I had returned to within a block

I had returned to within a block

of the state capitol building

in madison, wisconsin,

on this warm summer wednesday evening

in the middle of a week there for a work conference,

after having walked all the way up to

james madison park on the shore of lake mendota

and then over to the magnificent edgewater hotel

and back past beautiful old homes

being repaired to be rented out to college students soon,

retracing my steps down langdon and carroll back to an area

I’d already begun to get familiar with

over the course of the last several days —

and yet here I was teetering on the edge of the curb, confused,

facing the big white dome straight ahead

with its X of attached legislative buildings pointing to side streets

including one to my left with the thin beige wedge

of the wisconsin vererans museum on the corner

and another to my right featuring the big glass facade

of the wisconsin historical museum,

and it was while trying to remember whether

a veggie burger place I’d passed earlier

had been nearby here or blocks back on state street

that a short-haired, nicely-dressed, retirement-aged lady

came up behind me and said something strange.

without a salutation or preamble, she addressed me thus:

“thank you for waving us on.”

I turned and said something like “oh? what?”

she explained that half a block back, I’d paused on the sidewalk

and indicated she and her husband

could pull their car into the parking garage

I could see they were trying to enter.

I demurred that it was no problem, she thanked me again

then walked back to where her husband waited,

and I stepped off the curb and continued toward the capitol,

before I consulted my phone and realized I needed to double back

to get to the veggie burger place.

by the time I had ordered food there, though,

and set down my backpack and shaken out my sweaty shirt,

my memory had already changed what I had heard that lady say.

in between texting with my girlfriend

and mapping the walk back to my hotel

and choosing conference workshops

to attend the next day, all while eating

and assessing the mess I was making,

my mind was mulling over the profound implications

of what it turned out I hadn’t actually heard.

our minds are primed to reframe and rephrase what we take in

to buttress what we’ve already been heavily dwelling on,

and in most cases this nearly quotidian phenomenon

goes unnoticed — leading though, of course,

to a ripple effect of further such ossified overlaid templates —

and it was only because the next day

I happened to be given a germane prompt for reflection

that I realized my mistake in this case,

taking my inclination to extrapolate deep thoughts here

in a whole new direction.

in the big auditorium the next morning,

as part of her presentation, a guest speaker on the topic

of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the world of philanthropy

asked us to turn to the person next to us and,

while maintaining firm eye contact,

ask and respond to several vulnerable questions.

I only remember the question that is relevant here,

which was: “what was the last kind thing you did for someone?”

with the added constraint of being able to look nowhere

but into my coworker helena’s eyes —

because unlike most others there, we wore masks inside —

I told her about my little good samaritan moment

uptown the evening before.

but I had to stop and regroup internally

before completing the story,

because I caught myself about to say that the woman had said

“thank you for letting us go,”

and suddenly I knew that wasn’t true.

but how wonderful would that be, if at an unexpected moment

a stranger were to appear and, speaking on behalf of everyone

whose curtailed roles in our lives we never got resolution on,

expressed gratitude for our finally being able to

move on from all the pain and uncertainty they’d caused?

we don’t get even half what we need from those

immediately present in our lives — and even when we do,

it often bounces off of the preset framing we tend to with care —

and yet there it comes anyway,

the support we need the most,

in the form of a misunderstood interaction

with a passerby far from home,

or through the act of processing all that by writing something

that, in a further twist, was originally supposed to begin

with the provocative, artistically-challenging first line:

“you can’t set out to solve anything with a poem.”