I have to change my downward moving life before there's nothing left worth changing, Boyd thought, then whispered the words to himself and to the ten other people standing near him as he was caught in mid-morning downtown errands, waiting along with the other pedestrians for the traffic light to change at one of the city's busiest intersections. Boyd had been thinking about changing his life a great deal lately, his usual unease and dissatisfaction with his work seeming even stronger this morning, and somehow the traffic light seemed to symbolize the change that he was contemplating, specifically, whether he should retire early from his job in the Motor Vehicles Department.
Boyd told himself that at fifty-seven he hoped to have at least twenty or twenty-five years ahead of him to enjoy life, not that he was very good at enjoying life, when he sees across the street the woman he had met at a nearby downtown bar last night, she looking different in the morning light, but who doesn't, he tells himself. For a few minutes, at least, he had thought he was falling in love with the woman, even imagined that he might marry again, perhaps third time lucky, he had smiled to himself, so taken was he by the way she looked and her fresh-faced, charming smile, but they had gotten into an argument over the difference between having a mid-life crisis and a spiritual crisis. He told her he was having a spiritual crisis but she insisted it was a typical male mid-life crisis, and that was why he was trying to impress a woman half his age at a bar. He resisted asking her age, not eager to determine if she was indeed half his age, or even more disconcerting, if she was younger than his twenty-nine-year-old daughter from his first marriage. She was definitely older than his twenty-one-year-old son from his second marriage, but what was the point of worrying about age, when it was mortality and human emotions that were the real concerns when two people meet, regardless of the setting. He told her he wasn't trying to impress her at all, that he liked to think about and discuss the theological, even in downtown bars. Stupidly, he had asked her if drinking to excess on a Friday night would jeopardize her chances of getting into Heaven, and she, her smile dissolving, said she'd prefer to go anywhere as long the conversations weren't boring and insipid. He congratulated her on using the word insipid, which he considered an impressively descriptive word, and then she added that Heaven, if it existed, was insipid. He argued that Hell would be much more insipid, and she moved to a different bar stool, offering her fresh-faced, charming smile to another stranger.
Amidst his thoughts of last night and of the theological, Boyd wondering what is taking the traffic light so long to change, he hears a sad-faced stutterer nearby reveal to a woman who reminds him of his second wife, a younger version though, that all he desires from life is a reflection of freedom, a single smile slightly tarnished, the memory of the reflection, the re-creation of that smile, as if he is attempting to conquer his stuttering by attempting to defeat someone in bewildered debate. After the woman steps away from the man, his stuttering fierce as abandonment, he says loud enough for everyone waiting for the traffic light to change to hear, “I thank the Lord that I am not God.”
Boyd moves closer to the curb, prepared to cross the street even if the traffic light doesn't change, seeing that the woman he had met at a nearby downtown bar last night has turned around and walked off in the other direction, but his thoughts of the woman and last night are quickly supplanted by his thoughts of the stutterer, thinking how foolish and ludicrous what the man had just said — I thank the Lord that I am not God — even concluding the stutterer must be having some sort of mental breakdown, well beyond a mid-life or spiritual crisis, just as a small car comes speeding around the corner, the driver sounding his loud horn, and the waiting-to-cross pedestrians break into inarticulateness. Boyd wants to hurl something, well-formed words or a childhood toy, toward the traffic light and the speeding car and even the now distant woman from last night, closing his eyes and seeing what he wanted for longer than he could speak. He would stop waiting for his life to change and make that change, first thing Monday morning.