BERT

BERT

It's amazing how many thoughts can go through your mind after seeing a face you're sure you think you know, but yet aren't sure enough about it to assign a name to it.

As I stood at the front counter that cold, snowy Monday morning in my White Horse Pike jewelry shop in south Jersey, re-arranging the jewelry I'd been making for the Christmas season that was upon us, the old gal happened in from out of the snow that had been falling since before dawn. She was with a gray-haired, bearded man whom I assumed was her husband. They both shook the snow from their hair and stomped it from their boots as they entered and closed the door behind them.

Her name, I found out a little later, was "Bert". Short, and affectionate, for Alberta. She'll always be Bert, for now on, as far as I'm concerned.

I felt her staring at me for quite a while. Saying nothing. Just staring. I finally looked away from straightening up the several Swarovski crystal and glass necklaces that were askew on the bottom shelf, and looked up at her and the man standing next to her, and smiled.

"Can I help ya's with somethin'?", I said.

"You have a heart there with a lot of deep and strikingly contradicting colors", she said, looking at me through eye-glasses whose lenses were shaped like miniature stop signs. "It's there...on the top shelf, between the black and blue pendant necklaces. I'd like to see it, and try it on, if I may?", she said.

"Sure!", I said.

As I fished the necklace off the top shelf, I intermittently looked up at her. I knew I knew her. Her face was burned into my memory for some reason, but I simply couldn't assign a name to it. The pure white wavy hair. Those hexagonally shaped eyeglasses. The way her eyelids sloped gently over the corners of her eyes. Her parsed lips and dimpled double chin. There was a strong, self-assured look in those eyes, yet a vulnerability that made you want to somehow protect her, if such a need ever arose. Where, in God's name, had I seen her before, I wondered.

Taking the necklace from my hands without taking her eyes from mine, she put it around her neck.

"Oh, that looks so good on you," I said. "It really fits you and your eyes".

It was one of my favorite creations. Four layers of antique glass, fused into one piece through a very high-temperature firing process in my kiln, resulted in a beautiful piece of glass that was deep-based in cobalt blue, yet had veins and highlights of golds, silvers, and greens that seemed to swim through it. The four layers gave it a very deep, three-dimensional look, and bordered, I thought, on being singularly magnificent and very intense. Grinding it into a heart shape and fire polishing it, again in my kiln at very high temperatures, resulted in something uniquely spectacular. Like all my Pine Barrens Diamonds hearts, it was one-of-a-kind.

It had taken me many months and a lot of wasted 'experiments' until I finally perfected the art of hand-grinding pieces of glass into heart-shaped pendants. The pieces of glass were remnants from old glassworks factories that used to dot the 18th and 19th century Pine Barrens region of south Jersey. Glass had been made in south Jersey from as far back as 1739, when Casper Wistar opened the first glassworks in the colonies in Salem County's Allowaystown. Through a lot of research and digging, I began finding discarded pieces of glass...slag, as it's sometimes called...all through the Pine Barrens area. After several years of classes and seminars on jewelry making, I was off and running with my new jewelry business, calling it Pine Barrens Diamonds.

"It looks so perfect on me, because it's your heart...", she said, and suddenly looked towards the floor, ready to cry. The man next to her put his arm around her and drew her close to him.

I was a little startled and confused at the goings-on in front of me.

"Uhhh, well...I hope that means you like it?", I said.

I tried to fake a laugh, but I was truly wondering what had melted this seemingly strong and stout woman in front of me into a sobbing mess.

She composed herself after a moment, just looking at me, while all the time lightly stroking the glass heart that hung around her neck between her fingers. Then she spoke.

"My name is Alberta Simberly. My friends call me Bert. I hope you will call me that!".

"Well, of course I will! My name is Paul, but my friends call me Paul!".

We laughed for a moment, and it seemed to relax the tension that had been building.

Bert then held the heart firmly in her hand, and said to me,

"We've met before. Not like this, but we've met before. Quite a while ago".

My mind was racing. I knew I knew her, but I just couldn't place her. A nightclub gig? A teacher? A secretary at an old job somewhere? A friend of my parents?

Almost whispering, she said, "Do you remember the day you were driving on Bustleton Pike, north of Buck Tavern, about twenty years ago? You were driving a dump truck tractor trailer, and just ready to cross over some railroad tracks that lie just past Sal's deli...".

I felt my jaw drop, and I just stood there, dumbfounded. I did remember. That day...and now, her face...flooded back into my memory like a tidal wave. It was a day I'll never forget, though I've tried and tried to, ever since it happened. Nobody wants to remember nearly being killed, or nearly killing someone else.

It was a hot July afternoon that day in the Delaware Valley. At the time, I was working as a truck driver for a company that operated a fleet of dump trucks and tandem dump trucks (tractor-trailer dumps) that serviced the many cement and asphalt companies in and around the Philadelphia region. Though southeastern PA and southern NJ are separated only by a relatively minute ribbon of water known as the Delaware River, their geo-mineral make-ups are as different as night and day. South Jersey is a virtual sand bar compared to the mountainous, rocky terrain of S.E. PA's Bucks County. The Jersey asphalt plants need the PA argillite rock to make their asphalt, and the PA concrete and cement plants need the Jersey sand to make their concrete and cement. It makes for quite a lucrative scenario for a company that owns and operates a fleet of dump trucks, servicing the trade-offs as many times in a day that their drivers are willing...and physically and legally able to perform.

I was on my way to Better Material's Penns Park, PA quarry, an argillite rock mine I went to every day after I delivered a load of New Jersey sand to one of several concrete manufacturers. There, I'd pick up Pennsylvania rock, known as argillite, and take it back to one of several NJ asphalt plants we serviced.

I was approaching some old, abandoned railroad tracks that ran across Bustleton Pike, PA State route 532, up in mid-Bucks County. Suddenly, a car pulled out of a side street on the other side of the tracks. Initially blinded by the sun that was behind the truck as she pulled out, the driver just froze and jammed on the brakes, and stopped in the middle of Bustleton Pike, as she finally saw me, mere yards away...and the twenty-two tons of truck I was driving...baring down on her.

I nearly put my foot through the firewall of that R-model Mack one-stacker, pressing on the airbrake and trying to drop gears, but it was no use. I was going to T-bone that car with all 44,000 lbs. I was driving, rolling along at 45 mph!

At the last moment, I swerved to the right, and ran off the road and into a ditch, and finally stopped. The truck was nearly turned all the way over on its side and looked like some kind of twisted and broken gray and silver, black-footed dinosaur laying there. Traffic was backed up for miles in both directions, and later backed up into Philly, as a wrecker arrived and finally righted and hauled away my wounded truck.

Incredibly, I walked away without a scratch. The driver of the car, a woman, left the scene of the wreck before anyone else arrived. Her face, though, frozen in fear at what almost happened to her, was burned in my memory forever. Over the years, I have seen it again and again in my mind's eyes, locked forever in that stark fear of impending, torturous death, peering at me through the side window of her car. I missed it by a red whisker just before running into the ditch.

I'd wondered about her and kept re-seeing that locked-in-fear face for a long time after the wreck. I wondered if she ever really knew how close she came to being smeared into oblivion under 44,000 lbs. of steel and aluminum.

That face, burned into my memory some twenty years ago, was Bert's face.

"Oh, my good God!", I shouted. "THAT was YOU?"

"Yes. That was me. You saved my life that day, Paul. I was in the wrong, and, unselfishly, you saved my life, and, in doing so, nearly ended your own...."

She started crying for a moment, composed herself again, and then continued.

"I'm going to die this Saturday night, on Christmas Eve, Paul. Quite unexpectedly, it turns out, though not quite as dramatically as I would have...or should have...had you not been so unselfish, all those years back".

I was stunned and perplexed at what she said. I looked at the man standing next to her for some clarity, but he was beginning to tear up and was looking at the floor.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, here. Hold the phone, here", I said. "Whattaya mean, you're going to die Saturday...? I don't understand... How do you know you're going to die? How'd you know where to find me after all this time? What's going on here...?"

She put her index finger up to her lips to 'shush' me. "Please! Let me continue", she said. She took a breath and sighed. "Yes. A cerebral hemorrhage is what they'll call it".

The man took a handkerchief from his back pocket and tried to cough back his gathering tears, as Bert gently began to rub her hand up and down his back and continued.

"Every night now, for twenty years, I've been praying and asking the Good Lord to give me the chance, somehow, to meet you in person before I died, and to thank you and apologize to you. Last night, He came to me and foretold the event, shall we say, that is going to happen to me Saturday evening, and granted my prayer, leading me here to you today, so I could thank you, and apologize for leaving the scene of the accident that day, without even knowing if you lived or died. Now, today, He has granted my one last unanswered prayer."

The man handed Bert his handkerchief, and she wiped her eyes, and continued,

"Now, I want to buy this heart...YOUR heart...a heart that has so many complex hues and colors and depths...so that when I'm laid to my rest, I know I'll spend the rest of eternity with it...with YOU... touching MY heart. You gave me twenty years I shouldn't have had with my family. Twenty years to get to know and love and share with my eighteen grandchildren. You gave me twenty-five percent of my life".

Bert handed me the necklace after she took it off, asking me to please put it into a box, and started reaching into her pocketbook for her wallet. I was still in a state of shock, trying to comprehend all that had just transpired in front of me. After all these years, it just seemed so incredible that she'd found me, indeed, that she'd even been looking for me, and praying to meet again. And now, knowing she was going to die in a few days, she finally did find me....It all just seemed too much to digest, especially the part about her knowing she was going to die of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Why wasn't Bert in the hospital? Who diagnosed a cerebral hemorrhage, and why weren't they addressing the life-threatening condition in an operating room somewhere? And who was this dopey man standing next to her, listening to all this, and seeing her crying and so upset without saying a word? Seemingly, he was letting this whole tragedy take place without any intervention whatsoever. What kind of a husband was he?

I was really riled up and ready to burst when Bert put $75.00 cash on the counter.

"I don't want that, Bert. I want you to have...", I stuttered.

"I insist!" she interrupted, looking over her glasses with a stare stern enough that it could stop a clock. She was paying for it and there'd be no arguments. That was final.

I was still fumbling around with a thousand questions and things to say in my head when Bert took the box with the necklace in it and gently eased it into her purse. She looked deeply into my eyes and said in a whisper,

"Thank you again, Paul, and goodbye".

I just stood there, not being able to say a word, but wanting to say so many. The man guided her to the door, and they walked out and turned right, toward the parking lot. It was still snowing to beat the band. I turned around to watch them from the window behind me that looks out into the lot, but to my astonishment, I saw only Bert getting into her car.

Where had the man gone?

I quickly went to the door and opened it, looking in both directions up and down the sidewalk that runs along the White Horse Pike. He was nowhere to be seen anywhere on or across the Pike. What was more, there was only one set of footprints in the snow in front of the store. They turned to the right, towards the parking lot. I ran around to the parking lot. He wasn't there, and Bert's car was the only car in the lot. There were no other tire tracks in the snow.

It was like he never existed, or simply vanished into thin air.

I looked at Bert as she was backing away in her car, alone. She saw me, paused, and smiled at me in a very calming, knowing, and peaceful smile. She put the car in drive, and carefully pulled out of the parking lot and onto the Pike, her taillights fading, then vanishing silently in the storm. It was the last time I ever saw her.

Bert's was the only necklace that I sold that day and, for that matter, the only thing I sold all week. I stayed open, though, through Friday evening, re-hashing, and re-thinking everything that had happened that snowy Monday morning. I closed Saturday and Sunday for Christmas.

And for Bert.