Sobbing

Mark from the Old Crow Book Club and I chatted for ten minutes in front of the grocery store about the subtleties of several 20^th century Japanese novels I had given him. We also discussed the agony post WW II Japanese novelists must have faced with their storytelling after their nation wrought so much savage destruction, particularly to the Chinese. Maybe some novelists didn’t face it at all. As a comparison, William Faulkner always danced around slavery, lynchings and segregation. So did a lot of white Southern writers and poets of his era.

It was a fine fall afternoon and seeing Mark looking swell always trampolines me into a good mood. I said goodbye and walked around the corner of the store to an alley that led toward my car in a parking lot.

Sitting on the sidewalk and leaning against the store was a young homeless man I’d met months before and once offered my help in assisting him into housing, but he’d never showed up at our pre-designated place for me to refer him to the city. This was the same program that had worked successfully to move Mark into a Safe Rest Village.

I didn’t recall the young man’s name but he was a skateboarding madman around the neighborhood, and indeed, his skateboard was overturned next to him.

As I approached him, I heard him cry out to the heavens, “Will someone help me?” and then he broke into convulsive sobbing.

He had not seen me coming.

I stopped. I listened to his sobbing.

It had been a long time since I’d heard someone sob this hard, but I had known that person well, and this young man was almost a stranger, homeless, in public, marooned in an alley, sitting on a sidewalk, leaning against a grocery store.

I walked right past him as I looked toward him. I said nothing. He never looked at me. He did not seem addled. His face registered absolute agony.

I got in my car and sat for a spell. Not long thereafter, guilt dropped on me like a guillotine falling to behead a member of French royalty.

Goddammit! My last name is Love and that name has informed my life. I wasn’t raised to just walk away from someone in such obvious suffering.

I decided to drive around the store and see if the young man was still there. If he was, I would pull over and act, although I had no idea what that would entail. Some options buzzed through my mind as the plan began to unfold.

Of course he would be there! We were talking about a total of five to seven minutes elapsed from walking past to him to getting in my car, exiting the parking lot, driving around to the front of the store and then turn into the alley where the young man was.

When I came to the alley, I slowed down and looked for the young man.

Gone! Where? How could he have possibly vanished in that brief amount of time?

I drove home knowing I had violated my number one rule when helping the homeless in my neighborhood: when you see the need to act, you better act then or the moment will most likely disappear.

Sometimes for me, the immorality of inaction doesn’t hit me until I’ve had a few minutes of cogitation about what just transpired.

I’ve got to pick up my pace.