Notion by Chris Klassen

“It’s a lovely day,” my friend, a small sweet person, said to me as we stood on the lawn next to the sidewalk on a warm morning, “and I want to take you to my favourite place, a place I frequent for peace and calm and gentle thinking.” I had never heard of this penchant of hers before, even though we had known each other for a long time. She began walking, meditation-like, with soft quiet steps, and I followed more clumsily. The sidewalk was dust-swept and the grass on each side was manicured meticulously like it had been treated with scissors, like a hair stylist had trimmed it instead of a landscaper. We walked silently for a minute or two.

“That’s my favourite tree, over there,” she said, pointing. It was a massive oak with deeply brown gnarled bark on its trunk and huge bountiful leaves in its canopy. “I pass it every time,” she continued. “It’s like the first marker of the journey.” I knew this tree too. I had seen it many times, sometimes with her, sometimes without. It was over there, near the edge of a playground, where there were swings and slides above a surface of sand and where little steel chairs and tables waited for picnickers. Children were playing and mothers or fathers or random care-givers were either standing nearby talking or sitting on the grass, not on the sand, cross-legged, watching. My friend slowed her slow walk and looked at the tree. “It’s majestic,” she commented, “don’t you think?” I nodded and replied that, yes, it was quite a tree. I placated her. I didn’t know what made it more special than the other huge oaks that also lived here. But she was pleased and content. That was what mattered at the moment. She then sped up slightly and we walked past the park completely.

“That wasn’t the spot though,” she replied when I commented that I always found it refreshing to see little children enjoying themselves innocently and laughing loudly at random circumstance. “It’s a nice place, for sure. But it’s too loud and crowded to be my favourite place. My favourite place has to be still and empty, so that I can’t be bothered by anyone.” I agreed, and we kept walking until the sidewalk led to a small bridge that traversed a creek. Halfway across, my friend stopped and looked down at the water that flowed reasonably quickly. On the bridge, the breeze blew her hair more dramatically than at the park.

“I love it here,” she said. “Sometimes families of ducks rest down there.” She pointed at the water. “I could watch them for hours, especially the little ones. They just kind of float around, almost like toys. Then, when their parents start to swim away, they follow. They seem so content.” I stated that this could be a good favourite place. After all, I said, it was like being in nature, there were no other people around, and there were ducks. “And small fish too,” my friend added. And small fish too, I repeated. We stood on the bridge and looked down at the water for a few moments and, when I looked at my friend, she had her eyes closed and I waited to talk until they were open again and then I asked if this was the place.

“No,” she answered. “I like it here for sure,” she said, “but no. People sometimes pass by, talking to each other, sometimes with little dogs that sniff and bark. They would interrupt.” When I asked what would they interrupt, she replied, “Me, that’s what.” I didn’t quite understand her response, but I didn’t feel it was my role to press further. I didn’t feel she wanted an actual discussion. She only wanted to show me her favourite place, that’s all. When she resumed her crossing of the bridge, I followed obediently. If I felt like it later, I thought I may ask why we were doing this in the first place and why, after all the time that we had known each other, did she decide to finally take me on this excursion?  We had never even talked about it before.

We stepped off the bridge at the other side and back onto the sidewalk and continued walking silently and I saw that tall weeds and grasses had now replaced the trimmed grass and lawns we had passed before and then, on our right side, I saw a small pond and two old-looking wooden tables.

“I think this might have been a rest area once,” my friend said. “Not anymore though, otherwise the weeds would be cut.” She stepped towards and sat down at a table and looked at the water and I sat down across from her so that I couldn’t see the water. Names and swear words and hearts with arrows had been carved into the table top. When the breeze blew across the surface of the pond and in our direction, it smelled musty. 

“This isn’t my favourite place either,” my friend said, “but it’s getting closer.” She laughed when I expressed surprise and confusion at her comment. I said that I didn’t see the attractiveness of a vandalized table and a bad smell. “Because it has history and creativity and the smell is pure,” she answered, “that’s why. People were here but now they’re not. They left their marks and then went away. Only ghosts are here now. It smells like ghosts.” But people could come back and bring life to it again, I said. “That’s why it can’t be my favourite place,” she replied. “They’ll wreck its old charm. I don’t want to be here when new people carve new messages into the table or throw garbage into the pond. If I was here alone, just enjoying the space, and they appeared, it would be so dejecting.” She stood. “Come on,” she said, “just the thought is starting to bother me.” She took a deep breath. “I love that ghostly smell though.”

My friend and I had talked philosophically before, occasionally, about love and death and God and the meaning of life and if the Bible was literal or allegorical. Much more often though, we talked about movies and pop culture and seemingly great ideas that had gone awry and been replaced by new ideas. Maybe that was why she was leading me on this walk, because it was a brand new idea that had just crossed her mind. It was odd, I thought, but it was definitely intriguing, and my curiosity was piqued. We left the pond and returned to the sidewalk, her in front of me as was appropriate.

We walked in silence for a little while, surrounded by uninteresting vegetation, until we arrived at an old dirt road. “This way,” she said, “I’ll show you this next.” We stepped off the sidewalk and onto the road and followed its curvy direction around a sharp bend and stopped in front of a rusty iron gate that was open just enough for us to squeeze through to enter, on its other side, a small disheveled cemetery. The tombstones, very few, were either angled dejectedly or had fallen over completely. My friend approached the first one and stopped and pointed. “You can barely see the name and the date,” she said. “They’re all like that.” When I asked how she even knew about this place, she smiled. “I don’t know, I just found it.”

We wandered through the insignificant grounds, reading what we could read of the epitaphs, and I wondered briefly if I, or she, would recognize any of the virtually illegible names. “Of course not,” she replied, sitting down suddenly to rest against a grey crooked faded stone, motioning me to join her. I shook my head. I felt like we were intruding and, to lean like she was leaning, like she invited me to do, was improper. “Aren’t we just showing our respect by visiting?” she asked. “This place has been so forgotten. We’re giving it a bit of attention. It’s a decent thing to do.” Her thoughts were valid, but I didn’t reply. I did, though, start to ask if this was – it couldn’t be, could it?  – her favourite place, and before I had even finished the question, she answered again, “Of course not.” She paused briefly as a squirrel ran by. “I like the feel here,” she continued, “I like the ancient haunted feeling, I like the sense that my presence here might be adding a bit to the afterlife, you know, in case the spirits feel forgotten. But it’s not proper to spend too much time. It belongs to the spirits.” She stood up and brushed some dirt from the seat of her pants and I followed and we went back to the gate and the dirt road and up to the sidewalk.

It was much warmer now and the sun beat down on us and I asked if we were getting close to our destination because, really, I was feeling like I wanted to go back home and wash and have something to eat and drink. “Are you enjoying this, though?” she asked, and I replied that enjoying probably wasn’t the right word. It was intriguing and certainly, since we had never discussed anything like this before, not something that I had ever expected from her. “Don’t have expectations then,” she replied cryptically.

The sidewalk led us up an incline and then turned sharply and we walked along the crest of a hill and then down again and it seemed to me that we had almost reversed direction and were walking back towards our starting point, although we still had a long way to go. After a few quiet minutes my friend stepped onto a gravel road and we marched, dustily, in single file, and then we made another drastic turn and then she stopped and I stopped and, in front of us, was a large derelict concrete-and-steel building with shattered windows and water-stained walls and a faint chemical aroma.

“Here,” my friend said, beaming. “We’re here.”

I couldn’t help myself. “This?”

We crossed the property, stepping carefully over shards of glass and strips of metal and small rust-coloured weeds that grew out of the concrete, and we entered the empty building through a broken garage door. Sun shone through holes in the decimated roof and there were shallow puddles of dirty water on the floor from recent rains. Next to one wall, in a corner, was a dead rat. Beside the rat was a single tattered lawn chair that my friend approached.

“This is mine,” she said of the chair. “I found it in the garbage near my house and I brought it here.” She sat down and closed her eyes and immediately her breathing slowed and she emanated a calm that, in my confusion and concern, I had to disregard, and I announced to her bluntly that I felt this place, whatever it might have once been, was disgusting and even dangerous now.

“This place should be demolished,” I said with contempt, “not lionized. You’re not even safe here.” I looked again at the dead rat.

My friend responded with her eyes still closed and her breathing still soft. “It’s perfect,” she said. “It’s isolated and desolate and soul-less. When I’m here, mine is the only soul. I’m God’s focal point. The destruction around me is human. It doesn’t matter. Only the essence that I bring to it matters. And then the calm and the understanding that I take with me back home.”

“How long have you been coming here?” I asked. I felt queasy.

“I don’t know,” my friend answered.

“Do you always visit all the other places first?”

“No, that was just to give you an idea of what else I’ve considered.”

“Do you know what this place used to be?”

“No, it doesn’t matter.”

“And you’re always alone here?”

“Always.”

“And you never mentioned it to me before?”

“No.”

“Why not?” This time, she didn’t respond. “I’d like to leave,” I said. My friend remained seated, breathing slowly, her face soft, and I stood and watched and neither of us moved for a minute or two, until she opened her eyes and rose, gracefully, from the chair.

“Today was an exercise in perception,” she said. “This is my favourite place, but you don’t perceive it that way. It’s my oasis, it’s not yours. You can’t see it, so you can’t appreciate it. But we’re both right.” I shrugged and said that none of that made much sense to me. “Maybe it will,” she replied. Then, with a more commanding voice, she said, “Ok, let’s go.” We exited the building.

The walk home was silent and, for me, long and awkward. I stayed behind my friend the whole way.  I couldn’t tell if it was awkward for her too. I couldn’t perceive it.

Chris Klassen

Image by Claire Francis from Pixabay – Abandoned building with broken widows, dirty walls and puddly floor all very grey and sad looking