Across the street, by the sea-wall, an old woman paces back and forth. With one hand she skims the waist-high wall for balance, her palm gliding over chalky concrete. Her other hand grips a black walking stick. She scoots down the entire length of sea-wall, pausing only where tangled brush swallows jutting rock; turns, scoots back the way she came. And repeats. She wears black sneakers and a baggy grey jumpsuit that ripples subtly in the wind, loose fabric rustling in little leaps as if invisible sparrows are pecking at her clothes and trying to lift her into the air.

I’m pacing along the same sea-wall but probably for different reasons. She does it, I think, for exercise, maintenance purposes. A daily ritual to keep the blood moving. Maybe pacing soothes the pain in her knees. I wonder if she gets anxious during all those pacing-hours, fearful of squandering too much time by the ocean. Does she feel like she’s pacing toward death? Does she drift into wistful sky-blue memories, or think burrowing black thoughts of how she should be using her scarce time to do other things, nostalgic and artful things, anything other than pacing the sea-wall?

Anyway, she is pacing perhaps to feel less old or more alive, and I’m pacing to be efficient. I walk with my shirt off and a book in my hand, triple-tasking — getting smarter, getting browner, getting thinner. I figure I’m saving time that way, reading and walking and tanning at the same time.  I go out to the sea-wall and become a brownish smear of efficiency.

Another boon of the path out there by the sea-wall is the view. A good view is important to deep reading. Every once in a while a sentence will crunch your chest so hard that you need to stop reading and think, to set aside a few moments for the sake of recoil and mental health. You look up from the page and let the threads of your scattered emotions knot themselves around the qualities of your view. A good gaze will ground your thoughts, allow some poignant clumps to take shape in your brain. That’s what I think.

I look up from the page and peer over the sea-wall, letting my vague sentiments congeal themselves around the substance of my view. My thoughts excavate the clammy mud and emerge from the seashore oily with mineral richness; they zip out toward the bay, dance on the surface of the water with the sun rays, ping upwards with a surge of Vitamin D; they hydrate in the low-hanging clouds, snatching water molecules as they shimmer in gaseous form amidst the San Francisco fog. With the help of my view by the sea-wall, thoughts congregate around bickering seagulls, pelicans looming like bomber squadrons, gangs of roguish crows. That way, reflections dig deeper, fly quicker, become more likely to thicken into something round and rich and enduring. That way, too, I am saving time.  I mustn’t waste the minutes thinking loosely. Haphazard thoughts are indulgent, distracting. Wasted time.

So, a good view is essential. A real time-saver.

Maybe she’s there for the view, too. Perhaps she’s also trying to save time, think with real clarity and glue, collect her thoughts into some deep bedrock-type final reflections.  I wonder if she tries to avoid haphazard thoughts like I do, fastening her gaze to some grounding point above the sea-wall, focusing real hard because she doesn’t want to waste her brain’s remaining operative time on pointless flights of fancy.

Or, maybe she’s just strolling. Not burning with anxiety. Just killing time. Thinking hardly anything except that the pelicans look like her grandchildren playing in the water, or that the wind feels nice on her skin.

We are both pacing along the sea-wall, killing time, saving time. A crow shouts. Down below the sea-wall a man slips in the mud as he tries to reel in a fish.

Since we’re both walking along the same stretch of wall, our paths cross every once in a while. We walk at roughly the same speed, slowly, because she can’t move any other way and because my eyes are buried in the text of a novel and I can’t watch my feet as I walk. I’m absorbed in Toni Morrison’s “Sula,” reading a scene that will lodge in my brain like a stubborn baby-memory. Shadrack, the town’s mad advocate of National Suicide Day, makes eye contact with the beautiful and loveless Sula, their gazes converging over the surface of a deep water-well. Shadrack, the mean old war veteran who shows respect to no one, nobody except Death, tips his hat to her. Inexplicably, unprecedentedly. Sula drops everything and bolts home.

The scene makes me feel something formless but potent, so I look up over the sea-wall at my mooring view, thinking hard and searching for a word or two, a name for the misty stuff that Morrison’s writing has stirred up in my diaphragm.

Shadrack worships National Suicide Day. In some weird and ancient way he covets Death. Sula has no moral code, no empathy (at least not in the traditional sense), only an obsession with control over her own fate and security.

A cat slinks across my path. My eyes and thoughts follow, stepping with him into the bushes.

Shadrack knows that suicide is a way to control fate. The town sees him as a devil because he steps outside the natural forces of God and time by advocating self-killing. He worships suicide because it’s an act of infinite power, the absolute extreme of certainty and control. Sula, too, cares not at all for natural forces, nor emotional ones. She expels her grandmother from her home, watches her mother burn to death, sleeps with the husband of her only friend since childhood — not because she has any lust for men, love for wildness or ill-will toward anybody, but simply because she can. Because pointless provocation is a statement against the world, against the natural flow of things.

Like recognizes like. Shadrack tips his hat to Sula. She flees from that recognition. Sula has fear.

And perhaps that is what they really have in common. Not devilishness, but fear. A time-anxiety and a desperate desire for control in a world that will one day — don’t doubt it for a second — send its little sparrows of fate to pick you up and scatter you to the winds forever.

I’m close enough to the old woman now that I can hear the crisp impacts of her cane on the concrete — steady, rhythmic. There is also the soft scrape of her palm skimming the sea-wall surface. Her breath is faintly audible. A crow floats up behind her, wings spread out like a cloak, and bashes a clam against the walkway. He squawks victoriously and sets upon his meal.

The distance closes. I see an old woman pacing for exercise, she sees a kid with his nose in a book. Saving time, killing time. And she says to me the same thing she said yesterday, the same thing she’ll say tomorrow. “You might trip,” she warns, her accent unidentifiable, a kind smile creasing her wrinkled brown cheeks. She points to my book to indicate that she thinks I should keep my eyes on the road.

I smile back, quietly. She does not expect a reply. Crossing paths, we both look out over the sea-wall, sharing the sight of the sky.