Sampson and Delilah

Sampson’s feet pound the pavement of his usual path. He likes to run, no really, he actually enjoys it. He isn’t the type of runner who sets goals and keeps timing and pacing records in an app, you know runner-runners. He’s the type of runner that does it because it feels good. It’s the same reason he goes on long walks with his camera, long walks through art galleries, long walks through parts of town he hasn’t been to in a while - long walks through the corners of his imagination.

He wanders. It’s his nature. He’s a piddler, a collector of the beauty that lies right before us in the everyday, but we neglect to notice because we’re too busy with distractions of expectation. He likes to take off from his stoop and jaunt about his local geography with only one goal in mind: doing what feels good and enjoying the beauty hidden in plain sight. It doesn’t matter that he’s lived in this mid-size, mid-western city for several years or that he has run these streets ad nauseam; there’s always something different for him to discover. That’s the point of doing anything, the thrill of it all, right? The point of existence: Do what feels good and doesn’t screw you or the world over.

Sampson’s feet piddle in a rhythmic run on the familiar pavement. He takes the left turn onto the sidewalk that opens up to the street in his neighborhood with all of the entertainment: shops, galleries, bars, restaurants, coffee spots, etc. As he rounds the city planters full of red yuccas and outlines the curve of the sidewalk, a flutter of sparrows takes off flying from the cement unfolding before him. The mob of birds stopped his rhythm and replaced it with gratitude and awe.

He took this moment to pause, catch his breath, and use his magical sight to find the eccentricities of the street traffic and city day life. As soon as his gaze crosses the street, it locks on this woman sitting with a younger girl on the patio of the coffee shop - his coffee shop. He felt like he was going to throw up. Not from disgust, but excitement. The excitement was unknown, magnetic. He crosses the street, gets closer, listens in for a moment. Then he runs away in an emotional stupor of sorts as he tries to re-sync the rhythm of his heart, his feet, and the earth beneath him.

Sampson Fitzgerald embodied the archetype of the ugly-duckling in his youth. His face full of acne, gawky stature, and so called “nerdy” interests left him, not unpopular, but also never really fitting in. By the time he hit his second semester of college things changed for him. Our ugly duckling began transforming into the swan he would one day become.

Along with his transformation comes a new sense of confidence, and a bit of a “player” mentality, as the kids say. This is understandable because of the lack of physical validation his ugly-duckling status received in high school. By junior year of college, he stepped into his body. It is tall, lean, built like a swimmer with a chiseled inverted triangle torso. He finally stopped trying to tame his hair and let it do what it wants, which translates to it always having this fresh beach wave tousle to it.

As he continues through college and then into life, he becomes more educated, cultured, and the niche bits of knowledge he’s always been into create opportunities and benefits for him. This is of significance because Sampson’s adolescent, ugly-duckling status now gives him the two-fold benefit of being incredibly handsome and having a dynamic personality.

He's great to have on your trivia team, compassionate, funny. And, all of these traits stem from the necessity to develop a dynamic personality; because when he was forming his identity (aka, high school), he was the ugly-duckling, the forever friendzone dude, the guy that was cool to hangout with, but considered an outsider. He learned the rules of the world while in this formative, adolescent stage: Life is sink or swim.

And, since he wasn’t the good looking dude or the rich dude or the mysterious dude or the rebel or the jock or the brain or the artist, he was always floating somewhere in the middle. He was soaking up the personalities around him like a sponge, learning what makes people tick. Because of this, he was able to navigate people like a knife through butter. His ability to work a crowd made him quite infamous among his college coeds and, later, the women of his mid-western city.

But, he never found the ability or desire to stay with one of them for more than three months. It became a joke amongst his college friends, they knew when to start the Countdown to Heartbreak. The heartbreak always coming from the ladies, never from Sampson because he never fully put his heart into them.

He was with one of his college friends, about two weeks or so after his run, when he ran into the mystery woman for a second time. The friend he was with, Clara, is actually his best friend. They met in college because they happen to share the same birthday. They were grouped in the “Birthday Month Game” during a mandatory dorm relationship building activity freshman year. Now that they are approaching their 30th birthdays, their friendship has rendered them more like siblings.

Clara is an artisan and likes to network using vendor booths at various pop-up shops and arts festivals around the city. Sampson is there anytime he can be to help schlep goods and drum up customers when the days are hot and the crowds are disengaged, again his winning ugly-duckling combo coming in handy. He doesn’t work for Clara, he actually works with her wife, Martha. Sampson and Martha have become independently wealthy with their nonprofit that creates meaningful mentor programs for public schools.

He just likes to help with the booth because it’s Clara, and because piddlin’ is in his nature. Being a piddler is why he is involved in so many programs and leagues and groups across the city and what has led to his reputation as the man-about-town. He’s talented and quirky and chased, but he never gets caught for long and his ex-flings never have a bad thing to say about the guy.

They’re at a yearly festival celebrating the neighborhood Clara and Samson live in; he is again helping Clara run her booth. It’s a particularly sweltering Saturday in September and after lunch Sampson decides to get a couple beers from a local brewer/vendor to provide some reprieve from the heat.

As he walks along the shaded sidewalk to the beer stand, a robin lands on the path in front of him. He stops accordingly and greets the little bird. When the salutation ends, the robin lifts off and Sampson’s eyes follow its path from the concrete to the clouds. Sampson smiles and looks back in front of him and sees her; the mystery woman lands right there on the path in front of him. Technically she is at the end of the block, but she is still right there - on his path.

She is surrounded by stereotypically beautiful women, the kind Sampson’s been with a million times before, but she stands out amongst the prototypical pretty. The mystery woman is certainly gorgeous, but it’s more than that. There’s something more. A horn honks and someone yells in the street to Sampson’s right – distracting him from his tunneled vision – when he looks back to see her again, she’s gone. It’s as if she vanished into thin air.

He gets the beers and goes back to Clara’s booth. He is lost in thought, in questions about this mystery woman. Is she even real? Clara pops in with a “Hey there, friend. You with us?” Sampson explains what happened on his run and what just transpired on the sidewalk. In all their years of friendship Clara has never heard Sampson talk like this and she wants to help him identify the mystery woman as much as he does. But, he struggles.

He can’t describe her in a way that creates any kind of marker for Clara to distinguish who she might be. All he can give her is a list of the ways the mystery woman makes him feel: like his “insides are going to erupt from delight.” Clara has also never heard Sampson use the word delight before, so she knows shit is serious.

A few weeks later he is on another run, they have become more frequent as of late because they are a coping mechanism, a way for Sampson to process anything that might be perplexing him. And, at the moment, his obsession with trying to discover who this mystery woman is has complete hold over his psyche.

He continues seeing swallows and robins and thinking that if he follows their flight path, his eyes will land on her. He maps out what he would say to her in his mind over and over, but the conversation doesn’t happen. She is nowhere to be found. Sampson begins to consider if he is going insane. He often finds himself questioning the reality of those experiences and that human.

A month goes by and no sightings of the mystery woman. The obsessive thoughts have all but subsided and Sampson almost completely forgets about her. One night he is with Clara and Martha seeing their buddies play in a cover band they recently started called The Bardyurds. What started as a giant ironic joke (after a night of heavy drinking) became a weekly way for The Bardyurds to make some good tips while Sampson and the rest of the gang dance and sing and cheer them on.

This particular Friday night, the place where they play is packed and Sampson struggles a bit to navigate the crowd as he returns to their table from the bar. He gets stuck behind a group of girls who are whooping and hollering about the fact that they haven’t seen each other since senior year of college. His hands are too full with drink orders to try navigating the obstacle course that is drunk-women-reuniting-unexpectedly. He is more than happy to patiently wait out the flailing hugs and squeals of excitement. He looks to his right while pausing at the traffic jam and there she is, across the crowded bar, exactly in his path of sight.

She’s alone. He’s never seen her in public alone. He has this urge to run to her, but he’s got a human blockade surrounding him and two handfuls of orders for the table preventing any sort of gesture. He tries keeping track of her as he gently navigates the crowd to his table where he finally arrives and promptly: drops the drinks off, says nothing, turns around, dives back into the sea of strangers. He didn’t see her again that night. The obsession was back.

A few weeks after the bar incident and he’s become what he termed as “a little fucked up in the head about her/it/what this all means.” He sees her again while he’s running, she pauses in front of him at the street light, her windows are down and her sunroof is open. She’s blaring Nina Simone as she taps her fingers and seductively smiles to the beat.

He halts. He feels like he is going to puke. It's just like the first time he saw her, but this time the sensation gains intensity as the red light wanes. He can’t make his feet move or take a deep breath. He gets light headed and then… The next thing he knows he’s propped up by his coffee shop building as the clerk tries to hand him a glass of water. He knows he didn’t pass out from overexerting himself on the run, or the heat. He passed out from her. As Sampson sat there, collecting his thoughts, a little cardinal hopped up to him, gave him a double take, and flew off.

Thoughts of the mystery woman plague Sampson’s waking life. Luckily, he gains reprieve from an unexpected trip offered up by an old friend. Upon his return from this break in existence, he feels refreshed, rebalanced, like he can piddle again. He meets Clara and the crew that weekend for another jam session at the bar with The Bardyurds. The show was great, the sound was great, the company was great, and Sampson was feeling damn good. It’s closing time and he forgot his jacket inside, so he runs back to grab it as Clara and the gang wait outside to get a cab.

He comes out of the stairwell and there she is, the mystery woman, standing at the bar with a friend. His eyes lock on her. He doesn’t feel his body move, but the next thing he knows he’s floating toward her. Her existence pulls him in like a tractor beam. Next thing he knows he’s talking to her, and the next thing he knows he’s responding to the calls of his friends from the door of the bar, and the next thing he knows he’s walking away from her and into a Canary Cab big enough to fit six adults.

That’s all he can recall from the interaction. He has no details about what he said, what she said, what her name is, nothing other than: “Excuse me, sorry to interrupt, but… They’re yelling for me, I have to go, nice to officially meet you.” That’s it. That’s all he can recall.

Two months of repetitive thoughts and queries into what the conversation would’ve been like (was like) later, and he sees her while on another run. She sits on the patio of the Scissortail Cafe, a vegetarian restaurant he frequents, with a table of people he recognizes but doesn't know. She sees him too. She waves to him and flashes that smile.

He responds by sprinting away in the opposite direction as fast as possible. He has no clue why. He, later, wrecks his mind and self with questions about this reaction.

It was like the experience from the bar, but in reverse. The out-of-body-like experience that floated him toward her before, catapulted him from her now. He was afraid it was the ugly-duckling inside of him that made him fly away. He felt like he missed his opportunity, his chance.

He spent several weeks carrying this imagined burden of defeat. Then he decided to have a chat with this ugly-duckling inside. Sampson mindfully loved it and affirmed it and validated it and watched it finish its transformation into the swan. Several months go by, he isn’t sure how many because he was deep in his self-care practice. An unusually warm, winter day he feels the need to shake things up - go for a piddle - and decides to take a walk in a neighborhood adjacent to his, one experiencing a recent revival of sorts.

He has a mentor program in the area and noticed the changes during a site visit a few weeks prior. As he wanders with his joy and instinct and swan status, he notices how “that much more badass” everything around him is: the sky, the earth, the graffiti, the murals, the flowers, the cars, the families, the… Barn Owl Oddities and Apothecary? The sign catches his eye as he moseys along the sidewalk. Sampson can’t help but follow the noble bird, so he crosses the street and walks through the shop doors.

Bells chime as his eyes adjust to the change in lighting. He blinks and pauses, settling into these new surroundings as his vision fades from light to dark and then dark to light. He instinctually modifies his stance and tilts his gaze up from the WELCOME rug beneath his feet to the counter and clerk placed on the path before him.

“It’s about damn time.”

He is frozen, paused, in this moment of time as he realizes who is responsible for the velvet voice speaking to him, his mystery woman. He doesn’t question her welcome statement, instead he asks, “What’s your name?” She smiles and says, “Delilah.”

He looks her in the eyes and tells her “Good thing I have a ‘P’ in my name. Do you like my hair?” They erupt in laughter and he knows. That’s it. That’s all he can recall, just laughing and knowing and loving the moment.