Thursday, December 05, 2002

He sat on BART with

He sat on BART with a clipboard and a hardback book.  His hair, brown as a funk, surged incorrigibly from under a tired ball cap.  His jacket, well-worn, bore a breast label from a motor oil company, and seemed to have been soaked in his sponsor’s product.  Pants: chinos, old and tired; shoes: leather sneakers, alive with pleasure.  His black shirt bunched and wrinkled over his gut; a motto on a round pin perched at the bottom of his daringly plunging placket - I couldn’t read it, too much information, too small a space.  Next to the pin dangled a pewter pentangle charm.  His brow furrowed as he worked a green ballpoint, going from the book to the clipboard.  The book was thick and dense, and he had scrawled many notes in the margins.  The clipboard held a few sheets of less-than-pristine three-hole notebook paper on which I thought I could read the beginning of a sermon of some sort, written in a deliberate and plain magiscule print.  The book was open to a chapter that seemed to have something to do with God.  At his feet were two bags: a white plastic grocery bag, crumpled and ratty, full of envelopes and papers; the other, a white garbage bag full of rolls of unused white garbage bags.  When he left the train he was running.