New York City is a walker's paradise. Central Park. Bergdof Goodman store windows. Times Square both day and night. Little pockets of originality. Greenwich Village, both east and west side neighborhoods. Ethnic neighborhoods. And the people.
The people. The fashion. The immigrants selling umbrellas. Burly doormen. Hot dog and Halal stands. Everyone seems to have an accent. Cab drivers. The hustlers trying to make a buck. The mix of wealth and poverty. The stories we could tell of the emotionally wrecked.
I saw him coming. Rips in his trousers. His clothes were a dark cloud. His countenance was even darker. He held a poster in his hand. As he passed us in the crosswalk, He screamed in the most vile voice______.
I believed him.
Mandi, the psychologist, thought it was solely mental illness. She may have been right. But I thought back to the New Testament stories of men like him.
I tried not to think about him. Hesitated to write about him. I almost deleted the entire occurrence. Does writing about him put more evil into the world?
But I left him in my narrative of New York City. Because he's part of the story. Because he was the reality to the lovely experience of a bustling city. Because the wounded are human. Because he's now a part of my human experience. My grandchildren's experience. We can't erase our encounter; if they need to talk about him, about the moment our limbs froze in fright, I want to remember.
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