A Stranger's Goodbye

He wasn't there when I passed by their tiny shack this afternoon. He wasn't mending jeans on his old, rusty sewing machine by their door. He wasn't shoving his wrinkled face to rolls of cloth because his eyes were almost clouded by a sheer gray coat. An ash-gray cat slithered through the narrow opening of the door. He wasn't there this time.

My feet, seeming to have a mind of their own, started to shuffle into a slower pace as they neared his home. I couldn't see his bald head poking through his window. I couldn't hear the rhythm of the running sewing machine, nor the snipping of his bulky scissors. I saw several people instead, seated around plastic tables, exchanging drinks and decks of cards. I heard their controlled laughter over candies, peanuts, and bottles of beer. There was no old man, however. I had almost waited for him to step out his small door with cups of coffee on a plastic tray. I had almost waited to catch a glimpse of his silver hair that scarcely covered his head, but my eyes stopped on a bushful of ugly flowers at the center of his house. Dull colors were surrounded by splotchy ferns. My heart skipped a beat, but my gaze insisted on panning to the right, where a blow-up photo of him was displayed on top of a box he probably had never seen before.

My mind raced into a series of what-ifs. What if I had sought him to tailor my school uniform - the one I wear almost everyday. Would he be a part of me then? What if I had bought from him the unattractive cupcakes they sparingly displayed on a glass shelf outside their house. Would he have grazed my being like the cupcakes could have?

Like a turning disc on a broken player, images of the past present themselves to me episodically - the way I sympathetically smiled to myself whenever I saw his frail old body rocking along to the rhythm of his sewing just to make ends meet, and the way I nodded in gladness when they finally improved their home with several planks of wood, cans of paint, and a cheap but better roof. The replaying of the images stopped abruptly when a drunk man's cajoling voice rang in my ears.

My feet continued on, without any plans of stopping. My chest sucked the details I had noticed for years. He wouldn't be in that tiny shack anymore. He wouldn't be mending jeans on his old, rusty sewing machine by their door. He would no longer be shoving his wrinkled face to rolls of cloth. An ash-gray cat slithered back into the house through the narrow opening of the door. He wasn't there this time, and he would no longer be there whenever I'd pass by.