Just across the grocery store, Jack’s eyes greeted the green grass of the central park. The old man slowly wandered toward it, weaving his way through the bricked paths carved through the grass bed. As the afternoon was bidding its farewell, Jack eyed his favorite bench. A young girl with a small puppy on her leash sat over there, head buried in some novel with a purple cover.
Jack took the bench facing his favorite bench, bench 104. Several visitors of the park donated benches to it. As he sat there, he sipped from his water bottle. He placed his grocery bed and closed his eyes, reminiscing Allie’s blond curls and the way the sunlight hit them to add shine to her voluminous hair. He recollected her laugh in his mind and the way it echoed in the park along with the screams of young children playing nearby and the chattering birds, eager to head home as the night fell.
A sad smile made its way to Jack’s thin lips. You had to leave me, isn’t it? he wondered to himself. A rhetorical question that he always fired at Allie in his mind. He remembered how the headstrong woman enjoyed even the smallest moments of her life, how all things strange piqued her curiosity. For instance, the secrets of stars attracted her and the nightingale’s sad tune made her question the universe.
As the young girl on Bench 104 left, the inscription on it stared at Jack. It read, “Allie loved all things strange.” The woman at the store had refreshed Allie’s memory in Jack’s mind. She never left Jack’s mind, as the woman’s disoriented expressions and shaking hands reminded Jack of his wife, Allie’s early stages of dementia.
That was how he recognized what was happening with her. And that was also how he realized that the horrible mental disorder would consume the woman just as it had killed his wife in whose memories he had donated Bench 104, ‘Allie loved all things strange’ to the central park.
