| ...the ocean heaves and sighs, God’s breath.
The sun is riding low by the time he arrives, sand shifting beneath his dark,
sandaled feet. The light filters through him, wraps around him, and the
world is so bright that everything else is shadow. “He’s here every year?” she said to me. “Every year,” I said, staring at him, a cold drink in my hand. “On the same day?” “July 21st,” I said, sitting down in a chair on my porch. “Why does he do it?” “I don’t know,” I said. “You never talked to him?” And I looked at her, and she looked at me and I turned my head because I don’t talk to people like this, I don’t reveal the inner workings of my heart and my mind… “I didn’t want to break the spell.” She sat down next to me and kindly nodded as if my words made sense. For a moment she drew my attention away from the old man and his ritual. The wind blew across her face and her hair danced like the gulls in the sky, the light filled the twin wells of her eyes, and I wished I had my paints handy, or a camera at least to capture the moment… Then his calloused hands reached out to take hold of a folded chair and I turned my attention back to see the ritual of those weatherworn hands taking hold of that old chair, and planting it in the sand. I watch this old movie every year, like It’s a Wonderful Life on Christmas or Miracle on 34th street on thanksgiving. I watch this same movie every year and this is my favorite part. He settled into the chair, after saying something, softly I think because no one ever seems to notice. “Why does he do it?” she said, leaning forward, and I turned again for a moment till I realized that she wasn’t talking to me this time. She was watching him reach into that old canvas bag, and pull out a towel to rest his feet on. He settled slowly into the chair, rays beaming off the brass screws in the wooden framework of the chair, caught like golden butterflies in the silvery net of his thick, curled beard. He settled in, hat pushed forward. No book, no portable TV, no music, no sports radio. For the rest of the day he will do nothing at all, like a Zen Buddhist meditating on the transcendental eternity of the ocean, juxtaposed against the firefly like flicker, the short-wicked candle of a single man’s existence. “Why does he do it?” she whispered into the breeze and her words fluttered into the sky like fallen leaves, or the sparkling dust of fresh snow on a cool winter’s night when the shadows of the trees are slender and silent and blue. I shook my head, resisting the urge to answer the rhetorical question this time, and we whiled away the rest of the day, watching him and making up stories of what brings him back to this place. “He went to war with an old friend, who died in his arms while the bullets flew overhead,” I said. She looked at me for a moment, and shook her head, it didn’t feel right. “She must have been beautiful,” she said. “He fell in love here… she was supposed to meet him, but she never came back… and he’s still waiting after all those years…” “Or maybe it was nothing sad at all...” I said. |
