He was
sitting on a bench on
Chapel Street across from the
pizza parlor when I saw him. At first he seemed very much like
your run-of-the-mill typical homeless guy; he had a filthy
knit cap on, with some unrecognizable professional sports team's logo scrawled across the front, a scraggly
salt-and-pepper beard, a ripped
starter jacket,
hopsack pants that could have been nearly as old as he, one sneaker wrapped in a plastic shopping bag.
As I approached him, though, his eyes met mine, and I was startled. He lacked the almost
necessary bloodshot eyes of the
homeless, the eyes that tell of unremembered nights spent
drinking the pain to a dull numbness, of freezing,
comatose until your drool stuck your face to the cement in a
living lacquer, of getting up and wandering the days with a
paper cup and an
apathy for whether there was enough in there for food, as long as the next
forty was on its way. His eyes were clear,
lucid, bright.
He smiled at me, and after a startled moment, I realized I was smiling back. Now
unsure about this man, I observed he had a sign, a
cardboard scrap with
black magic marker scrawled on it. It took me a moment, but I'm sure of what it said.
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Donations accepted.
I didn't have any money, so I gave him my gloves.
I didn't know anyone read
that anymore.