“Poor, poor young grandson,” the old woman mused.

The wrinkled skin on her bony hands reminded him of the overcooked chicken wings from last Wednesday’s church buffet. 

“Poor me? Poor you,” he replied. 

The setting was take your pick, as his friend Riley said before moving south on a whim for the Tampa sunshine. Or was it on a lark? Were they the same? 

Doesn’t matter where or when anything happens, Riley said. Go with your gut. You spend more time in your head than you do living your life. Have a decision? Stop, weigh the options, act. Bing, bang, boom. 

He made points as swift as Paul Bunyan chopping down a mighty oak. 

There was a setting, however, much to Riley’s free falling chagrin. The old woman sat with crossed legs on a soft cream blanket atop a grassy hill. The green ran downhill and for miles in every direction. The compass had a field day, he thought, and laughed, spelling out the hardy-har-har. The sun seemed to enjoy having the sky to herself. 

Her yellow blouse fluttered gently in a breeze so light he had to dab a paper towel at the sweat on his forehead. The paper towel had sandwich crumbs on it and they were now on his sticky skin without his knowledge.

The old woman said, “When you close your eyes, don’t ask yourself, ‘What am I missing.’ Do you know why?”

Her bony hands swiftly worked knitting needles through blue yarn. When she held the piece up to check her progress there was no yarn, only the vast sky stretching to a horizon he had to stop inspecting. It never ended. A warmth whirred in the space between his temples.

“That assumes I’m missing something,” he said. “What if I’m not missing anything at all?”

“Indeed,” she said. The gaps between wrinkles in her upturned lips were smooth. 

Slowing down to speed up, Riley came back to him, his voice muffled like a bullhorn at half volume. Asking yourself questions to reach what? An answer to the ultimate question? Yada yada yada. Remember writing the Vanity Fair story? Then taking the freelancing gig? None of that happens if you hem and haw you dilly dallying fool. 

“You’re distracted again,” she said, not actually his grandmother, just the title he’d given her that day. 

“I’m always distracted,” he said, noticing breadcrumbs on his forehead. He wiped them clean and folded the paper towel into a neat square. “But I’m getting better at staying focused.”

“What’s the next question in the flow?” she asked. 

He looked up as he thought. The sun glowed. The breeze blew. His eyes closed. Then opened. “Am I missing something? Yes. Next: What am I missing?”

“And so on and so on, until you reach the answer. Good. Shall we have dessert?”

She pulled the plastic container of cannolis out of his dad’s old camouflage fishing cooler. “I prefer mine without chocolate chips, so I hope you brought your sweet tooth.” 

That this woman didn’t exist, that she was his mind’s attempt at humanizing his idea of intuition, was for another day, another time, another conversation with himself, and perhaps, he thought with a nod and a smile, his readers. 

“Things happen. That’s all they ever do,” one of them said, Riley or the old woman. Perhaps both. After all, at a certain point, it was difficult to say where instinct ended and intuition began. 

“I trust you both,” he said, then, to no one, to himself. “Sometimes.”