The Connection

We drive down a tree lined road where the branches reach across the pavement meeting above the highway and intertwining their branches like long, delicate fingers.  This green tunnel seems like a passage into times past with visions of plantations imagined on either side us at the ends of long driveways disappearing into the woods along the road.  We are in the Historic Plantation District of Charleston.

It is here that we pass an old, African American man sitting in a chair by the side of the road at the end of his driveway.  A glance yields the view of a small dark house in the trees behind him that bespeaks an age even greater than his own.  He waves and smiles at each passing car and our eyes meet in the brief connection we’ve made drawing a smile to my lips in reply.  My mind sears the vision of the whites of his eyes surrounded by the furrows of age and his smile into my memory.  And I wonder.  What brings him to the end of his drive?  Is he bored or worse lonely?  From where has his life slipped away?  What dreams did he dream?  What has he seen in all the years that have graced him?  I have this urge to turn the car around and return to him and sit awhile to let the questions bubble forth in anticipation of his answers which I most want to hear.

What stories the elders could tell.  And yet they are often silenced.  The art of mixing generations around a campfire to hear their tales has disappeared.  Now the world passes by them.  Buried in cell phones and ensconced by cars for one, the world hears nothing but the tapping of its fingers.  And when the mists of time gather up the elders and they are gone, what stories then will be told about times we can no longer reach back to see through their tales?

My own car swishes down the now rain coated street and I am left to imagine the horse drawn carriages, ladies in hoop skirts and gentleman farmers who once roamed these woods and fields along with the ancestors of my smiling companion of just a few seconds at the end of his drive.