☆ STARSAILOR ☆

In the late afternoon of Thanksgiving day I left McCune Compound where I was housesitting and drove a dozen miles south into Oakland in the Heshmobile. I was on my way to San Francisco to have dinner with Laura and her boyfriend Campbell, but I had neglected to pick up any food to bring the day before. I did not want to show up and be a mooch, so just before the Bay Bridge I detoured to the Safeway in Rockridge, which was essentially the only grocery store open just then. I drove around the building and parked on the rooftop parking garage. I took the escalator down to the store and outside the front door a guy with a bad haircut and a clipboard asked me if I wanted to sign some sort of petition. I said: “I’m Canadian,” and kept walking. If you say this to a stranger who is beckoning you over for your signature, saying you are Canadian is a bulletproof way to quickly and politely get out of listening to a canned spiel about government spending.

Anyway: I stepped into the store and saw that it was crowded as hell . . . everyone had put off shopping till the last minute just as I had. I squirmed through the madding crowd to get to the baking aisle. I had told Laura I would get cornbread mix, to which she replied: “I don’t even like cornbread.” I regarded her insane opinion and said OK, OK—well, I’m getting some anyway. As a red-blooded son of the Old Dominion state, I shudder to imagine a Thanksgiving dinner bereft of cornbread. And so I searched in vain, only to find a single box left over, and it was made by some brand that makes tortillas and salsa. I wondered what business they had making cornbread. And this cornbread was jalapeño-flavored, which I felt ambivalent about. With no other choice, I accepted my fate and grabbed the last box of it. I thought: Even weird cornbread is still cornbread, and that sure beat the alternative, which is oblivion . . .

Naturally the self-checkout machine did not work properly. It shrieked out to me in a robotic feminine voice that the cornbread box had not been properly scanned, and to remove it from the bagging area, and on and on . . . a cashier who is always a jerk to me for some reason came over and was a jerk to me for some reason. I thought: Come on, you creep! Can’t you at least be nice today, on Thanksgiving?! but it would have been out of character for me to say a thing like that, and anyway I felt exhausted on a bone-deep level, so I simply said nothing. Looking at the screen he sighed theatrically and entered an override code. I paid and got the hell out of there.

Back on the roof in the Heshmobile, I turned the ignition and sat there with the engine idling and waiting for the heat to kick in. The sun was setting westerly, having no alternative, over Oakland toward San Francisco . . . the sky was blue and yellow and pink and orange, autumnal as hell, and streaked with pink clouds. The trees across the way were fall-colored and the air was a nice November kind of cold. Whenever I am someplace else during that time of year, it is always a little sadness to me that I have to miss the East Bay fall, which is real even if you don’t believe it, and so it felt good to see it again.

I scanned the parking lot with my eyes. In front of me and to the left I saw a white car with its parking lights on. Inside a young woman was sobbing and wiping tears from her bright red face. She looked so sad. I wondered what had happened that this woman would end up crying in her car in a parking lot above a grocery store at sunset on Thanksgiving. I felt rotten as hell about it and it did not feel right to simply drive off. I figured I should at least ask her if she was OK. I thought also: Well, but if this woman had gotten to a point where she could not help but cry hard in a semi-public place, then perhaps it would be embarrassing to her if I brought attention to it . . . perhaps she just wanted to be alone to cry.

And yet I could not let it be! . . . so I got out of the truck and approached her driver’s side window. She was probably in her mid-20s and had wavy brown hair and green eyes and freckles. If you can tell that someone is a “good person” simply by looking at their face, then to me she looked like one. There was nothing sinister about her, no malice . . . I just saw a sad girl with a kind face crying alone on Thanksgiving. And it broke me!

She looked up at me a little surprised and rolled down the window. I said: “I don’t mean to bother you, but I just wanted to see if you were OK. Are you OK?” She pulled a Nights of Cabiria and smiled through her tears, saying: “Oh, I’m OK. I’m OK. Thank you for checking on me, though.” And I said: “Well . . . sometimes you gotta just make sure.” I wished her a happy Thanksgiving and walked away.

Back on the wild streets of Oakland, I aimed the big white-lightning Heshmobile across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel with the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond in the rearview mirror . . . heading towards a strange part of San Francisco I had never seen before, way the hell out there, to be with my friends . . .

In my mind there is a constellation of thousands of these little moments I have had with strangers that I remember vividly, maybe because there was some quiet tragedy to them, or because there was some element that remained mysterious to me years later. This one is both. I have thought about the crying woman and have wondered what had made her cry that day. I have wondered if she spent Thanksgiving alone. Maybe she just had a bad moment, or maybe her whole life had just been ruined. Maybe she just felt she needed to cry, and who could blame her. I guess I’ll never really know either way. But I remember her and I will always wonder.