By David A. Sylvester
I had left my home and after two days, I was walking along Route 16 in the Central Valley late in the evening, the sun low and warming my sweatshirt. I needed to find a place to sleep and kept looking for a place along the highway among the farmhouses and fields, with their trees, junk cars, shrubs.
The sun was setting, casting its last long brilliant light lighting up the tops of the hillocks and darkening the furrows into shadows. Soon it would be night, and I didn’t want to be stumbling through strange thickets. It was one of those trips again. I had to get away. Everything had been left behind. There was nothing to go back to, even when I went back. It was all gone. I glanced back up the road, and about a dozen yards behind me, there was an old man swinging a flat-mouthed shovel along the breakdown lane running along edge of the highway.
I had trudged past, bent under my backpack, without noticing him, but now with the sunlight at his back, he stood out in particular clarity. He was clearing out a ridge of dust running along the highway. He cut into the dust with a rasp along the pavement, and swung it a foot in front of him, no more than a couple of feet farther off the road, and with each swing and toss, a cloud of dust rose up, shining in the sunlight with a brilliant golden haze.
Scoop and toss, scoop and toss. He did this very slowly, very carefully. He seemed at peace, untroubled by any thought of other tasks to do, or by the apparent futility of cleaning off a state highway when a new rush of cars would undo his work tomorrow and leave a new ridge by evening.
He was a very old man, perhaps in his late 70s, small and stooped, absorbed in one of the simplest tasks on earth, and in its simplicity, his movement had a dignity that I do not remember seeing in the city with its myriad of more important tasks. Perhaps I haven’t noticed, just as I didn’t notice him.
Perhaps I haven’t stopped and turned around to see the men at the shoe shine chairs, buffing the shoes of a stranger, the barbers lounging in their chairs waiting for customers and watching the people like me on the sidewalk go by outside their window, the delivery man holding up the box of a hot pizza, knocking on a motel door for the romantic couple too languorous to leave their bed, the bus driver listening to the quarters fall into the slot of his machine, patient and watchful, keeping the engine in idle while they find their seats, the print shop owner on a late lunch break, leaning against the next-door building, smoking on a late lunch break, letting people pass before his eyes with the same mild enjoyment he feels from the sun on his face.
And I think of all these people who were absorbed in being when I was stumbling from the curb to my car with too many packages in my arms, fishing for the keys in my pockets among the fistful of uncounted change, wondering what this wordless yearning inside me is trying to say and what I might learn if I only turned and saw.
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