I’d never been to Toronto before.  But it was a good time for me to get away for a few days.

Late September, and all the leaves were turning here in Minneapolis.  It was colder in Toronto when I flew in that Wednesday afternoon, colder, cloudy and windy.  I had two interviews to do on Thursday, and those were finished by mid-afternoon, leaving me with nothing to do until my flight out Friday morning.  

So I spent the afternoon walking through the town, just looking around.

  One of my appointments was with a buyer who told me about the Harbourfront, so I turned my steps that way.  It proved to be a good place to walk and think; paths, trees, benches, a few little shops and the like, all along the lakeshore.  I had a lot on my mind.  Jaime was pushing me to make up my mind about where things were going with us, and I’ve never been very good at commitment. 

Of course, it was commitment that Jaime was looking for.

By about four o’clock I’d been walking for a couple hours, so the little bench in the park looked pretty good.

An older man was already seated on the bench, leaning forward, tossing bits of popcorn to a couple of pigeons.  He looked like a local businessman having a slow afternoon, with his dark tie loose in his collar and his Ottawa Senators hockey jacket open over his white shirt.  It was his eyes that caught my attention; even as I walked up, I could see things in his brown eyes.  I could see regret, and fatigue, and worry.

Don’t ask me how I noticed all that.  I’m normally not at all perceptive about these things; just ask Jaime, she’ll tell you.

At any rate, he noticed me, the moment I sat down.  I guess I must have had a kind of thousand-yard stare on my face.  He gave me a wry smile that I hardly noticed until he started talking.

I guess he was a little more discerning than I am. 

“Let me guess,” he began, looking at me with a faint smile.  “Girl troubles?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Only to an old pro,” he replied, leaning back against the hard wooden back of the bench and tossing another piece of popcorn to the squabbling pigeons.

“An old pro?”  I wasn’t sure what he meant.

“An old pro at having girl troubles,” he clarified his comment. “Starting at age sixteen.  Starting with the biggest mistake I ever made in my life.”

“Mistake?”  I wasn’t too sure what he was going on about.

“You first.”  He smiled again, a sort of sad, wish-I-was-in-your-shoes smile.  “What’s got you wandering around Harbourfront with a thousand-yard stare?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I don’t have anywhere I have to be,” he pointed out.

So, I told him.  I told him about meeting Jaime last year at the gym we belong to.  I told him about our dating for several months, about exchanging apartment keys, about our vacation together last summer – the usual stuff that leads up to popping the question, you know, except that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to pop that question yet.  And Jaime was getting impatient.

“Do you love her?” he asked finally.

I thought about that for a minute, before it hit me that there wasn’t really anything to think about.  “Yeah,” I told him.  “Sure.”

“You’d do anything to keep from hurting her, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Including being honest with her?”

“Yeah, of course!”

“Then you need to start by being honest with yourself.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

He leaned back on the bench, a sad smile on his face.  The wind blew a scattering of dead leaves in a whorl around us, the clatter and clutter mixing with the crackle of his empty popcorn sack as he crushed it, tossing it neatly in the trash can beside the bench.  The pigeons handclapped into flight.

“Well, let me tell you a story, then.”

And he told me about a girl he’d known and loved once, years ago, as a boy.  She was a girl with wild russet hair and sparkling green eyes, a beaming smile and a quicksilver temper, passion that flashed and a heart that glowed. 

“We were friends,” he said, staring at the sky, “and maybe a little more than friends.  It was a hard time for me – my Dad had disappeared a few years earlier, and then dropped back into my life suddenly.  Mom was having a really hard time with all of it.  I was in my OAC year in school, and trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life.  And – well, I hadn’t been completely honest with her.  Looking back, I think she was a little confused herself.  She expected more out of our friendship that I was.”

“Let me guess,” I interrupted him.  “You gave her the old ‘lets-be-friends’ speech.”

“Sort of,” he answered sadly.  “And you know how well those usually work out.  And that’s what happened this time.  We sort of drifted apart after that – I’d told her how much her friendship meant to me, and it really did.  That’s why I wanted to be so cautious!  I was trying to keep from screwing things up and losing her completely.”

“And you ended up losing her completely.”

“Yep.  That’s right.”

I thought about that for a moment.

“So, you’re saying you lost her because you finally decided to be honest about your feelings?”

“No.  I lost her because I was dishonest for too long.  I was dishonest with myself, too, thinking I could string things along forever, or at least until college forced some sort of decision.”

“Oh.”

He turned to face me.  “And you – you’re going to have to decide what it is you want.  Be honest with yourself.  Do you love this girl?  Do you want to be with her?  Can you imagine yourself with anyone else.”

“Yes, yes and no,” I chuckled.  Whoever he was, he had a way of cutting through to the point.

“Then be honest with her.  Right now.  Always.  If you’re not ready, tell her.  But tell her the rest, too.”

I leaned back and joined him in staring at the puffy white clouds sliding by overhead for a while.  The wind gusted clutters of leaves past us, and a pigeon returned to shuffle and peck around the bench for a few minutes.  And we just sat there, thinking, the both of us.  I thought about Jaime and me, and about what the man on the other end of the bench had told me.  I don’t know what memories, regrets or sorrows passed behind his sad brown eyes, and I didn’t intrude.

I had enough on my own mind.

We sat silently for maybe half an hour, before the man sat up and looked down the path.  Another man about his age was walking towards us, the late afternoon sun glinting off his round glasses, his long camelhair coat billowing in the breeze.  He wasn’t a big man, but he was well-dressed, prosperous-looking, and obviously concerned.

“Ryan,” the man on the bench next to me greeted the newcomer.

“Joe,” Ryan said, “You’ve been sitting here all afternoon again?”

“Afraid so.”

Ryan extended a hand.  “Come on, Joe.  Come have supper with us.  I’ll take you home afterwards.”

“I don’t want to be a bother, Ryan.”

“No bother, Joe.  Deirdre and I like having you come by.”

Joe stood up and turned to face me.  “Remember what I told you.  Think about it.  You’re a smart guy.  You’ll know what to do.”  I stood up and shook his hand, and shook Ryan’s hand as well.

And then they turned and walked away.

I started to walk back to my rental car, thinking hard.  It hit me suddenly, so hard that I stopped in my tracks.  The decision before me wasn’t really a decision at all.  I knew what I wanted to do; I just had to be honest with myself about it.

A smile grew on my face as the realization hit home.  A sense of urgency hurried me back to the car, now, and from there to my hotel room.

I had a proposal to plan.