Tripping Uptown

So...a brief vacation from writing due to illness and the busywork that follows being unable to do anything for a week. Hope I was missed. Here's my latest...

I lost the stomach for downtown a decade ago. When I retreated to the suburbs, I left behind at least a million unread words. Manuals on bookshelves, PowerPoint presentations, corporate newsletters, annual reports... unappreciated gifts of a stifled imagination.

Occasionally I return to the core, but only to shop, a project for which I am wholly ill-suited.

Unaccustomed to the train, I am a clumsy traveler. I forget to buy my ticket before I descend to the platform, then I forget where I put it. I touch the handrail on the staircase then discover I’m out of hand sanitizer.

I sit at the edge of my seat. I touch nobody, nothing. I am not fond of the smell.

Near the downtown station where I exit, an old man sits crumpled in a corner near a door, a hat laid in his lap.

I walk past him, then stop. I find my wallet easily enough, but when I try to unzip it, the paper money gets clenched in the teeth and the zipper stalls. I pull at the bills to free them, shreds of currency flutter to the greasy sidewalk. I am sweating by the time I liberate a twenty.

I put it in the old man’s hat. It takes a moment for him to notice, then he looks up and into my eyes. “God bless you,” he says.

I want to say, “he already has” but I cannot. I struggle with belief.

“Spend it like you found it,” I offer, and he smiles a dark, gummy smile.

“You’re an angel,” he tells me and I smile too.

The secret to being perfect, it seems, is to show up infrequently, with a gift, and say something that makes a little, but not too much sense.

Feeling the love without, and the love within,

Kari