The Third Act

Passing Strangers: A middle-aged man with a bad back and a purple crayon

Hi Friends,
This week’s portrait comes to you a few days late but it couldn’t be helped. As I finish the final edits, I’m sitting on a screen porch in a small villa on Kiawah Island, South Carolina watching the rain. We’ve had three glorious days of sun and beach and I’ve had the joy of looking after two little girls, Bella and her cousin Aria who’s visiting us for the week.

It’s a work trip for Paradis so while she’s been in meetings, I’ve been in charge of sunscreen application, pancake making, dispute mitigation, and sand removal. I’ve eaten my weight in leftover chicken tenders and french fries and my thighs and the tops of my feet have a rosy, overcooked glow about them. It’s a strange feeling getting to have all this a second time around which probably explains this week’s stranger.

I hope you’re enjoying your summer, wherever it’s taking you.

Peace & Music,

Ben

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Passing Strangers is a weekly series of fictional portraits— keyhole views into the lives and inner worlds of other humans. These are standalone pieces but if you look carefully, you might begin to see a how they’re all brush strokes in a broader landscape. Visit the table of contents to find all the portraits.

He wondered who he’d have to kill to keep things interesting. You could only carry on for so long before things became intractably dull, and for him, the only thing worse than being bored was being boring. In truth, there was something worse that he was loath to admit: being disliked. Was there a less useful quality for a writer to have than the need to please?

His back was stiff that morning, seized up as it did two or three times a year—not from any great exertion or heroic deed, but from sitting hunched over his laptop, stressing over meaningless minutiae that somehow tricked his lizard brain into reacting as if a grizzly were charging, demanding a fight-or-flight response.

Well into his third act, old age was creeping up on him. He was 55, bald, bearded, and bespectacled. In the mirror, he could still see the young man he was, but photographs were unforgiving evidence of what everyone else saw when he said hi in the elevator or checked out at the grocery store. He had already lived a lifetime and was somehow starting another one. When you boiled his second act down to the bones, it was a mostly unoriginal drama that unfolded in the suburbs and resulted in two grown kids who now required a lot of therapy, an ex-wife, and a persistent churning feeling in his gut. In contrast, his third act had been full of surprises, not the least of which was a precocious six-year-old girl who, along with her mother, had quietly commandeered his distressed heart and started renovations. He spent most days just trying to keep up with and be worthy of the present.

The park was lush, green, and thick with humidity. The sun was barely over the horizon but he was already sweating. With every step, the fused steel plates of his lumbar vertebrae loosened and he was able to turn his mind back to the story he was working on. Like Harold with his purple crayon, the man had taken to writing novels when he turned 40 as a way to fashion an escape from a life he no longer recognized. In stories, terrible things could happen. Horrible damage could be done. People could say difficult things that were true, even cruel, and still be redeemed by the end.

As he passed strangers in the park, making his way around the food trucks and golf carts setting up for whatever event was coming, he imagined their lives. Some of them made it into his stories. He wondered if they would recognize themselves.

But no, that was highly unlikely. No one could ever really see us as we see ourselves. We are, all of us, unreliable narrators.

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I’d love to know how what you think of this series of portraits. The magic in anything I post here usually happens when you lean in. How do you encounter strangers?