She was wearing that same sweatshirt

And her sweatpants

My dog brought her over and they did a dance

In my front yard on a Saturday evening

My not-too-well-known neighbor started talking

And in a moment she was seething

We’d never talked much, just said hello in passing

But this night it bordered on trespassing

She stood there and unloaded:

“My friend never smoked, never drank, never did drugs

He’s a workout buff, not a thug

Now he has cancer

How I am supposed to make sense of this stuff?”

She said, “I don’t trust doctors

All this money poured into research

But sickness and death go on like an endless dirge

We might as well smoke and drink

Indulge in any and every thing”

She threw up her arms

My dog and I stood there, in some state of alarm

My neighbor doesn’t know I’m the doctor treating her friend

She doesn’t realize it’s all so delicate

In much the same way my heat broke last winter

The salesman had installed a faulty unit

In the cold that night, me and my family nearly splintered

My neighbor doesn’t know that I know that salesman was hired by her

And I didn’t know it was one of her greatest regrets hiring him

That man was also an embezzler

She and her company were left in great debt

Even outside of medicine there is cancer

I don’t have all the answers

Many things are still a mystery

I watched my neighbor walk back across the street

During our conversation I hadn’t said a thing

Who was listening

New sweatpants were delivered to my neighbor’s house

On her front porch was that old employee looking down and out, barely clothed

Asking for a job, saying he no longer had a home

I couldn’t help but watch the scene unfold

My neighbor let that man in, out of the cold

He left an hour later with new sweats – from a company run by a man with prostate cancer

At work on Monday that man’s cancer was gone

I thought about my dog rolling around in the lawn

So many mysteries

My dog doesn’t try to figure them out

Maybe it’s a lesson for my neighbor and me

As we behold these specious complexities