If it weren’t for our dogs, Al and I would have remained perfect strangers. In the town we lived in, though, there wasn’t ever a lot of space between the haves and the have-nots, so my one-story ranch house was only a short walk away from his stately Georgian home. Only a small grassy, unkempt hill partitioned the road that ran through my neighborhood from the street that winded through his.

Like the thousands of footprints that beat the wild grass of that embankment into submission, I often walked my dog Clementine down the hill to wander the other neighborhood. Its wider roads and sidewalks were easier to enjoy if you were nervous about walking a jumpy dog near traffic, and it was lined with elms taller that its most ostentatious house, providing shelter from the sun or the rain. There was even a creek to mark the neighborhood’s lowest end, a foil to the hill at the top.

Other than the occasional dog walk, I never went into Al’s neighborhood, one of those places named after whatever animal was displaced in the construction of it; Fox Hill or Turkey Glen, Deer Spring, or whatever. So the only time I saw him leave his home was to walk his terrier mix, Sabrina. Even then, I rarely did more than wave, for every time we crossed paths I thought I detected a nearly imperceptible stink-eye from behind his giant, old-man sunglasses. This made me feel like even more of a stranger in a neighborhood that wasn’t my own, so I just smiled and waved and moved on. Al, leash in hand, waved back. He didn’t smile.

That was until one day, Sabrina got away from him. I was standing at the mid-point of the aforementioned hill when Sabrina came barreling towards me and Clementine. Already forced by advancing age to use a cane, Al had no chance of keeping up, but I could see him trying his best to catch Sabrina.

Clementine, as her name suggests, was a small orange thing, and Sabrina was on the small side as well, but heading towards us like a mottled missile, sleek with her nose pointed straight at us. I’m not sure what made me put my fear aside, but I stepped between Clementine and the incoming marauder, as much determined to catch Al’s dog as protect my own.

In retrospect, this may not have been the smartest move, given that I had no idea what Sabrina’s capacity for savagery might be. But I’ve often been accused of acting or speaking before thinking and I did that then. Fortunately for everyone involved, Sabrina stopped short, barking ferociously, pushing Clementine into a shivering retreat.

Once I established that the hand I threw up as a stop sign for Sabrina wasn’t missing any fingers, I saw Al hobbling up the street. I gingerly reached out and took ahold of Sabrina’s leash. By the time Al caught up, I had both dogs in hand and they were sniffing each other in a curious, if cautious, manner.

Al, smile grim with embarrassed fashion, thanked me. I realized then it wasn’t simply instinct that caused me to stop Sabrina. Besides the cane and the protective shell of his hat and wide sunglasses, there was a slight stoop to Al’s shoulder. He was a tall man, a good half-foot taller than me, but gravity and time were making him smaller and I suppose I noticed that from the times we passed each other.

Standing at the foot of the hill, we introduced ourselves. “You live up in that neighborhood?” Al asked.

“I do. Right over there.” I indicating the white ranch house visible from where we stood.

Al ‘s forced smile became a grimace. “I used to be able to make it up that hill.”

Looking at the rougher terrain of the grassy knoll, I wondered if that’s what gave him trouble. “Yeah. I wonder why the city hasn’t paved over this and joined the streets.”

Al’s smile returned, but genuine for the first time. “Oh, they haven’t done that because I won’t let them.”

“I’m sorry?”

Al’s pride straightened him as much as it could. “I own that parcel. I won’t sell it to the city, so they can’t develop it. I don’t want a road coming through there.”

I looked at the hill and its 30 short yards that separated one neighborhood from another, and considered all of my neighbors who did odd jobs for people in Al’s neighborhood. “Why not?”

Even from the under the brim of his hat, Al’s smile beamed as he began to speak, but then thought better of it. “Too much traffic,” was the answer he went with.

It seemed to me that my neighbors having to drive all the way around both neighborhoods to get to the entrance at the bottom of Al’s would cause more traffic then driving straight through, so I said, “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Well,” Al smiled, “I suppose I prefer if everyone comes in the same way.”

“Don’t want people sneaking in the back?” I almost asked, but caught my tongue. Instead, I decided to let that momentum lead me to exit the conversation. I gestured at Sabrina, now by his side, and said, “Well, glad I could help with that.”

Al lifted his cane. “Oh, this? I’ve got it for my spondylitis.”

The confusion the technical word introduced into the conversation stopped me. “I’m sorry?”

Without hesitation, Al launched into an explanation, going into detail about how spondylitis was a degenerative nerve disease that he had been diagnosed with a few years ago. It bent his back and forced him to use a cane. He spoke of the malady as if it were an enemy, one that he hated but couldn’t touch, like a taskmaster with a long whip. He spoke of useless doctors for which he held an equal fury, men and women who could do nothing to ease his pain or reverse the degrading quality of his life.

It was, indeed, a very sad story and I listened patiently to it. For about the first 10 minutes. I nodded and asked questions at what felt like appropriate intervals, expressing sympathy with slow nods and soft utterances. After a time, though, I felt taken hostage by my pity for him, unable to escape, but desperate to cross the short stretch of grass that he couldn’t follow me over.

Eventually, he said, “Yes, I was once a strong, young man like you.” I think he meant it as a joke, but the sentence was conclusive enough that I spoke so shortly after it was almost interrupting. “Well, I gotta get back to it,” I replied, wanting to leave while I was still young.

Unfortunately for me, Clementine and Sabrina became friendly during Al’s long diatribe, getting to know each other in a prolonged series of increasingly intimate sniffs. This made it nearly impossible to avoid Al on future walks around his neighborhood. Both dogs would become excited when the other was spotted, wagging tails and pulling on leashes, and as my wife is fond of pointing out, I can rarely deny Clementine much. So I would inevitably let her lead me to Sabrina who was attached to Al and his never-ending complaints.

The conversations always followed the same mold as the first one. There was a greeting, then at some point I would make some inadvisable comment that Al could take as an inquiry to his well-being and he would launch into a long list of corporeal complaints. These were the worst as it felt rude to walk away while he was venting about the sad state of his health.

Somehow, though, as if his loss of physical dexterity had transferred into some kind of conversational jujitsu, Al would transform his malady complaints into venting about things in general. Having mentally wandered away, I would come back to Al expounding on his view of the world at large. This tended to coincided with the opinion he held of his doctors, a quiet anger at the perceived incompetence, laziness, or entitlement, of “them.”

I artfully chose not to ask Al to define who “they” were, instead using it as a reason to leave, which was was much simpler than mustering the callousness it required to walk away from the fusing of his spine. On our future meetings, though, he continued to smash these topics together, railing against people waiting for hand-outs, or “unwilling to wait there turn,” and then launch into a long list of his maladies, expecting nothing but sympathy.

Eventually, one day, this level of cognitive dissonance produced a chuckle from me, a perverse impulse I tried to hide but couldn’t resist. It stopped Al mid-sentence, who stared at me with his wide sun glasses rimmed with the wrinkles of his anger. “What?”

I stepped back in the face of his ire, but something stronger stopped me as surely as if I had backed into a wall. Instead of making some polite excuse I answered honestly, “Sorry, everything we’re talking about just reminded me of a sermon.” I hadn’t been to church in years, but I found myself surprised that it was true.

Al gestured with Sabrina’s leash as if I were at the end of it. “Well? Let’s hear it.”

I hesitated, caught between the time it would take to tell the sermon and my desire to escape. Since Al had made me listen to his long list of complaints I went with it. “There was a woman who was down on her luck – she was poor, her mother was infirmed, her children were sick and her no-good husband had run off.” Al propped himself up on his cane, straightening himself at this beginning.

“So one night before bed she got down on her knees and prayed, ‘Jesus, please take this cross from me. I can’t bear it anymore.’ And when she went to sleep, she dreamt and Jesus came to her in that dream. The Lord said to her, ‘My child, I will take your cross from you. But if I do you have to chose a new one. Everyone has to have one. That’s part of the deal.’

“The woman understood and Jesus led her to a giant room in which the walls were hung with crosses off all different shapes and sizes. Some them were made of wood, some of stone, others had spikes and splinters, some were large and others were small. The woman was amazed at how many there were, so she spent a long time going from one to the next, trying to determine which cross she would take.”

“Eventually, the woman found one that she thought would be good, a simple wooden cross that wasn’t too big or too small, one she thought she could manage. So she took it and turned to the Lord and said, ‘Jesus, this is the cross for me.’

“And the Lord started to laugh. And he kept laughing. This confused the woman greatly, until she stopped him, saying, ‘Lord, you’re starting to hurt my feelings. What are you laughing at?’

“Wiping tears from his eyes, the Lord replied, “I’m sorry, my child. I don’t mean to laugh at you.” I paused, looking at a rapt Al for effect. “It’s just, that’s the cross you came in with.”

I let that conclusion land and watched Al, not sure how he would take it. He opened his mouth and for a moment I was sure I was going to get a broadside. I was genuinely surprised when laughter came out instead.

Al had been so sour for so long that I honestly didn’t think he was capable of laughter. My astonishment turned into my own laughter and for a few moments the two of us were just two men standing in the middle of the road, laughing like old friends. The dogs even stopped sniffing each other to fix us with curious eyes.

When we had caught our breath, Al said, “That’s a fine story.” He grinned, his hard surface stripped away to a humility I didn’t know was underneath. He swept Sabrina’s leash back and forth pondering its oscillations. After a moment, he ended the conversation with a perfunctory, “Well, we should get going.” For a man who had been laughing heartily a few moments ago, whatever he had on his mind caused him to stoop more than usual.

I nodded and we went our separate ways. Over the next few weeks I noticed Al speaking to more and more people, and none of them had the crushed expression of someone as trapped as I had felt by the vice of his complaints. Later, another neighbor asked me, “What did you say to Al?” I shrugged and said nothing of consequence. I have to admit, though, I was pretty proud of myself for being so clever.

My next exchanges with Al were friendlier. One day, while Clementine and Sabrina began their own ritual greetings, we idle chattered about the weather for a bit. It was getting on to summer and heating up. Then he surprised me with, “I’d like you to come to my church this Sunday and bring that parable you told me.”

I was flummoxed by this statement (it didn’t feel like a request) and I responded by saying that I wasn’t a preacher. “Oh, I know,” he smiled under his impenetrable sunglasses. “But I spoke to my reverend and told him you had something worth sharing.” I demurred, protested, equivocated, and begged off, but Al was as dogged about it as he had previously been about his health issues.

So that’s how one Sunday I found myself at the Three Oaks Methodist church, searching the lot for an open parking space amongst all of the congregation’s automobiles, lined up as squarely and shining as a German regiment waiting for inspection. I hurried inside, through a short introduction to the Reverend Jacobs, then to wait in the wings while he introduced me to his congregation as a “special guest speaker.”

An echoing silence filled the nave as I moved quickly to the pulpit. The church was a fine place, with arched ceilings and stain-glass windows, big enough that its pews seated enough people that I couldn’t find Al at first. This shook the small panic already growing in me, my presence feeling tethered to his own. I searched among men in suits, seated with their families dressed in their Sunday best, each a carefully coiffed and placed unit, waiting expectantly. Among the faces I found some with shimmering, expectant eyes, others with a radiating skepticism. More than a few of the parent’s checked their watches while their children snuck glances at their phones.

Someone coughed, reverberating throughout the hall, the noise opening a silent hole that sucked in all of the room’s expectations and nearly took me with it. I was only rescued from the crushing gravity of that by spotting Al. He was surrounded by somber people with speculative eyes, occasionally shooting Al glances as my silence dragged on. They bunched around him, waiting on this new, strange thing he had brought to their church.

I had some notes crumpled in my hand, sweat-stained now from my palms, and I tried to smooth them out on the podium. The crinkling of the paper was the first thing caught by the microphone and it reverberated out into the church, the letters that I had put onto the page now as indecipherable as braille.

I looked up from my own impenetrable scribble, out at the faces of the congregation, and realized I had no idea what to say to them.

See the author’s published work here.

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