You write?” she asks.

“Yes.” 

“What do you write?”

 There are several honest answers I can give: 

                        a) private thoughts in a journal; 

                        b) I don’t know; 

                        c) poems. 

I choose (c). Zara’s eyes light up behind her glasses. 

“Ohhhh. Damn! Me too!! You got any poems memorized?”

More past professor than present poet, I assume she means other people’s and feel ashamed. I never could recite poems from memory.

To buy time, I ask for confirmation.

“You mean poems by other people?”    

“Noooooo!” She exclaims as if it is the most obvious thing in the world. “Your poems!”

Oh shit. Even worse. I tell Zara that I’m not sure I know any of those. 

“You don’t remember your own poems?”

She sounds confused and a little sad. I know why. I feel it, too. 

Am I even a poet? 

I don’t know what I am.

In a panicked mental scramble through my poems, I find a haiku, only to realize I’m not even sure how it goes. Jesus. Really? Three short lines? So I improvise, reciting it with what I hope is a Zen-like everyday profundity:

            Cleaning the toilet

            every morning now

            I notice new parts.

Zara doesn’t appear impressed, less so when I try to explain it. In fact, she seems sedated. 

Then I remember a student saying my strength as a teacher was “return of serve.” She meant that I was good at listening and guiding students to the hidden schools of meaning swimming deep beneath the surface of their own words. I try that instead.

“What about you, Zara? You got anything to share?”

“Oh yeah, hold up.” Zara pulls out her phone, glances at the screen, closes her eyes, and begins.

Breath, rhythm, rhyme, image: the poet in Zara emerges. 

I am thrilled by her poetry and performance and that it happened during a Lyft ride from Walmart. My god! I want more!

The second one is even better. I tell her so. Zara looks down and shakes her head, but she’s beaming.

“Thank you, thank you.”

Then Zara says she writes songs too.

“Oh, man! Songs?! Can I hear one?”

“Sure! Sure!” she says. “This is great!”

Looking at her phone and again closing her eyes, she begins to sing in a low, soft voice. It is a song about heartbreak. It is about being misunderstood. About handing your bare heart to someone who appraises it, maybe samples it, and then tosses it aside. It is a song about nevertheless carrying on, with your heart held out, beating raw to the world. 

Then Zara stops. Face still angled down, she lifts her gaze to meet mine in the rearview mirror. Floored, I say words, but they don’t matter. My eyes are saying it better. And anyway, I think she already knows.

I pull into the parking lot of her low apartment complex on Maple St. in Springfield, across the street from the grand, old, now-repurposed mansions perched on a high hill overlooking the Connecticut River.

When the car rolls to a stop, I turn to face her. Zara offers a fist bump. All my skittish self-consciousness has evaporated. I look her in the eyes, this stranger, and ask her to please, please be careful out there, to be careful with her heart. 

She smiles broadly. Her whole body relaxes, and she smiles.“Oh, I know my worth.”

---