Still Wearing One Shoe
It was Friday evening, and I was in the hall with my coat on and one shoe tied, on my way to meet a friend I've had since we were eleven. Once a month we eat at the fish place down on the sea front and talk about nothing in particular.
Then my phone buzzed in my coat pocket. It was my friend. "So sorry, stuck at work. Next week instead?"
I wrote back "Of course, next week," and I meant it. I've sent that exact message myself, from the same kind of desk.
So far, so kind. Then I did something odd. Standing there in the hall, I wrote to three other people to see if anyone was free. One of them was a man I used to work with and hadn't seen since the spring. While I waited, I looked up the menu of a tapas bar near his flat. I don't even like tapas. I was comparing two kinds of small potato I didn't want.
The man I used to work with answered first. "Maybe. Half eight?" I started typing yes.
That was when I noticed I was still wearing one shoe. It was twenty past six. Nothing had happened to the evening. Every hour of it was still there. My friend had moved a dinner, that was all, and I'd spent twenty minutes trying to save a Friday that wasn't in any trouble.
I stood in the hall and asked myself why, and the answer came quicker than I liked. On Monday somebody at work would ask what I did at the weekend, and "nothing much" sounds like something that needs explaining. I wasn't filling the evening for me. I was filling it for Monday.
So I didn't send the yes. I wrote back, "Not tonight after all, but soon," and I meant that too. Then I tied the other shoe and went out with nowhere to be.
I walked down to the front anyway, past the fish place where my friend and I would have been sitting, and bought chips from the hatch next door. I ate them on the sea wall while the sun went down without any help from me. A dog came and looked at the chips with great seriousness. He got one.
Sitting on the wall, I worked out what had happened in the hall. I'd held the plan so tight that when it fell through, I thought the evening had gone with it. It hadn't. When a plan falls through, you don't have to replace it. What's left is still an evening.
It wasn't better than dinner with my friend. It didn't have to be. I was home by nine and asleep by ten, smelling a bit of vinegar.
Next time a plan falls through, send the kind reply and stop there. Don't send the messages that try to fill the gap. Put the phone down, tie the other shoe or take off the first one, and see what turns up.
My friend and I had the fish the next Friday. Over pudding he asked what I'd ended up doing that night. "Nothing much," I said, and for once it didn't need explaining.