By Betsy Gonwa, 
Across the street, a father and son were playing catch. Speeding along on my bike, and turning to head up the driveway, I saw them. At first glance it looked like frisbee, and I thought no more about it. Dismounted, I rolled my bicycle into the garage and put the kickstand down. I took my panier off my bike, and would have gone into the house after my husband, but then I half-heard him say that they were playing lacrosse. I looked again.
In all the years we have lived here, we have seen much activity on the parkway, but never lacrosse. I placed my panier bag in the house and dashed back out to the garage, to the corner where my husband’s 40-year-old lacrosse stick leaned against the wall.
By this time, the father and son were walking to their car, opening up the trunk.
“Hey,” I called. And again, as I hurried down the driveway with the lacrosse stick in my hands, “hey!”
That got their attention.
“Do you want a lacrosse stick?” I asked, holding out my offering.
“There are four more boys at home,” the father said. “We have a whole team.”
He took it from me, smiling, grateful, opening up the trunk to stash it inside.
“Thank you for the lacrosse stick,” he said.
Just last week, the lacrosse stick was stored aloft, in the attic of the garage. I certainly could not have grabbed it in an instant as I did today. I likely would not even have remembered it was there. Today, though, it was ready. Perhaps rather than waiting to be taken to St. Vincent de Paul’s, it was waiting for this moment.
I thought about earlier events in the day, how I’d waited for a train so that I could continue my bike ride, and casually met up with two bicyclists on the Hank Aaron trail, waiting to cross 121st Street. “Where’re you from?” I asked.
“St. Paul,” answered the man in the orange coat riding his bicycle laden with front and rear paniers and a rolled up pack on the rear rack.
Considering their loaded bikes, I asked, “Are you camping?”
“We’re moteling it,” his wife, ahead of him on the trail answered. “We’re carrying everything,” she added. “And I have to carry my own food because of food allergies,” she added, nodding toward the bright red panier bags on either side of her front tire.
“I have to do that, too,” I said. She asked my allergies. I asked hers.
We continued to bike side by side. I told her about our trip from Pittsburgh to DC, partially on the C&O Canal towpath.
“We did that,” she said. “I didn’t like the C&O towpath. It was too bumpy, full of roots.”
“We were on a tandem hauling a trailer,” I said, “Perhaps the weight kept the bumpiness down. When did you go?”
“A couple of years ago.”
“We went in 2008, 2009 . . . “
“It’s changed since then,” she said. “Not so well maintained.”
A matter of timing, this conversation, just as the encounter with the lacrosse playing father and son. Perhaps, life is all a matter of timing. Perhaps these kinds of moments of connection are more available to me than I realize if I keep my eyes and my heart open.
I bid the bikers farewell and pedaled on to my downtown destination, leaving them behind as they biked more slowly with their heavy loads. Two small bright spots in my day. I wonder how many of them I miss.
What about you?
