This morning I was late again but I didn’t care. It rained on the way and the music on the radio was somehow rainy too. And the air was rainy, humid and refreshing at the same time. It didn’t feel right to step from that air into the electrically lit hallway but finally I was at my office door, dark and familiar. A few seconds after I settled, the janitor showed up, an old man with a white beard and a never-changing baseball hat. He was a nice guy and we had made friends, always exchanging a word or two while he was emptying my trash can. This morning he smiled.
“Nice weather, ma’am!”
“Isn’t it,” I smiled back at him.
“I sure can’t wait till Saturday!”
“Oh yeah, tell me! It feels totally like spring out there.”
“You know, this Saturday I’m heading to Lawton. They say it’s gonna be eighty degrees.”
“Cool!”
“I need a good day out. This winter has just been so long and so miserable and, you know, I had so many bad things happen one after another. So I just said, I’m going to Lawton and I’m having someone drag me up Mount Scott and I’m having a good day.”
“There you go!”
“I said, you know, if one more sad thing happens to me I don’t know what I’m gonna do. You know. Had a lot of bad things happen to me this winter. You know, my wife just passed away a couple weeks ago.”
I opened my mouth to say, “Oh, I’m sorry –“
“Well, thanks, but you know, I’m okay, it was cancer, you know, two years, I knew it was coming. It still didn’t make things easier but yeah, I knew. And then one thing came after another, and I just sat down and said: look, I said, I need to go and get out of here and have a good day.”
All the while he was smiling and fixing his baseball hat, holding my trash bag in his hand and looking both lost and found. Then he said thank you and wished me a good time and closed the door behind him. I sat facing my computer screen, then got up, slammed the “Coffee break” poster note on my door and headed out back into the rain.