'Pants-less in Indy'

I found myself in an empty parking lot again. This time, I wasn’t wearing any pants.

The early morning sun was streamlining through my open door, blasting my white thighs as I struggled to change in the front seat of my car. A stray goose, abandoned from his heard of goose-stepping feathered creatures, squawked at passing cars as he sat in the corner of the lot.

I hate geese. But regardless of him, or my hatred for the squawking shriek hitting my ear drum, I was determined to put my pants on.

I stood up, grabbing the door frame as the car dinged at me to say that my keys were still in the ignition. My belt jingled as I fastened it and squinted in the early morning light. It was 8:55 a.m., but I was already running an hour late.

The night before – or more accurately, the first three hours of that same morning – I had played the role of a zombie puking into a trash can. It might sound strange, but don’t worry, it was for a friend’s short film. A really cool short film. Not the high school type. You know, some 16-year-old’s imagination gone wild, a short film co-staring America’s Next Top Zombie, Godzilla, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Kraken too, all in someone’s vision of an Oscar nominated short.

It’s definitely not that. Or at least, I don’t think so. Maybe. It could be. Keep your fingers crossed.

But back to the goose. And the parking lot.

I looked out over the top of my car, thinking that it desperately needed a wash, but I didn’t care enough to give it one. To the north end of the lot was a Marsh Supermarket. One of the remaining few. I didn’t go in, but I thought that it would only be fitting, almost like a send-off, an ode to my shopping cart-pushing days, before I could see over the handle bar. I stayed put in my socks and undershirt.

It was too early for my unsung driving skills. I sat back down, nearly laying my forehead on the steering wheel to grab an extra minute of sleep. The two hours of fretful dreaming sagged under my eyes, along with the zombie makeup I desperately scrubbed at to remove, but to no avail.

Makeup or not, I was still a zombie. I leaned back and listened to the goose stupidly yell at passing traffic, mixing in with the mindless honks coming from the drone of vehicles and the ding of my open car door.

Later on, after I had gained enough confidence to drive another hour, steadily and awake, after I had met Mark and we drove to Cincinnati for his first Major League game in nearly 20 years, after I almost purchase a vegan burger but retracted my order after the cashier graciously showed me my mistake, after I had fallen into a light sleep on the way back, dreaming about playing baseball again for the first time, for the final time, after all of it, I thought.

I thought that we complain too much.

And don’t get me wrong, I think I do my fair share of complaining. But it’s the vision, the viewpoint that most people apply to life that I worry about.

Many people may have seen that morning – when I struggled to stay awake so much that I drove to an empty parking lot to wake myself up and watched a goose wander aimlessly towards traffic as I sat in my plaid boxers – as an awful start to a soon to be worse day.

The truth is, I wouldn’t have traded it for anything. Not even the squawking goose. I wouldn’t have traded it for a mundane morning, because, quite simply, I don’t want the mundane. I fear the mundane.

I want the opposite of that, even if it means cursing my car for being too small as I contort my 6-foot-1 frame into it to change and a long lost feathered pilot watches me from afar. Nothing about a goose and plaid boxers in a still-standing Marsh parking lot at 8:55 a.m. is mundane.

My fear lies with those closest to me. It lies with my parents, my family, professors and past teachers, mentors and coaches, acquaintances and even strangers sometimes. Sometimes, it lies within myself.

How often do we find happiness?

More than eight hours before, as I sat on the steps of a church below a darkened sky, a friend asked me what my happiest moment was.

It was cliché, of which I’m well aware, but I told him I didn’t have one. I really couldn’t think of the happiest moment that I had ever lived.

Of course, I’ve been happy. The strange thing is, when he posed the question, I immediately thought of a thousand important times in my life, but not necessarily happy ones. I thought of the day I moved into college, as I stood alone in my dorm room for the first time, truly alone and on my own. I thought of my final at-bat in the final season of my final game. I thought of how I struck out, but I also remembered how I smiled, knowing that I had given it my all, and that was enough for me.

My friend waited for me to answer his question on happiness. I took a step between two small bushes and came to a stop. The waning gibbous moon shined above as I pondered the question. I apologized to him, an apology that was, in a way, for both of us. I couldn’t think of my greatest time, only a collection of my richest moments, of happiness and its counterpart.

To me, it’s the collection that matters. It’s the endless picture album of moments in our lives that truly keep us going. It’s the strangest things, the sporadic trips to a donut shop at 1 a.m., the trips to faraway lands to find something others wouldn’t see as special. It’s about finding yourself, tired and lifeless, in a parking lot in the early hours of a Sunday morning, making friends with a squawking goose.

It’s about finding meaning in the meaningless.