Benches

“It’s kind of like looking for a parking space,” I explained. “If you drive around long enough you’re bound to find one.”

More often than not, I’ve found my ideas on park benches while eating my lunch. The very first blog I wrote a year ago was titled “Open Spaces” and described that very process.  There’s something about benches that inspires me, I guess. Maybe it’s the comfortable angles or the worn wood. Or maybe I just like the pause that benches represent, the temporary respite; a quiet little eddy alongside the shore.

Of course, here in New York City, you have to share your benches with everybody else. That’s the part I don’t like so much, but it’s the price you have to pay. You can be sitting peacefully one moment and unfortunately joined the next by a soda-slurping, seat-usurping, cell-phone-talking presence that you know immediately is a test from your Higher Power just to see if you’ll flinch.

And so it was the other day as I sat in the sun on Spring Street eating a sandwich I had brought from home. Everything was going well until a loud and annoying fellow plopped himself down on the other end of the bench, my bench, and began talking animatedly into a cell phone. He could’ve sat on somebody else’s bench, as there were seats available I noted with a nod of my head, hoping maybe he’d see me and get the message. But, no. He wasn’t even aware that this was my bench. In fact, he seemed to not even notice that I was sitting there.

I knew it was a test. It had to be. I felt like I was on Candid Camera or Punked. Somebody would jump out from a parked van, laughing and shouting, “Yep, we knew it. We knew you’d get mad…”

So, I did my best to let go of the annoyance and to regain my sandwich-eating calm, regardless of my bench mate. I pulled out my own cell phone and called my wife.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m sitting on a park bench, eating my lunch,” I said rather pointedly, hoping the fellow might overhear. He didn’t, of course, and kept right on with his own conversation. “Some idiot just over came and sat down right next to me,” I muttered into the phone.

“What?” my wife asked, distracted on her own end by a sink of running water.

“Ahh, never mind,” I said, suddenly giving up my resentment in favor of the truth. “I’m just sitting here trying to figure out what I’m going to write about. And so far I got nothin’.”

“So, what’d you say about an idiot?”

“Forget about the idiot. It’s just some guy who came and sat on my bench. I can’t think of anything to write about.”

“Why don’t you write about the time I threw that container of yogurt out the window at those people who were making noise?” she said, so easily and glibly, as if she had been thinking about what to write all day, too.

“Yeah, maybe,” I responded, filing the idea away in the back of my mind.

“Or whatever,” she said, and I realized the conversation was quickly winding down.

“Alright,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”

As I put the cell phone back into my pocket, I snuck a peek at my bench mate who had also finished his conversation and was sitting quietly now, watching the passing parade along Spring Street. We weren’t so different, I allowed myself to think, as my earlier gruffness faded and acceptance took its place.

Reflecting on the brief conversation with my wife, I was struck not so much with her suggestion for what to write about, but rather the ease with which I reached out for help and the immediacy of its arrival.

It wasn’t always so for me, as I grew up in an environment where asking for help wasn’t really done. Asking for help would have meant there was a problem and no one in my family wanted to admit to any problems. Just the word “help” conjured up images of fire trucks and flashing lights, and in my mind the idea of asking for help was all tangled up with the notion of crisis. Even when I got sober it was extremely difficult to ask for help.

But, as I’ve stayed sober over the years, it’s gotten easier and I’ve grown more comfortable with the idea. And it doesn’t have to mean that I’m in crisis or so horribly positioned inside a deep well that I can’t possibly climb out; it simply means that I could use another perspective on whatever it is I’m concerned with in the moment. And frequently, asking for help in one area opens up resolutions in another.

I obviously didn’t take my wife’s suggestion for this blog, though I may come back to it sometime over the next year’s worth of writing. But it got me thinking about asking for help and how much easier it has become.

Which is good. Especially now that I have to find a new bench. One with a little less traffic.