I’m not saying I’m proud of myself

I decided the walk would be warmer than standing still so I took off north from the second bus stop. I set an alarm on my phone set to go off at the time when the bus home was due, figuring when the alarm went off I’d be sure to get to the nearest bus stop and stay there.

On the walk I passed a man with a thin white beard and mustache and shaggy mutton chops. He looks like a hard-living fifty to me. He was standing in the sidewalk with a squared off stance, arms folded, feet hip width apart.

I saw him from about a half block away and heard him talking to another pedestrian, something about being late and missing the bus, or maybe he was saying the bus was late. I couldn’t hear him clearly. He had - has - a gravelly voice that suggests a medical issue with his throat. It has a tone that always make me think of steel wool.

I’ve seen him on at last three occasions prior. Once he walked down the street bellowing at the top of his lungs. It sounded murderous to me. This was in the dark on an early spring or late fall night. I’d stood at the stop that I’d walked away from this time, waiting for the bus. I heard him come down the east-west street then turn and head north bound, periodically letting loose these screamed strings of fragments of profanity - “FFUUU the SHII you AAAA I FUUUU” kind of thing. If I’d read in the paper that he’d walked up the street and stabbed someone I’d have thought “of course.” That night the bus had come and he’d gotten on a few stops after I did. He proceeded to tell the driver in his broken voice about some terrible back pain he was in and that it was so bad he’d been screaming out loud. I felt bad for what I’d been thinking about him.

Another time I saw him out the window of the bus as I headed south toward the stop where I catch the second bus to work. He was standing in the gutter next to the crosswalk at the corner shouting at the window of a car stopped at the light, in a boxer’s stance, fists balled up and occasionally throwing a punch and a kick at the air.

The third time I’d walked up on the northbound stop on my way home and he’d nodded and I’d nodded back then got out my book. A book is a good luck charm and a shield.

“How you doing brother?” he’d asked as I unzipped my backpack.

“Day to day’s kind of a grind but big pictures’s good,” I said as I rummaged in the bag. “Yourself?”

“I just buried the last family I had.” He nodded toward the hospital set back from our bus stop.

“Oh man. Sorry to hear that.” I pulled my book out, feeling guilty but also wanting out of this conversation.

“Cancer. Took my sister, my brother, both my parents, all four of my uncles.”

“That’s awful.” I opened my book, not liking myself for wanting to disengage, but still wanting an out.

“Gonna get me too,” he said. I didn’t want to talk but I couldn’t just not respond to that.

“All my grandfathers died of cancer.”

He’d frowned and nodded slowly, breathed out sharply through his nose.

“Well, god bless you brother. God bless you.”

“Thanks. You too.”

“Thank you.”

The bus came a minute later. He sat toward the front and I walked to the back where I read my book.

This time on the walk home in the cold when I got close to him he nodded at me then stepped aside with a dancing kind of movement, like a very graceful skip, and a sound that might have been a wheeze and might have been a mumble of that best midwestern syllable, “ope!”

“Thank you sir!” I said. I “sir” and “ma’am” everybody in circumstances like this. I don’t know how to articulate quite why and don’t remember when I started. It’s tied to wanting to get along, I know that much. “You have a nice day.”

“Yeah you too brother,” he replied, “you too.”

I walked for seventeen minutes then stood another seven. The air temp was single digits. My fingers and toes hurt. I get so sick of the winters. I always think of the time in Minneapolis when the bus had broken and I was out in subzero weather for over an hour standing at the bus stop before giving up and walking to the light rail. My toes had begun to hurt, not feel cold, but a mix of ache and sting. I’d taken my boots off on the train and gently rubbed my feet to warm them. I worry about something similar happening on these days.

The bus finally arrived and the mutton chop guy was sitting right at the front. Without thinking about it as soon as I saw him I said “eh-hey! seeing you again!” and we both laughed.

I tried to read my book again and overheard him, that wheezing choked scratchy voice, steel wool, telling another passenger - another hard-living looking older man - about trying to get into some place up north. I wondered if he was staying at the homeless shelter at the church by the library and our house. I didn’t want to see him around the neighborhood, feared the potential feeling of obligation, disliked myself for that.

At my stop I got up to leave and he looked at me, I gave him the bro single nod, that upward chin-tilt. He said “have a good night brother.”

“You do the same.”

“Thank you. God is good. You be blessed.”

“You too.”

“Hey I appreciate you brother, God bless you, I appreciate you, God bless -“

I didn’t hear the rest because I got off the bus, and when I stepped onto the curb I felt relieved.