Somebody screwed slats of wood onto a metal frame, bolted it to a concrete slab, and now people sit there and cry.
I sat on one this morning because my knees are not what they were and I needed the coffee. Green paint, peeling at the armrest where a thousand hands have worried it smooth. A small brass plaque: In memory of Walter, who loved this view. The view is a duck pond and a parking lot.
Here is the part I keep turning over. Walter is gone, and his people did not build a monument or carve a mountain. They bought a place for strangers to rest their legs. That is the whole gesture. Sit down. Look at the ducks. Somebody loved it here.
I have seen the planet with nobody on it. From orbit you cannot pick out a single human being, or a house, or a bench. You cannot see the borders anybody died over. The whole living skin of the place, every forest and lung and Walter, breathes through a shell of air thinner than the peel on an apple. That is not a feeling. That is the instrument reading.
A man came and sat at the far end of my bench without a word, the way you can only do with a stranger, and we watched the ducks together for a while. Two specks the camera would never catch, parked on a plank, keeping each other company against all that black.
I did not say anything to him. But I made sure, when I left, to leave him the good end.
The one with the view Walter loved.