Went Xmas shopping downtown.
There had just been a massive snowfall, yet the weather forecast for that evening called for rain. Sidewalks hadn't yet been cleared; and the street ploughs had tumbled even more white stuff onto the pavement.
Falling dusk, and the crowds of Xmas shoppers were stumbling & slipping through waxy soft snow, snow as soft as snow can get before you have to call it slush.
When one has to traverse this kind of terrain, one stares mostly in the vicinity of one's own feet. On those rare moments when one looks up to take one's bearings, one notes that the visibility is quite limited through this throng of shuffling people who are all watching their own steps also.
I felt very boxed in.
A big man veered across my path, blocking my vision nearly to its periphery; I looked up to navigate an anti~collision course, eyes crossed with how close he was to the end of my nose.
As he passed, there was the match~strike of a foot slipping on pavement; past him was a sudden clearing and, down at the end of this unexpected vista, I caught sight of a figure in mid-flight: flapping arms gracelessly outstretched, falling towards a parking meter, catching his balance at the last moment with a slap of his hand on its head.
My first thought was, this is a man who had just found a parking spot & then lost his balance on his way to put change in the meter; thank goodness he'd gotten close enough to reach it before he slipped, or else he'd've landed on his nose.
Mid~condensation of this idea, his eyes lit on mine; I smiled; he smiled; and then he held up a crudely lettered cardboard sign:
A penny a smile / 1¢ un sourire.
I burst out laughing.
There is, somewhere in literary land, a description of a laugh as having in it "a kaleidoscope of possibilities."*
In the one fell swoop of this fleet & melting epiphany of absurdity, the laws of interpersonal monetary physics were temporarily dropped; all the catch-22s of conscience & catechisms were irrelevant.
All I had on hand was a fiver, which I gave him. Would've given him more if I'd had it.
No moral to this fable; I was sitting under the table and someone threw a crust of bread which hit me in the nose.
~ ~ ~
* ...it might be from The Phantom Tollbooth; if so, it would refer to one of the two sisters, Rhyme & Reason.
Posted by edgar at December 23, 2003 12:14 PM | TrackBack