The Silent Listener

Cleaning out some odds and ends while home with a sick child can be liberating. I administer medicine, tend to his every need, but still have ample time to organize bathroom drawers and purge some excess household junk. I ran across a hand-written account on a looseleaf piece of notebook paper. I wrote it a few years ago. I had just finished my first jury duty experience and was waiting for Nick to pick me up at a downtown Starbucks. Here is the written account:

He had normal twitchy head nods, comfortable posture, and rhythmically puffed away on a cigarette in the lulls of a conversation. This, in all appearances, looks like a normal coffee shop patio conversation. As a matter of fact, I am perched in a coffee shop window, sipping on my own cup of brewed beans. Reading the local paper, my eyes shifted to watch the passersby; there's nothing noteworthy in the news. This man looked relaxed and enveloped in his talk. The clencher of this observation is that this man's talking companion doesn't exist. At least in the physical sense, no one sits in the adjacent or opposite chair. No one else even occupies a seat on the entire patio.

What is this man's story? To whom is he speaking? His eyebrows tense and relax like mine or yours would in a talk with a friend. His hands gesture like any good Italian's would. He nods in polite approval to whatever is being said back to him. Something about this unseen partner is making this man's day, maybe his entire life, just a little more tolerable. Whoever joins him in this conversation might just be the key to his existence.

This man is someone's son. He is old and weathered, but at sometime, somewhere, a mother looked down at his face with a heart filled with love. He was precious. He would grow and create a good life, she thought, but fate would painfully prove otherwise. Passing judment upon this man would be easy. Perhaps judgment could be cast upon me for simply observing and trying to analyze this image in time.

When I am warm, he is probably aching with cold limbs. When I am hugged by my husband or children, he probably longs to experience any sort of human touch. When I dig through my stuffed pantry for food, he probably scrounges around for morsels of things tossed out. When I snuggle into my bed, he probably flinches from more scratches on the concrete. When I feel boundless love or validation or comfort, he is probably alone in this world.

He sips the last remaining swigs of liquid from some sort of container for a little relief from this heat. This man has a life. There's no telling from where he came and how he got to this patio bench, but his life should matter just as much as mine. Maybe that is what he is trying to tell his silent listener.