meish dot org: life, unfolding

I once travelled by Amtrack from San Francisco to Seattle, just after new year. The journey took forever, and we got delayed in southern Oregon because of snow, so my reading matter quickly ran out and I became bored and frustrated. I retreated to the viewing car to watch Pretty Woman for the eighteenth time (they had it on a loop) and stare out at the rolling landscape. A guy asked if I could do him a favour. I said sure. He asked if I could draw something onto his jeans, which seemed like a completely normal request, given that I was 17, impressionable and had just had a fairly eventful and trippy month in California. Sure, I said. Anything in particular?

He introduced himself. His name was Eric Pfeiffer, like the numbers, he told me, five-four, which I thought was strange – not like the famous actress, I asked? He just laughed. He was 19, on his way home to Vancouver, Washington, where he was at the local college. He was a part-time firefighter, and had just had a tattoo on his left shoulderblade. Could I copy it onto his jeans for him? Sure, I replied. No problem – though I’m not an artist, I warned. Fine. He gave me a biro and hoiked his shirt up, and I started to draw.

There’s something quite weird about drawing on denim, especially when it’s wrapped around warm flesh. The ink heats up easily, and the surface takes to the design readily. The design was an aztec sun motif, outlined in black and filled in orange and red tones on warm tanned skin. Eric was about 5’11″ and skinny, with sandy brown hair, grown too long, so it got in his kind green eyes. As I drew on his leg, constantly checking between shoulder and thigh, he told me about his studies, his family, all sorts of random things. He talked about himself, and I listened and concentrated, but said little. I didn’t talk about myself.

Time passed. I drew in heavy biro on his warm thigh. We talked. Sooner than we expected, his station came up. I walked him to the train door and watched him disembark, a new drawing on his legs.

I didn’t think about him again until six or seven weeks later, when a card arrived addressed to Meg, Lester B Pearson College, BC, Canada. I’d been wearing a college sweatshirt that day, and he must have remembered. Inside the thick envelope was a card showing a school of dolphins from above, surfacing through crystal water. His schoolboy scrawl read “To Meg;- because some things in life are too beautiful to ever forget. Eric.”

There was no return address. He did not require a response, and I couldn’t give one even if I tried. This was a random act of randomness. I never heard from him again, but I still have the card…why? To remind me that random things happen, random brief encounters can occur, and they don’t have to be complicated. They can be good, and fleeting, and simple, and just be.