Because the underwriter’s wife scraped three long stripes of paint off the side of the car while pulling into a stall next to a concrete pillar in an underground parking garage. Normally she used the van, but had taken the car to return the videos specifically because it was easier to park. She was rueful and the underwriter philosophic and the next day she kept the car so she could take it to the auto body shop for an estimate.

Because the underwriter took the bus.

Before he left the house he filled his pockets with change. To the musical accompaniment of loonies and quarters, he walked the three blocks to the stop. After a not unreasonable wait, the bus came and beached itself against the curb and the underwriter got on, lightening his pockets according to the fare schedule on the box.

Because he made the mistake of taking one of the sideways-facing seats you had to forfeit to the elderly and disabled, which then necessitated that he look at every person boarding to see if they fit this category.

Because, when too many of them looked back into the morning face of the underwriter, he lifted his not-enough-coffee-yet gaze instead to the advertisements running above the heads of the passengers across the aisle. Marsden Business College A Step in the Right Direction Breathe Clear with Claritin Trouble With Your Tax Forms? Help Is on the Way

The underwriter read the poem. He read it for the same reason he read the advertisements.

Because, initially, he thought it was an advertisement, too.

He read it a second time quite differently but found he understood it even less. Intrigued then, he wondered what it, a thing that existed purely for its own sake, not exactly serving the public good, not selling anything either, was even doing on the bus. Did people still write poetry? Evidently. A woman’s name was appended to the poem. Didn’t she feel exposed? Why not just get on the bus naked and ride it all over town?

Because, while the bus trawled its way downtown, the underwriter kept on reading the poem. He read it fifteen times at least, then got off at his stop and walked the four long blocks to his office.

Because, by then, the poem was gone.

He felt the way he might have had his briefcase been open shedding papers along the way, except, of course, he couldn’t retrace his steps and retrieve the poem. Where did these things go? Is there a void that will really never fill despite all the keys and birthdays and glasses and names, even sometimes of his own children, that are dropped in it? Despairing, he happened then to glance up at the building’s towering mirrored sides.

And two lines of the poem came back.

Because he’d just experienced first-hand the transitory nature of memory. Because he was at the age when brain cells die as silently as butterflies in a sudden frost. Because some days he really couldn’t get the names of his own kids straight. He muttered the two lines over and over until he was safely inside and up the elevator and in his own office where he could write them down.

His wife called a few hours later to tell him how much it was going to cost to have the side of the car repainted. They discussed whether to bother going through the insurance company and his wife apologized again for damaging the car. She was an admirable woman in so many ways, but hopeless in this one respect, particularly parallel parking, which sometimes sent her circling a block for a quarter hour in search of a double spot.

After he hung up, the underwriter wished he’d thought to read the salvaged lines of the poem to his wife, but felt too foolish to call her back. Instead he summoned the secretary on the pretext of a dictation. She was new to the office, supplied by a temp agency. The underwriter didn’t know much about her other than she had rings in her face and knit surreptitiously under her desk. Despite the jokes cracked behind in the boardroom’s closed doors, the general consensus in the firm was that knitting cancelled out face jewelry.

The secretary came in and took the seat across from him, cardiganned shoulders hunched against the arctic air conditioning, ready with a pad and pen.

“Falling is not so easy as it looks from the ground.”