The old man at the vet's office
Shortly before the pandemic, when we still blithely breathed near strangers in small indoor spaces, I took the cat to the vet for his annual exam. (I say this so that you don’t worry about the cat, who is fine.) After the exam, I lined up at the reception desk to pay. There was an older man in front of me, maybe mid-seventies or so, with shoulder-length, straight white hair, a dark blue wool blazer, and a high-quality scarf. The scarf looked like cashmere, and in my memory it’s purple, but as I write it now I’m finding I can’t say for certain that it was. He held a stack of books under his arm. Me being me, I craned my head to see the spines of the books. He saw me out of the corner of his eye and shifted the books so I could read the spines as he went on talking to the receptionist.
I don’t remember now what the books were, though I do remember they were sociopolitical texts. I remember thinking, “He has good politics” and “I bet he teaches this stuff.” I mean...he looked like he’d walked right out of central casting for the role of Small Liberal Arts College Philosophy Professor. (I say this as a good thing, as a compliment.)
He finished with the receptionist and smiled at me, and went back over to the woman who I presumed to be his wife or partner, and their large apricot poodle. (It didn’t have the fussy haircut. You know you were wondering if it did.) And then they were gathering their things to go, and it was my turn at the desk. As the worker was doing whatever it is they do that takes so damn long to bring up your bill, the man called out to me, “What does your bag say?”
“It’s from the Reina Sofia in Madrid,” I said, holding my tote bag up so he could read it, and he and the woman both beamed at me and he said, “We love that museum.”
The man passed by me as he walked out, and he laid a hand on my arm in a way that could have been totally creepy and inappropriate but was not at all. It was warm and welcome. We looked at each other and smiled, and then he and the woman and the apricot poodle walked out the door and were gone. I found myself feeling bereft at having made and then lost this small, simple connection over the spines of a stranger’s book and a tote bag from a Spanish art museum.
All this means, you might very reasonably say, is that some incredibly privileged people met in a vet’s office. Big deal. On one level, you wouldn’t be wrong at all. But what I’m trying to get across, what I’m not sure how to convey to you, is the feeling that drove it. This man was aware of the way I was looking at his books, and he was aware that it would be okay to lay a hand on my arm in a gesture of parting, because there was a connection between us that was immediate and true. The book spines and the tote bag were just shorthand for each of us to say to the other, "I see you."
I’m not saying that we were meant to know each other at all beyond those few minutes, but that moment of mutual recognition in the vet’s office has stayed with me all of this time.
As the pandemic began, I thought about the two of them as older people, and I wondered how they were doing. I wondered if I would ever see them again. I say “them” to be inclusive of her as well, but really I mean him. I wonder if he’s okay. I wonder if I’ll ever see him again, though I don’t think it’s likely that I will. And maybe it’s best that I do not. We had that moment of connection, which was perfect in its way, and some things should be left just like that.
So I didn’t seek him out, but I did write him into my next novel. In the book, he isn’t a potential philosophy professor most likely at Reed College in Portland. Instead, he’s a professor and scholar of Iberian Medieval Spain, an American from Indiana who’s lived and taught in Madrid since the late ‘80s. His name is Robert, and he has a Spanish wife named Paloma. They do not have an apricot poodle.
Over the year and a half or so that I spent writing the first draft of the novel, I felt that I was getting to spend time with this man, deepening and honoring that perhaps random connection we’d made. The character in the novel is, of course, based only on my idea of the man from the vet’s office. I understand that I don’t know him at all, and that whoever he actually is likely bears little in common with my invention. But it was my idea of him that lingered all this time, anyhow. And now he lives in this novel.
That’s all I wanted to say about that.
I hope the real man in the blue blazer is well. And I hope his wife is well. And that apricot poodle. And I hope you’re well, too, all things considered.
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