Words + Images

No picture this week but I can share this …

I’ve picked up a few things about him. He’s Haitian and speaks Creole. He joined the neighborhood maybe two years ago. He’s slender, and his skin is like black walnut. Smooth and dark. He’s rather ageless — he could be 40 or he could be 70. Is he good or bad? That I do not know. He does seem to move with grace through the world from my vantage point. I live along a main thoroughfare and along this thoroughfare he walks with an easy gait. And when he walks he sings. Operatically.

Even when I am not peering out of a window, I know that he is near by the song in the air as he moves. I know so little about opera (and that little is thanks mostly to PBS and to Bugs Bunny) and yet when he sings I can recognize what little I have heard. La Traviata. La Boheme. Wagner. And then during a recent rainstorm, when I left the windows a little cracked to let in the wonderful fresh air, I heard his voice.

I looked out a window and there he was, walking along nonchalantly, with his bags from the local grocery store, dark skin and hair, white shirt plastered against his whippet form,  and those khaki pants. His shoes I could not see in the shadows of the looming night. His voice filled the air. This time it was Ave Maria.

His head was tilted back, and when he stepped beneath the glow of the street light, I could see the white of his teeth and eyes. I’d just heard Ave Maria sung at a funeral a week or so before. So solemn that day. This man, my unnamed fellow, sang it with such joy.

We have yet to actually meet. I figure I should not rush out of my home, make him stop his song, to accost him with my questions of “who are you” and “what is your story” or “may I snap your portrait.”

At least, not yet. 🙂