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My Husband Napped in the Truck at the County Fair Last September. A Woman Sat Next to Me on a Bench at 2:30. I want to tell you about that woman, because it has been almost a year since I met her and I think about her almost every day. I don't know her last name. I am not sure if I would recognize her if I passed her on the street. But I know exactly where I was sitting when she sat down at the other end of the bench, and I know what she said to me by the third sentence she spoke, and I know that the next ten months of my husband's life were different because she sat down. My name is Joanne. I am 62. I live in southern Indiana with my husband Wayne. We have been married 39 years. I am a retired bookkeeper. I spent 31 years at a regional construction firm doing the kind of careful, quiet work where you balance things to the penny because that is what people pay you to do. Wayne is 65. He retired three years ago after 41 years as a union pipefitter. He spent his working life on his feet, on his knees, in basements and on roofs and on factory floors in every kind of weather. He worked with his hands until his hands had calluses on top of calluses. He is the strongest man I have ever known. He was, anyway. We have been going to the Labor Day weekend county fair together since 1986. I want you to understand what that means. It means thirty-nine Sunday afternoons of funnel cake and tractor pulls and the livestock barn and the floral hall and the 4-H exhibits and Wayne explaining the difference between a Massey-Ferguson and a John Deere to me for the thirty-ninth year in a row. It means the same friends working the volunteer booths. The same kettle corn vendor in the same spot near the entrance. The same Ferris wheel that we have both said for thirty years we are going to ride one of these years and have never actually ridden. It is the closest thing Wayne and I have to a religion. We do not skip it. Last September we got to the fairgrounds at 11 in the morning. By 12:45 — about an hour and forty-five minutes in — Wayne said he needed to sit down. We sat on a picnic bench near the food trucks for fifteen minutes. At 1:15 he said: "Jo, I think I'm going to head back to the truck for a little while. I just need to close my eyes." I want you to understand that this had never happened. Not in thirty-nine years. Not the year he had pulled a muscle in his back in August. Not the year his mother had died in July. Not the year he had been laid off and we both knew the truck payment was a question. Not the year of his hip surgery, which he had scheduled for after the fair on purpose. Wayne does not nap in trucks at the county fair. Wayne stays from open to close, and then we drive home, and then he sits on the porch with a beer and watches the cornfield across the road get dark. I said: "Okay. Take the keys. I'll come check on you in a bit." He kissed me on the forehead. He walked toward the parking lot. I watched him go. I watched the way he was walking. He was 65 years old and he was walking like a man who was 75. I ate an elephant ear. I walked through the floral hall by myself. I looked at the prize-winning dahlias. I watched a woman judge a class of teenage girls' embroidery. I bought a small jar of honey from a beekeeper I have bought honey from for twenty years, and she asked where Wayne was, and I said he was resting in the truck for a minute, and she said: "Tell him Bill says hi." I did not tell her he had been in the truck for over an hour at that point. At 2:30 I sat down on a bench near the livestock barn. The bench is in the shade of an old maple tree. You can hear the goats and the lambs from there. You can smell the sawdust and the animals. I had been sitting there for maybe ten minutes when a woman in a sun hat sat down at the other end of the bench. She was maybe 68. Maybe 70. She had a kind face and a paper plate with a half-eaten piece of peach pie on it. She nodded at me. I nodded back. We sat there for a few minutes without saying anything. Then she said: "My husband is asleep in our truck." I turned to look at her. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the goats. I said: "Same." That was the word that did it. That one word. She turned and looked at me and something passed between us that I do not really have language for. Two women on a bench at the county fair, both of whose husbands were asleep in trucks in the parking lot, both of whom understood exactly what that meant. She said: "First time?" I said: "Yes." She said: "I remember the first time. It was a Walmart parking lot. Dennis was in the truck and I was inside finishing the grocery shopping by myself. I sat in the cereal aisle for ten minutes and tried not to cry." I said: "What year?" She said: "2014." Her name was Phyllis. She told me about her husband Dennis over the next forty-five minutes the way one woman tells another woman a thing she has been carrying. Dennis was 70 now. He had been a long-haul trucker for thirty-five years before retiring. The first time he napped in a parking lot during their errands had been in 2014, when he was 60. By 2016 he was doing it most weekends. By 2018 he had stopped going to most of the things they used to do together. She walked me through it the way you walk someone through a road you have driven a thousand times. His hands had been cold at the breakfast table for the last two winters before she did anything about it. He had stopped splitting firewood — they had a wood stove — and she had started buying it by the cord from the man down the road. He had stopped walking their dog twice a day; the dog got one walk in the morning now, and a shorter one. He had stopped staying up to watch the late football game on Sunday nights; he was asleep in the recliner by 8:30. She said his doctor — a good man, she emphasized, a good and careful man — had been telling them for three years that Dennis was just at the age where things slow down. Bloodwork was fine. Blood pressure was fine. The man on paper was healthy. The man at home was disappearing. She had been pretending, she said, that this was the price of forty years of long-haul driving. She had been right about part of that. She had been wrong about all of it. I asked her what changed. She said: "I want to be careful how I say this, because I am not a doctor. I am not in healthcare. I am a retired Sunday school teacher and a grandmother of seven, and I have no business making recommendations to anyone." I said: "Understood." She said: "Our daughter-in-law's mother had given Dennis a bottle of beetroot capsules at Easter the year he turned 67. She had been taking them herself for her own reasons. She gave him a bottle the way some people give you a casserole when you've been sick. She didn't make a big deal out of it. She just said: 'Dennis, my cardiologist says my circulation is the best it's been in fifteen years, and the only thing I added was this. Just try a bottle.'" Phyllis paused. "Dennis is not the man he was at 50. I'm not going to tell you he is. But he is also not the man who slept in our truck while I bought groceries by myself. He's somewhere in between. He's a man who came with me to the fair today and made it until 1:00 before he needed to lie down. Two years ago he wouldn't have come at all." She pulled a fair program out of her purse. She wrote a single word on the back of it in pencil. Rosabella. She handed it to me. She said: "Talk to whoever your husband's doctor is before you do anything. Promise me that. Promise me you'll call the office before you order a bottle. That part matters more than the bottle does." I said: "I promise." She stood up. She said: "I'm going to go check on Dennis. It was good sitting with you, Joanne." I had told her my first name maybe twenty minutes earlier and hadn't even noticed she had filed it away. She walked toward the parking lot. I watched her go. I never saw her again. I sat on that bench for another twenty minutes after she left. I held the fair program in my hand. I thought about Wayne in the truck. I thought about the way he had been walking when he left. I thought about his hands at the kitchen table, the way I had been watching him wrap both of them around his coffee mug for the last two winters and telling myself it was the cold weather. We live in southern Indiana. The kitchen is heated. The coffee was hot. I thought about the firewood Wayne hadn't split this past fall. About the dog walk we had quietly adjusted from twice a day to once. About the Sunday night football game I had been finding him asleep through for the last year and a half. I thought about every other small thing I had been quietly absorbing into "he's just getting older." I put the fair program in my purse. I walked to the truck. Wayne was asleep with the windows cracked. The keys were on the dashboard. I sat in the passenger seat and let him sleep another forty-five minutes. When he woke up he said: "I'm sorry, Jo. I just couldn't keep going." I said: "I know." We drove home. I did not tell Wayne about Phyllis for almost a week. I wanted to do my own reading first. I wanted to make sure that whatever I brought to him I had thought about carefully. I sat at the kitchen table on a Tuesday afternoon with my laptop and I read about beetroot for almost two hours. I skipped past the supplement-company landing pages. I read about the active compound — something called betalains. The research wasn't trendy and it wasn't fringe. There were decades of peer-reviewed work looking at how the compound supports the body's natural antioxidant balance and supports healthy circulation. I noted what kept coming up about cold-pressing being important to keeping the compound intact — and that Rosabella specifically used cold-pressing at low temperatures, with beets grown on small farms in Lancaster County. I called Dr. Salim's office the next morning. Dr. Salim is Wayne's primary care doctor — a careful and kind man Wayne has been seeing for twelve years. I told the nurse what I was thinking about and asked whether there was any reason Wayne shouldn't add it. Wayne is on no prescription medications. He takes a multivitamin and a low-dose aspirin he started on his own after his father's stroke years ago. She put me on hold for five minutes. She came back and said: "Dr. Salim says beetroot has good research behind it for antioxidant and circulatory support. He says it's a sensible thing for Wayne to add. He'd like Wayne to keep doing what he is already doing, and he'd like to see him at his next physical so we can hear how he's feeling. There's no interaction concern with the aspirin or the vitamin." I thanked her. I ordered a bottle. It came in three days. That Friday morning at breakfast I put the bottle on the table next to Wayne's coffee mug. I told him about the bench. I told him about Phyllis. I told him about Dennis. I told him about the fair program in my purse. He listened the whole way through. Then he said: "Jo, why didn't you say anything sooner?" I said: "Because you've been telling me you're fine for three years and I've been letting you." He took the bottle off the table. He read the label. He said: "Okay." He took two capsules with water. He has taken two capsules with water every morning since. I am going to tell you what I noticed in the months that followed. But I want to be careful about how I say it. I cannot tell you that beetroot fixed anything. I am not a doctor. I am not in healthcare. I am a 62-year-old retired bookkeeper, and I am telling you what I noticed, the way Phyllis told me what she had noticed about Dennis. The first thing I noticed was the coffee mug. About three weeks in, on a cold morning in October, Wayne was sitting at the breakfast table with his coffee, and I realized he was holding the mug with one hand. He had reached for the newspaper with the other. I had been watching him wrap both hands around that mug for two winters. I didn't say anything. The next morning, same thing. The morning after that, same. The second thing I noticed was the dog. About six weeks in, I came home from the grocery store on a Saturday afternoon and Wayne wasn't in the house. He came in through the back door ten minutes later with our retriever on the leash, both of them muddy. I said: "Did you walk her this morning?" He said: "Yeah. Just took her out again. She seemed like she had it in her." She had had it in her for two years. Wayne hadn't. The third thing I noticed was the firewood. The Saturday before Thanksgiving, Wayne went out to the small pile of unsplit cordwood the delivery man had left a year and a half ago. He split a small armload of it before lunch. Brought it inside. Stacked it next to the wood stove. He didn't make a big deal out of it. I made coffee and watched him through the kitchen window and tried not to make a big deal out of it either. The fourth thing I noticed was Christmas. Our daughter and her husband came in from Cincinnati for Christmas Eve. We played a card game called Hand and Foot that takes a couple of hours. Wayne was at the table at 11 PM, still playing, still keeping score, telling our son-in-law a story about a job he had worked on a plant in Evansville in 1992. He had not stayed up past 9 on a Sunday or holiday night in three years. I cried in the kitchen at midnight loading the dishwasher. He didn't notice. Which was the whole point. Wayne saw Dr. Salim in March for his annual physical. I asked him afterward what Dr. Salim had said. He said: "He looked at the bloodwork. He looked at me. He asked what I was doing differently. I told him. He said, 'whatever you're doing, keep doing it.' He said the picture this year is in better shape than it has been in a couple of years." Wayne paused. He smiled a little. He said: "He said one more thing. He said, 'Wayne, I have been telling you for three years that some of this is just the way bodies age. I want to be honest with you — I am not entirely sure why this year is different. But it is. So whatever you have added, don't change it back.'" I have thought about that line a hundred times. I have thought about Phyllis on the bench. I have thought about what she said — I am not a doctor. I am not in healthcare. I am a retired Sunday school teacher and a grandmother of seven, and I have no business making recommendations to anyone. I have thought about how often a stranger on a bench can be carrying the thing you needed to hear that day. And how easily you could have walked past the bench. I almost walked past the bench. I had been walking past it, in some other version of it, for two years. Wayne and I went back to the fair this past Labor Day. We got there at 11. He made it past 1:15 without sitting down. He made it past 2:30 too. He didn't nap in the truck. We stayed for the tractor pull at 6:30. We had funnel cake at 7. We left at 8:15, both of us walking to the truck under our own power. On the drive home I asked him to pull over for a minute at the entrance to the fairgrounds. I walked over to the bench by the livestock barn. The bench in the shade of the old maple tree. The bench you could smell the animals from. I sat on it for ten minutes. Phyllis wasn't there. I had walked past the bench three or four times during the day. She hadn't been there then either. I do not know if Phyllis and Dennis went to a different fair this year. I do not know if they stayed home. I do not know if anything happened. I hope nothing did. I hope they are at a fair somewhere this weekend, both of them awake. I sat on the bench for one more minute and I said thank you out loud to no one in particular. Then I walked back to the truck where my husband was waiting for me with the engine running. P.S. If you have been watching someone you love dim down the way I had been watching Wayne dim down, the first thing to do is not order a bottle of anything. The first thing to do is talk to whoever knows their body. Tell their doctor what you have been noticing. Let the doctor rule out what needs ruling out. Some of what is happening might be exactly what the doctor has been telling you. Some of it might not be. You will not know until somebody who can look at the whole picture hears what you have been describing. P.P.S. If after that you decide to try Rosabella, do what Phyllis told me to do. Call the doctor's office first. The way I did. One phone call. Four minutes. Most nurses will get you an answer the same day. Then have him take two capsules with water in the morning. Don't change anything else. Just add this one thing. Give it a few weeks before you decide anything. Some men notice something within the first two or three weeks. Others take longer. Bodies are different. Be patient with his. P.P.P.S. Rosabella has a 90-day money-back guarantee. If you're not satisfied for any reason, every penny back. No questions asked. That is a sensible policy for a supplement. It gives you long enough to actually see whether it helps before you decide. P.P.P.P.S. Rosabella is a small operation. The beets are grown on small farms in Lancaster County, cold-pressed at low temperatures so the betalains stay intact rather than getting cooked off the way they do in most processing. The harvest is once a year and they bottle on their own schedule, so I keep an extra bottle in the cabinet. They currently have a multi-bottle option that I went with myself. Worth a look. P.P.P.P.P.S. I still have the fair program. The one with the single word written on the back in pencil. It is in the top drawer of my kitchen desk, under the warranty for the dishwasher. I take it out sometimes when Wayne is in the next room watching the news or out in the yard with the dog. I look at the word. I think about a woman in a sun hat with a paper plate and half a piece of peach pie, sitting at the other end of a bench at the county fair in September of last year, telling a stranger something she did not have to tell. I think about how almost everything good that has happened in our house for the last ten months traces back to a moment that almost did not happen. That woman did not know me. She did not owe me anything. She had her own husband to go check on. She could have eaten her pie and gotten up and walked away and never said a word. She didn't. If you are the woman on the other end of a bench from someone right now — and you have been through some version of what I had not yet been through — say the thing. Pass the program. Write the word. Walk away. You will probably never know what it did. But sometimes a stranger on a bench is the whole thing. Individual experiences vary. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.