Old Man

Every weekday, I pull up to work at 6:30AM or shortly thereafter. Getting to work so early allows me the choicest of parking places, although this is not the reason I adhere to such an early schedule. I pull up and, depending on my mood, I pull into one of three standard parking spots that I consider mine. I throw my worn-leather satchel over my shoulder and head for the looming, glass double doors. I trudge through the first set of doors into a sterile public foyer where I proceed to the next set of glass double doors and wave my standard issue photo ID badge over a magnetic locking device that permits me to enter the main cubicle farm. As soon as that featureless black magnet beeps and the little green light flashes twice, I am officially at work.

Every morning at 6:30 I drag myself from my car to the office. There are few who arrive to work before I do, but one individual is already taking his first smoke break of the day at 6:30. I don’t know his name. Usually, I walk by him and we exchange early morning grunts or head nods. Rarely, I walk by and we exchange coherent verbal greetings, which are regulated to three words or less. This guy is nearing retirement age, probably less than five years to go until freedom. He has that elder wizened look, with crow’s-feet chiseled into the dark skin around the corners of his eyes and horizontal concentration lines between his sagging brow and the worn baseball cap that covers short curly gray hair. A cigarette is a permanent feature in his cracked lips, which are never frowning and never smiling for fear of further cracking. The rough black hands that shuttle the cigarette to his mouth are well calloused from a lifetime of manual work and his nails are tinged yellow from decades of smoking. He always appears calm and reflective in the crisp morning setting. He relishes every puff of his cigarette in a contemplative manner. When I see people smoke like this, breathing deeply and delighting in the pleasure of exhaling smoke, I feel I’m missing something. I feel like their ritual completes their life, and perhaps my life is incomplete. It is this yearning that drives me to bum the occasional cigarette from my friends. There is something about this guy, maybe wisdom, politeness, perseverance, or calmness, that leads me to admire him. If I can be like him when I grow up, I’ll be all right.

Today was unusual in that we exchanged more than three words. He inquired about my state of being and I expounded about how Fridays make everything better. He nodded and exclaimed, “Fuck, yeah!” And with those two words he obliterated all preconceived notions of himself that I had constructed in my limited mind. After picking up the charred and shattered remnants of my wits, I reconstructed an image of this man that was even more admirable then before.

Old man take a look at my life I'm a lot like you.
...and so it was written, shenry at 7/12/2002 09:29:00 AM.
...and so it was appended with .