To the Woman on the Bench

by her son, FL González

She began life on a scarp hill in Puerto Rico’s ancient cordillera, where the sun drops from the face of the earth from time to time. A social worker poet that moved to New England, and the last to rise from a park bench in Bethel, Connecticut — happy to exist in the waning light of solitude, thinking how sad it was that most people miss the meaningful end of things.

Though this night she would linger a bit longer than usual.

Others took their cue from the sun itself when it winked ‘goodnight’ from its bed on the distant mountain. Young families hurried to their cars, calling their kids inside: Charles, Francis, Ben, Ann. Each scampering under the quickly fading light that provided some practical advantage before darkness felt heavy, like a blanket. The image of their children asleep was a willow branch that touched ever-so-gently the windows of their posh Connecticut homes. She was happy to watch the rest of the light-show alone (after all, she was always the one that stayed in her seat to hear the music in the final credits of a movie). She loved the orange colors that formed in the underbelly of clouds, and the monotonal greyness that signaled the sun’s plunge from an imagined horizon to its expected rebirth in China.

But before the first star appeared, the doldrum of living with severe dementia rose slowly into her reality, an antipathic anti-dream appeased only by the appearance of her favorite nurse: the one that danced merengues, and combed her thinning hair with tenderness. The daydreamed sunset, from beginning to end, had been a feast for her well-trained mind-eye that appreciated its subtlety & nuance, and translated altruistic meaning into common digestible prose (like a vegan whose prayers and contrition’s are embodied in her evening meal). She had been busy with a new poem which she dedicated even before it was finished, “para mis dos hijos, Cuco, Frankie y también para mis dos hijastros, Coquí y Ana, los que olvide en un camino empedrado”. Aware that it might be her last prose, she took her time composing-and-editing, editing-and-composing, but feared over-writing it, like the much too long scarf she crocheted with Raquel, the nurse that told her it would make “a good gift for a giraffe”.

She laughed at life from a place outside the nursing home window, looking in on herself while napping on the bench. That night she became a firefly in midsummer courtship; she had left the room with Peter Pan, holding hands with Tinkerbelle – flying back to the park bench and a poem still under construction. It was midnight and the light-pole’s dusty bulb flickered incessantly. Moths darted about half-blind half-mad from collisions with the neon brightness of Neverland. Hungry bats made irregular orbits around the chaos, trying to make an easy meal of them, “light is the master of darkness”, she smiled while trying to fend off memories of her dead husbands, which began to emerge from their distant rounds around the sun, which was now somewhere over the pacific. Leo, her third husband, was the one that knocked first – she welcomed his return with great nostalgia. The first husband had bolted out early when her youthful immaturity showed the matriarchal (boricuan) flair borrowed from her adoptive mom. She kicked the second husband out for physically abusing her sons, returning his own children like unwanted re-gifts: something that she never forgave herself for.

But Leo’s ashes were tender thoughts left in an urn, on a hearth where she also hung stockings year-round for great-grandkids that never knew she existed (her other men are dry bones in tombs scattered throughout the Caribbean).

It was near midnight and the last firefly flew high as if begging God for another chance to love, and across the poorly lighted field, beyond the picnic tables, darkish rats began their nightly forages. Some venturing far from the safe perimeter to gather some shiny trinket or candy dropped there by a youngster. She was not afraid of them, but felt an immense sorrow that they and their kin were the perennial loathing of human unkindness; they were, after all, innocent creatures whose only fault was their European ancestors’ habit of bringing fleas into their dens: a price their American progeny pays for over-and-over again, sickened to death with an assortment of poisons.

She decided to lie down on the park bench; her back sore from sitting the hours. Taking off her earrings and her shoes she planned to get up in a New York minute, but she soon fell asleep, and was, in rip-van-winkle fashion, awakened by the eastern sun after hours of lost time. Rested, she sat-up to a pretty field glistening with dew, as if the sky had cried with joy while she was sleeping, blessing her with renewed strength. She saw no trace of the nocturnal friends which had kept her company. The bats and the rats where safely home in caves and tunnels, tired from the hunting & gathering, likely feeding hungry broods — she realized then that love and touch were twins, born inside a singularity that radiated outwards through time, filling the entire universe. She then asked God for forgiveness, for having dropped the sacred baton once, but that she had recovered it, and managed to finish the race.

She then felt Raguel’s warm hand on her cold forehead, and saw, from the rarified edge of Neverland, a roomful of distressed friends scurrying about, like ants whose nest was disturbed – a few were crying. Curious, she put on her shoes and tried to locate the expensive gold earrings she had placed under the bench, but they were gone, carried-off by a pack-rat in the undetermined hours when she slept. Holding back tears, she realized that, for all of them, but mostly for herself, love was all that ever mattered – all that ever was.