A Leaf and a Lock

Wonderings on a Saturday

There’s a coffee shop in Altoona with a single leaf-print pressed into the concrete floor. I want to write a story about it – where it started, how far it traveled, and how it ended up in the poured concrete of Best Day Coffee on 8th Street.

I want the story to be full of whimsy even if there are garbage trucks and muddy boots and cursing laborers. Did this leaf, when it split from the tree, have any idea where it would land? Was it a grand adventure? Did a child take it home to press it in a book but then drop it halfway down the block? Did the wind carry it and plaster it to the side of a cement truck on its way to work? Did the cement truck driver hop out of the machine and get it stuck to his pants? Did his work buddy tell a joke so funny that he bent over with his hands on his knees and knock it into the gray matter oozing from the hopper?

Or maybe it was the guy in charge of leveling the wet concrete before it dries. Maybe he’d just gotten terrible news or wonderful news, and he wanted to leave something behind or tether himself to the moment or the place or the earth in general, and so he found a leaf and blew it into the drying square before he left, and even now, he goes to the coffee shop sometimes or his wife does or his daughter does and they see the leaf print and they remember the day with the wind and the mixer truck and the leaf that was supposed to be pressed in a book or left decomposing in a pile but was dropped here instead.

Also, how about this lock? This lock has been fixed to the chain link fence between the Gateway Market parking lot and MLK Drive for years. A decade or more? Why is it there? Who left it? Do they come visit? Do they chuckle every time they see it? Did they have any idea at the time they pushed it into place about the long-term impact of doing so? How long will it take for rain and snow and road salt and oxidization to turn it into an ashy pile? Will the earth implode before then? Or will a team of so-and-so’s raze the market to make room for a data center? Where will it go next, this lock?

Doesn’t it blow your mind that there are cement trucks and coffee shops and roads and parking lots and steel locks and chain link fences in the same places as there are trees and grasses and squirrels and hungry owls and oaks that are older than your grandmother and that there are bushes with and without thorns and that the moon looks different depending on the day and the season and how we’re tilted and that every single person around you just so happened to be born in the same impossible timeline as you? How improbable is this? Can you even wrap your head around it?

It isn’t functional to be in constant wonder, but don’t you think it’s good sometimes to look over the dashboard of your car and think, “Holy shit! Would you look at this?” And I wonder: If there were an international movement, an edict, an executive order, a global treaty, to stop every day at 2:05 p.m. (or the equivalent to where you are) to look up (or tune into one’s most capable sense) and in unison - no matter who you are or how golden your toilet is — say, in all of our respective languages, “My goodness. What is going on here?” Even if it only took one minute, don’t you think that would do something? Don’t you think something would shift?

I do.