The apartment I rent looks out, from the kitchen window, onto a residential street that runs east-west through the middle of the town. The street is moderately quiet. There is a small steady stream of foot traffic in the morning and a similar stream in the late afternoon, with very little in between. I drink my coffee at the kitchen window most mornings, between roughly seven thirty and eight fifteen, depending on what time I have to be at the library.
For approximately four of the five years I have lived here, an older man has walked his dog past my window at 7:42 every morning. The man is, by my best estimate, somewhere in his late sixties. The dog is a medium-sized brown mixed breed of indeterminate parentage. The walk goes in the same direction every day — west, away from the river — and the man and the dog return, on the same route, approximately twenty-eight minutes later. I have timed this without meaning to.
The wave
The first time I waved at the man was an accident. I had been standing at the window with my coffee, looking out, and he happened to look up at the apartment as he passed, and I waved before I had thought about whether to wave. He waved back. It became, after that, a slightly self-conscious habit, and then over the months it became unselfconscious, and now it is simply a thing that happens at 7:42 most mornings of the week.
I estimate, conservatively, that we have exchanged the wave approximately forty times. The estimate is conservative because the wave does not happen every day. It happens on days when I am at the window at the right time and when he happens to look up. Some days I am running late. Some days he is looking at the dog. Some days the angle does not work. The wave is, in practice, an inconsistent thing, which I think is part of why it has worked for as long as it has.
We have never spoken. I do not know his name. I do not know the dog's name. I do not know where on the block he lives or whether he lives on the block at all. The relationship — and I will keep using the word relationship while acknowledging that it is barely the right word — exists entirely within the four-second window of the wave.
Why I have not gone outside to introduce myself
I have thought, several times, about going downstairs and introducing myself. The thought has come to nothing every time. I think the reason is that I do not actually want to know his name. The relationship as it stands is exactly the right size. Introducing myself would convert it into a different kind of relationship — one with names, one with the small obligation to ask after each other on subsequent days, one in which the silence of the wave would start to feel like an inadequate substitute for actual conversation.
The wave is sufficient. The wave does the work I need it to do, which is the work of acknowledging that another person and I both exist in this neighborhood at the same time and have both, for some years now, been aware of each other's existence. That is what I want from the man with the dog. I do not want more from him and I think he does not want more from me, and so the wave continues, four seconds at a time, approximately forty times a year, for what is now the better part of four years.
The category of relationship I do not have a name for
I have mentioned in another entry that I do not have a name for the category of people in my life who fall into this kind of relationship. The man with the dog is the clearest example of the category but he is not the only one. There is the woman who runs the consignment shop and who waves at me through the window when I walk by, with whom I have actually had several real conversations but with whom the day-to-day relationship is mostly the window wave. There is the school crossing guard near the elementary school who knows me by sight and nods. There is the bartender at the place I do not actually go to very often but where I am evidently a recognizable face.
None of these are friendships and all of them are, I think, an important kind of glue. They are evidence that you are in a place, and that the place has taken some account of you, and that you have taken some account of it. I think most people who have lived in one place for any length of time accumulate a small set of these relationships without naming them. I think they constitute most of what people mean when they say they feel at home somewhere.
The day the wave did not happen
Last fall, there was a stretch of about three weeks when the man and the dog did not pass my window. The first day I noticed but did not think much of it. By the third day I had started to worry. By the second week I was anxious in a small but persistent way. I did not know how to address this anxiety. I could not call anyone because I did not know anyone to call. I could not go looking for him because I did not know where to look. I had to simply wait and see whether the wave resumed.
It did resume. After about three weeks the man and the dog reappeared, on the same route, at very close to the same time. The dog looked the same. The man looked slightly different — slightly more carefully dressed, perhaps slightly thinner — but he was the same man and the wave happened again and I felt a relief I had not entirely expected.
I do not know what the three weeks were. He might have been sick. The dog might have been sick. He might have been traveling. I am never going to know. The relationship is not, structurally, the kind of relationship that includes that information.
What the wave has come to feel like
The wave, four years in, has come to feel like one of the small daily anchors of my morning. The radiator ticking at 6:14. The kettle starting. The first sip of coffee. The man and the dog at 7:42. The light changing in the kitchen as the sun gets above the building across the street.
The anchors are not very ambitious. They are not very interesting to describe. They are not, individually, doing very much. In aggregate they are doing a great deal — they are constituting the texture of a morning in a place I have come to know, in a building I have come to know, in a town I have come to know, in a country that is otherwise large and impersonal and increasingly hard to feel located inside.
The wave will probably continue for some indefinite time and will eventually stop, because the man is older than me and because dogs are mortal and because nothing of this kind continues forever. I am trying to enjoy it while it is happening. I am also trying not to make too much of it. The man is just a man walking his dog. I am just a woman drinking coffee at a window. Four times a week, give or take, we wave. That is what is happening on this block this year and I do not want anything more from it than what it is.
