I stood there at lunch time, looking over the skin care and lotion products that stretched five shelves high and about a tenth of a mile long. Nivea. Neutrogena. L’Oreal Anti-Aging. What was that ingredient it should have? Retinol?  Anti-wrinkle... Eye Lift... Night Treatment….

A familiar sound began to come over the store Musak. It began quietly, but my ear caught it. The gentle, acoustic guitar strums of a prolonged introduction, one that comes into focus slowly…  I know that song, I thought.   No, it can’t be. In the Rite Aid?  And then it began.

Old friends

I froze.

Old friends

Sat on their park bench

Like bookends

A newspaper blowin' through the grass

Falls on the round toes

Of the high shoes

Of the old friends

This song, by Simon & Garfunkel, haunted me as a child, since I first heard it on my brothers’ record player when I was about seven.

In an instant, by a few notes, I was transported back. I used to associate this song so strongly with my aged grandfather, with city life in New York, but that was so long ago… And then it was my father.... Why am I hearing this? Dad? Are you letting me know you’re watching over me now?

The sounds of the city sifting through trees

Settle like dust on the shoulders of the old friends

I felt the tears in my eyes, stinging. I stared through the blur. OLAY. Ponds...

Can you imagine us years from today,

Sharing a park bench quietly

How terribly strange to be seventy

I thought of my husband. He and I will be seventy one day. Will it be strange? I don't know... Perhaps it will be natural. I began to relax. And I moved.

Walking away, I looked around at the signs but could not really read anything and didn’t know what I would be looking for.  I peered down the next aisle.

There I saw an old woman, looking at a shelf of products with her hands outstretched, as though bewildered by the selection before her.  I moved toward her and asked if I could help. She couldn’t find something she was looking for that would help the pain in her feet. I searched the shelves, digging down and behind corn covers and insoles until I found it for her.

She thanked me and asked for my name. We held hands for a moment. She smiled at me, her blue eyes fading.

Old friends,

memory brushes the same years,

silently sharing the same fears