It was happening very quickly… I looked at the collie – Tess. She looked back at me, equally confused. The boot lid continued to descend towards us…

It won’t make any sense unless I back it up a bit.

Once a week, we go to Grange-over-Sands to do our fresh-food shopping. The small but lovely seaside resort has a ‘one of everything’ approach to its specialised and individual shops.

There’s the collie to be walked, of course, so a certain division of labour is needed. I walk Tess around the local park, then onto the promenade for the return leg into the town. Tess and I usually arrive just before Bernie, whose last undertaking is to get us a couple of lattés from the local Costa Coffee. It’s a family tradition that began during the Covid restrictions (Grange was within the dog-walking zone from where we live).

Shopped and equipped with the coffee, we usually sit on the tailgate of the car, Tess’ head prominently gazing out (between us) at amused passers by. You get used to the attention directed at the dog and everyone is good-natured.

And so it was that I came to be seated, drinking coffee and swinging my legs; the shopping and walking done. It was my wife who first gestured, in panic, to the descent of the boot lid. Before I could react, it had reached my head … and mercifully stopped – the automated response to meeting resistance.

Tess retreated to the inner space, while I wriggled out and stood by the errant boot lid, feeling under its lower edge for the manual buttons. I tried several combinations, searching for a reason for the aberrant behaviour.

None could be found…

We reset: Bernie handed me back my coffee and Tess returned to centre stage to study her adoring public. The tailgate’s rogue performance faded into recent memory, and we all relaxed. I began swinging my legs again – something I often do in ‘relaxation’ and when I’m thinking, deeply.

Once more, equally unannounced, the tailgate came at me. This was becoming personal…

Perhaps in anticipation that it might happen again, I had memorised the position of the button that would abort the descent of all that metal and glass.

Bernie stood there, looking at the visible lower half of my face. She took the coffee from my uncertain hands and said she’d be back, soon. It was all very surreal, though Tess seemed unperturbed.

I pushed the middle button. The boot lid rose. Some distant memory of a story by Hoffnung of bricks and buckets entered my consciousness and a smile crossed my lips – which is more than could be said for the cooling coffee.

“It’s you!” She said it with a smile, clutching the car’s handbook that she had collected from the dash.

“There’s a proximity foot-switch under the back of the car. It’s supposed to help you if you’re carrying a heavy bag or two and have run out of hands…” She laughed. “It works to open and, if already open, to close. You must have triggered it – twice – by your habit of swinging your feet when you’re having coffee.”

We sat in silence, Tess twisting her head from side to side to consider our mood.

My feet were still.

©Stephen Tanham 2023

Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher photographer and Director of the Silent Eye, a correspondence-based journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.

http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog