Yesterday I drove up to Whole Foods and Strosnider’s on a little errand. I’m trying to make myself leave the house every day, which is often hard to do. I’ve needed some large nails for several weeks, so I went into Strosnider’s, and I thought I would check out the cakes at Whole Foods for my birthday as kind of a last hurrah, since I’ve decided after my birthday to start a low sugar kind of regime and general pullback from all that “kummerspeck” that we’ve been inhaling since August. Anyway.
So, outside Strosnider’s (which is a hardware store, by the way), I noticed this older woman, maybe in her sixties or seventies, dressed in a black ski coat and black pants who was pushing a black baby carriage the cover of which was zipped up tight. She was walking back and forth on the sidewalk among the shops in that strip. When I came out of Strosnider’s, she was still there, slow-walking. When I first saw her, I assumed she was airing a fussy baby, perhaps a grandchild. Then I saw her for the third time when I left Whole Foods and she was just mechanically walking around with this baby carriage. She wasn’t a beggar and she didn’t seem to be homeless.
As I was getting into my car it suddenly came to me that this woman was Death and that she was in the midst of carrying off this child. Which placed me in a kind of moral dilemma, it seemed. Should I try to stop her? Should I confront her? These thoughts flashed through my mind very quickly and I started crying a little bit in my car.
I did nothing. I drove home. I felt irrational and crazy.
When I got home I told Max about my encounter with “Death” outside Strosnider’s. He was reassuring that everyone has irrational thoughts and it’s not that big a deal unless you start acting on them. We joked that it’s much more likely that Death hangs out in Wheaton, probably at the Dunkin Donuts near the Metro Stop.
So, while there are truly psychotic people in the world, I am probably just a little farmisht. The important takeaway is that I did not run over this woman with my car. That is a success story to build on.
The First Year Without Sarah 