Friday, March 20, 2009

Sunset in a Tumbler: Second Act

How many years ago was it?  Five, or more?  I’d seen him around enough to have given him a nickname, reflecting my fantasy of his having the interior life of a bard, based on nothing more than his minstrel’s long silvery hair and beard, and the delicacy of his clouded prospect as he stumbled along the sidewalks of my neighborhood with his wizened little frame and single battered duffel.  I knew from the first that my imaginings were unfounded - he was merely another man of the streets, pared down to nearly nothing by the rigors and indignities of his asphalt path.  Still, I couldn’t help but invest him with an unwarranted sophistication, a fantasy of artistic sensitivity, despite that I only ever actually saw him slumped or shuffling, rolling cigarettes from leaf he kept in a rusty french tea tin, or begging for change with a cup in his hand and his eyes on something visible only to himself.  I never really helped him out; I just made up some indulgent story for myself about him being all wise and poetic because he looked like some Shakespearean character.  All in my mind, of course - only in my mind.  I had apparently chosen imagination over reality once again.

This was the guy I saw all those years ago, sitting on a gnarled root near the boulevard at sunset, gazing at the engorged lowering orange sun through the incised glass of a small fragile cup which he held, empty, before him, smiling raptly at the blazing vision he beheld.  Where he’d gotten that vessel, why he’d kept it or how, what he saw in it - too many questions crowded my mind that evening.  For some reason it made me anxious.  I left without speaking to him or making any kind of contact whatsoever. 

I’ve wondered ever since then about that experience.  The bard still hangs out in the ‘hood and I see him fairly regularly.  I’ve wondered a lot about what he was doing with that cup, but I never spoke to him.  I figured I’d wait for the perfect opportunity. 

Not so long ago I saw him with his vision cup again, this time at the corner of my own block, almost right on my doorstep.  He stood looking west, his grubby duffel at his feet, his clothes tattered, deep creases incised into his face and hands by a lifetime in the weather… Yet he stood erect, pulled up to his full (though diminutive) measure, gazing with loving intensity through the delicately-faceted glass of a small tumbler, toward a spectacular setting sun.  I thought it might even have been the same tumbler as I’d seen him use so many years before. 

He seemed lost in his vision again, but as I passed him he broke off, glanced to me, and smiled.  I could not read that smile.  Rather, I kept walking.  I didn’t say a word to him, nor he to me.  I just took the last few steps that lay ahead of me toward the warm comforts of my home.  I let the story of sunset in a tumbler remain locked in the vagrant bard’s heart.

Now I know that now I may never learn that story.  Really, it makes no difference why some old homeless man does what he does, but that’s no nevermind.  I want the knowledge, and it’s there for the asking.  I just seem to be stuck at that first step.