Tonight instead of eating dinner (we weren't hungry), the husband and I decided to take a brisk walk, which turned into the longest walk we've taken thus far. It felt great, Bean pretended to listen to me ramble on about my never ending work troubles, and I pretended to listen to him describe the parts of an air conditioner he has to fix tomorrow.
We walked the long way, up a hill, to get to the street where Tom Thumb is, then made the square back to the house. When we got to the Tom Thumb parking lot, we decided to cut through. I looked over to a parking spot right at the front of the store, and it looked like there was a person laid out on the ground. I wasn't sure because you know how sometimes you see a ball of sheets on the side of the road and it looks like a dead body?
"Is that a person?" I asked Bean. He started jogging toward it. I felt scared- what if if was a person and they were dead? What if it was dangerous?
It was an older man, about 65-70 laying between his car and the curb. Another man saw him and came over at the same time we got there. His eyes were closed at first but we asked him some questions, Bean called 911, and I looked through his phone to find out who I should call. He told me to call Betty, his wife, which turned out to be his sister in law, who told me that Joan was his wife. I called her and told her what happened.
The paramedics showed up and the other guy had blood on his hands from where he tried to lift the man's head off the ground. Betty and two other people came out from inside the store- apparently they'd been shopping and left the man outside sitting in the car. Somehow, he got out of the car and fell down. They said he had Parkinson's and Diabetes. His head was banged up pretty bad so they took him to get him checked out at the hospital.
It was an interesting moment. I wanted to get everyone's names, find their relation to the incident, tell them what I knew. It really felt like a community where so much of the time we ignore other people and go about our own lives. In that parking lot, we had the paramedics, the manager of the store, a husband and wife out for an evening walk, a guy on his way home, a random lady in a flowered dress, a man bleeding on the ground, and his family. The crowd just dispersed after the man was in the ambulance, we all just walked away, didn't say a word to one another, no promises of future contact.
Bean said he prefers it that way. He didn't want to know any names, didn't want to know what happens to the guy after that. He knows the man will be alright. I think about how scared he must have been, laying on the ground like that. Maybe we helped in some small way. Maybe we were supposed to take that long walk and pass through the parking lot. We were the first ones there, after all.
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