a word from a stranger

Street strolling home, another long day was coming to a close and the sun had long gone home before me. The early autumn cold stung my cheeks in the dark. The wind tossed the branches back and forth in front of the streetlights, shifting the light and shadows on the brick buildings nearby. My shoulders sagged under the weight that only a city can place on someone who is going home to an empty house after a long day of work in a crowded town. Long days give way to even longer trips back to bed. I dragged my feet across the cracked city sidewalks; gravel and smashed acorns ground together as I walked the long stretch towards the bus that would take me home.
"You good?"
It took a few seconds to realize that someone was talking to me, and by the time I turned he was leaving, perhaps he was thinking that I had ignored him, but in all likelihood not meaning to stop anyway. I took off an earphone and watched him for a second. It was hard to make out the shaggy haired man as he walked away through the shifting shadows of the oak trees that line fenway. "Huh?" I though, or spoke, sluggishly.
Without stopping, the man turned towards me, so that he was walking backwards "Don't worry brother. It gets better!" he said in an honest tone with a slight hippy inflection of the 1960's. As he was about to turn around again, the light caught his face for a second as he flashed me a grin before walking away. Somehow, I believed him and felt better.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Things I think in the city on the verge of winter

Winter is almost here. You can never tell for sure at this time of the year. One day it is warm, the next it is cold. But for the past couple of weeks, the Fall has been wrestling, and losing, to Winter. The mornings start out very cold, and slowly the day starts to warm a bit as the sun comes out. But the Cold stands patiently in the shadows, hidden from the sun's warmth, waiting for you to walk into the shade of a building or tree to show you how cold the air really is and remind you to bring a scarf. Today was especially chilly. Even our apartment made me wrap up a little tighter. It also made me close some of the windows that we had wide open. Our whole building is heated with a giant coal furnace in the basement that tends to turn our humble abode into a living inferno. We balance this out by opening windows. It is a terrible waste of energy, but we have no control over the heating. I read that madrid still has over 2000 buildings running their heating off coal. It is terribly...
Read more

Snowmelt demands movement

The sun is out again today. The snow has all but melted except for in the abandoned lots where they piled it up several stories high; but even those piles are melting, leaving behind all of the grime that was plowed up with the snow and rivulets of water running towards the nearest gutter. The fact that the water reaches the drain is quite a feat. Just weeks ago it would have frozen halfway across the sidewalk... and lain in waiting for an unsuspecting jogger. But, as I said before, the sun is out now, the temperatures are up, and the ice is nowhere to be seen. I am running out of excuses to avoid jogging, if you will permit the pun. I am in some of the worse shape of my life and I don't particularly feel good about it. Those of you who have known me for most of my life know that being "in shape" was never really been a priority of mine until recently. In high school I looked for ways to do the least amount of work possible in P.E class. When we played sports, I chose t...
Read more

Blogs

I remember when I started blogging. I think I was one of the first people I know to start blogging. Dont get me wrong, it was a cultural phenomenon back 4 years ago when I began, but none of my friends really did it. And then all of a sudden a bunch of us did. We all kept it up for a while, some came and went, but I had a pretty vibrant blogging community. Tonight I found myself checking my friends blogs and finding only abandoned websites for the most part. It kind of kills a lot of the fun of blogging for me. So I guess this post is a bit of a salute to all the blogs around me during this time: So I started thinking of all the people that had blogs I liked that stopped: -Jen -Erin Kidd (though she kept it up for a very short time) -Rebecca Wood (though it seems like she may start up again) -Kenny -Evangeline -Chris Cherene Or the ones that never really started up in the first place: -Charles And then there are the ones that I wish would write more often: -Ed Rand -Aitor -Erin Davidso...
Read more