A Close Encounter

Some stories stick around. This is one of them:

It was late in May a few years ago and I was walking on a side street between the local park and Oregon State University’s campus. It’s a shortcut I often take to avoid traffic and noise. There’s a 5-story apartment building on the left, and a row of five or six bungalows on the right with porches covered in lilacs. Down the middle of the street is a line of giant pine trees that keep the neighborhood cool when the air is hot. At the far end where the road curves onto 11^th Street, two chocolate labs whose names I don’t know always come out to greet me. Cars rarely drive on this street. Unless you lived there, you’d have no reason to.

On the day of this story, a blue Corolla came up behind me, drove past, then turned around and came back. The young driver pulled up next to me and said, I’m sorry to bother you. I assumed he needed directions. Instead, he said, do you know how to tie a tie?

I smiled big.

I do know how to tie a tie! My father made sure all five of his daughters (and his son) could tie a tie, but it had been fifty years or more since those lessons. I told the young man that. He laughed and said Ok, well that’s better than me.

So, there we were: standing in the middle of the road, face to face, close as mother and son, husband and wife, and I’m lifting his collar, carefully putting the tie around his neck, straightening it, trying to remember if it’s one time around or two, trying to get the front half longer than the back. Meanwhile, he’s telling me his name (Amir) and why he doesn’t know how to tie a tie (they don’t wear them in Saudi Arabia), and most importantly, could I hurry, because he doesn’t want to be late for his graduation photograph from the Engineering School at OSU. Good enough, we finally decide, and off he goes, thanking me repeatedly as he gets in his car and takes off.

I carry on with my walk with that glow that comes when something unexpected and wonderful happens, but then I see Amir’s Corolla coming around the corner again. He stops, puts down the window and says, I brought my friend Omar. Could you tie his tie, too? So, I did. It was a double for me.

Lilacs up close