There was a man in my old neighborhood that this lovely piece reminded me of who had also suffered a stroke. His name, too, was John and every day he’d sit up against a building across the street from my coffee shop. I never knew much about him, except that he was always there, but he was an icon of the street that everyone knew and, I suppose, everyone sort of cherished.
A lot of the girls that worked at the coffee shop would go out and talk to him, and he’d smile and chuckle, all the while shaking a little, until eventually it got too cold or windy for smiling and chuckling and shaking, and he’d return to his little apartment upstairs in the building. I was dating one of these girls, and I guess she spent a weekend once checking up on him, delivering his medications that his normal caretaker couldn’t manage for him at the time. She didn’t have any other relation to him besides seeing him outside the cafe’s window, and it so impressed me that she did this because, though she wasn’t at all a hard-hearted person, she doesn’t obviously come across as the bubble-fourth-with-good-will type, more the kind but quieter, accountant type who is too nervous to dance till she’s had a couple. What drew her to him in the first place, and what did they mean to each other? He died a couple of years ago, and somebody put a plaque up on the spot in the building where he sat. Like David, in his aformentioned piece, I wonder a bit who he was before the stroke. I also sometimes (and I can’t help but feel guilty for all of this) wonder if, without that stroke, and that little habbit of sitting out in the open, shaking, he would have become such a beloved fixture of the block. And maybe it’s just that we’re all reminded how frail things are, how frail we are, and the love we show is a kind of thank you to the person, that it’s they who are afflicted, that it’s they who do the struggling for us.
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Really beautiful. Love it. We all need reminding sometimes of the frailty of life. Some people choose to ignore it by ignoring people like John. But we will all take our turn in his shoes. Hopefully there is a nice person to show us warmth when it’s our turn too.
you had better come sit with me when I’m that old.