Child At Heart
Short Stories
by
Dominic Spano
Copyright © 2013 Dominic Spano
ISBN: 978-0-9684431-8-7
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real events or to persons, living or dead, is coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher/author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Table of Contents
Beyond the Periphery
When Angels Speak
A Gift From Grandma
The Guardian Angel
About the Book: Each of these short stories, with nostalgic undertones, juxtaposes the innocence of childhood with the challenging emotions and attitudes that sometimes overcome grown-ups after life has chipped away at their views, their hopes and their expectations. In Beyond the Periphery, an intelligent, socially conscious, affluent college kid struggles with his fear of confronting someone who was different from him. As he attempts to meet this challenge, he learns a lesson in life from an unlikely source. When Angels Speak is the story of a middle-aged man who is set in his ways and whose social encounter with two little boys leads him to a new perspective on his life. In A Gift From Grandma, an adolescent’s imminent coming of age is shaped by his ambivalent feelings towards his grandmother. The Guardian Angel is the story of a troubled teenager and the events that conspire to bring new meaning to his life. The book ends with a preview of two of the author’s novels: In the Twilight of the Moon and The Riddled Mystery at Pirate Cove.
Beyond the Periphery
His large bony fingers could have been those of a farmer or a construction worker; but the gnarled joints suggested an aging man with advancing arthritis. I liked to pretend that he really was an old farmer because his routine was so predictable. Each morning, for example, I got to the park at 7:45, armed with my sketchbook and drawing materials, and every day at that precise time I’d see him spreading his blanket of newspapers across the same bench—always the third bench from the East entrance to the park. I often wondered what he would do if, one morning, someone else was already on the bench when he got there, breaking his routine. I also wondered where he had spent the night.
From my perch on a rock overlooking the great lake which had given rise to the park, and in preparation for my upcoming studies at the College of Art, I had been painting scenes that related in some way to the shore and its surroundings. But what I really wanted to paint was this rugged-looking stranger who lived on a park bench, to try and capture the story that his personality and demeanor had been telling me throughout the summer and then show it to my peers when classes begin next month.
I liked to paint in two hour stints so my first break of the day occurred at about 10 a.m. Sure enough, each and every day at that precise time he could be seen reaching into a wrinkled, black grocery bag, pulling out handful after handful of bread crumbs and sprinkling them into the air for the flock of sparrows and pigeons that converged round his feet the moment that first handful rained to the ground, flung the way a farmer would sow seeds in the field. I wondered, too, where the crumbs came from.
“Mother Nature and Her creatures are all a guy has left sometimes,” he said to me on one occasion when he caught me gawking; but I wasn’t really sure what he meant by it.
He had an old, worn, gray saddlebag looped around his shoulder with a filthy piece of masking tape stuck to it, the edges mostly curled. On the tape, printed in large letters, was the faded word BLONDIN. Although his unkempt appearance kept me at a distance, there was something about him that fascinated me. Perhaps it was the way he spoke, much more eloquent than his garb might have suggested. As the son of two college professors, I notice those kinds of things, especially since my mother claims that she can judge a person’s character by the way he speaks.
Many mornings I thought of greeting him in some way, perhaps a quick wave of the hand or a nod of the head or possibly even a ‘good morning’. But I confess I never did. All the social conscience in the universe could not seem to overcome my perception that he and I belonged to two different worlds and my fear of opening up a Pandora’s Box, if I allowed those worlds to cross, was stronger than my need to turn a painting of his features into a thousand words. Then a couple of weeks ago I bore witness to a fleeting incident during my break for lunch that left me riddled with feelings of guilt.
The perpetrators I refer to were each nursing a drink—two women clad in tennis outfits, close in age, perhaps nearing fifty, although their shapely figures and perfectly coiffed good looks hinted of someone younger. The paper cups with gin and tonic had undoubtedly come from the Country Club next to the park, past the sign that read ‘no alcoholic beverages beyond this point’.
The white garb blended inconspicuously with the tall blonde’s fair hair and complexion but it highlighted the deep tan of the stockier, more petite brunette with the white head band. Their aggressive demeanor made me nervous and I avoided direct eye contact in much the same way as when I did not want to antagonize my mother. Instead, I stole quick glances whenever they were caught up in conversation.
“Oh God, look at that—” the blonde said as she walked past me on that particular day.
“I know,” replied the other, a disgusted shake of the head punctuating her feelings on the matter.
At first I thought I might have unwittingly done something to upset them. But the blonde woman’s index finger was pointing elsewhere; namely, to the raggedy-looking man sifting through the contents of the garbage container next to the Country Club’s parking lot. It was Mr. Blondin. The wealthy patrons liked to stroll through the park and sit by the vast lake, watching the south winds sweep the modest surf steadily to shore. On their way back to the Club, they discarded partially finished snacks prior to entering their Mercedes, Jaguars, BMW’s or whatever.
“God forbid that crumbs should taint the upholstery of the most visible symbol of their affluence,” my father used to say with the same look of disgust I saw in the brunette’s face.
“Uggh!” the blonde cried with a shudder that sent a ripple across the unblemished, pale belly of her upper arm as she reached into her purse for the car keys. “I’d rather starve.”
“You got that right,” concurred her friend, and they continued on to their Class Roadster.
As for Mr. Blondin, the scavenging had been productive: three sandwiches, still in wrappers, with no more than two or three bites missing from each, and most of a chocolate éclair. Furthermore, a can of diet Coke that had not been emptied brought a rare smile to his face. A diabolically-greedy look flashed in his dark eyes as he stuffed his stash into the pockets of his tattered army jacket—the one he always wore, even under the 78 degree rays of that cloudless August morning—then retreated back to his bench, crossed his legs under an elbow and savored two of the delights from the morning’s treasure while leisurely sipping the Coke.
“I’ll save you for later,” I overheard him say to the remaining food items as he tore a strip of newspaper from one of the sheets on the bench and proceeded to wrap the discarded remnants. When he had finished, he leaned back on the bench, grinning, and shut his eyes, looking very much at peace with the world. Watching him sitting there, it troubled me to admit that, as much as it bothered me to see him demeaned by those two women, I might not be much better than they. In his complex persona, all I had been seeing was fodder for my art.
The following day, I deliberately left my artist’s paraphernalia at home. Instead, I stopped at a MacDonald’s restaurant near the park and, determined to make some sort of contact with him, I brought a
long an extra cup of coffee. At the park, however, my strange reluctance to approach him persisted. The reality of what the park represented to each of us was a barrier I could not seem to penetrate. Instead, I sat timidly on a bench a few feet away from him, my forearms resting on my spread knees and the hot cup dangling loosely from my grip.
From behind the shopping cart that contained what I supposed were his worldly belongings, Mr. Blondin was staring unashamedly at a bickering young couple across the way. I saw him press a hand firmly to his sternum and shake his head fitfully, causing the lone tuft of hair high atop his forehead to flutter. “Hmph! It’s a mystery,” he said.
My initial reaction was that he must be suffering chest pains and my muscles tensed up, ready to pounce over to assist him. But a devilish grin etched his coarse, unshaven features and it occurred to me that his remark may have been in reference to the arguing couple; or perhaps it was simply the untimely surfacing of regrets that I assumed guys like him might feel. The more I analyzed, the less action I was committed to taking and I soon convinced myself that there was nothing out of the ordinary in this seemingly typical moment in the enigmatic life of a lonely old man living on the streets of an affluent city.
“Everything is a mystery but all things will pass—with or without your approval,” he went on to say. From the corner of my eye it seemed he was looking at me and not the young couple but I pretended not to hear, acting as though I was absorbed with the design on the coffee cup.
When I sensed he had looked away, I turned my head just enough to see him massage his heavy palm deep into his breastbone again. Maybe he really was suffering from chest pains. And maybe this was a natural cue for me to say something.
“Ah well, what can you do?” His voice contained a twinge of sadness that was magnified by my inability to speak up and I felt a pang of shame. My parents had raised me to be more tolerant and certainly more altruistic than my behavior was suggesting.
“Youth is wasted on the young, eh Rosie?” he uttered with another glance at the bickering couple, his words tempered with what sounded to me like resignation.
Then he looked at his large hand and spread the bony fingers, his smile betraying a trace of ego, and I wondered what his 6 foot frame might have looked like in younger years. “Ah well, it’s a crapshoot. You’re given what you’re given and you make the best of it.” He punctuated his observation with an empty nod.
Maybe he was schizophrenic, this Mr. Blondin who was having a coherent conversation with someone who was not there. I had read that people who suffer from that illness often talk to themselves. Yet I could not deny that there was a certain depth to his words, a worldly experience that shone through—the kind I associated with my parents and grandparents. I had an idea for a painting that would personify the weathered voice of experience pointing an infant along the path that was to become his life. I would call it Beyond the Periphery.
“Those kids gotta go through it just like we all did, don’t they?” he finally said to whomever he was visualizing, at the same time pulling what was left of a cigarette from his pocket. Meanwhile, the young couple across the way got up to leave. He reached into his army jacket for a book of matches and lit the cigarette, all the while his eyes followed the departing couple until they were practically out of sight, nodding absently from time to time. Suddenly, his raspy voice broke into song.
“We strolled hand in hand, Roseanne and me
Trying to recreate a used to be
Hoping to find
A love that once was blind
But in time figured out how to see.”
I sat there wide-eyed and perhaps a little open-mouthed, thinking more and more that you really cannot judge a book by its cover and wondering what kinds of thoughts that couple had triggered in Mr. Blondin and how I could project them onto a canvas. Yet I continued to sit in an immobilized state, a cup of rapidly cooling coffee still dangling from my hand.
“Nights along the sand we would recall
Nights that could turn winter into fall ...
Coming up the pathway was a young mother gesticulating angrily at her child. She grabbed the little girl hastily by the hand and quickened her pace, hauling the crying child behind her.
Mr. Blondin wagged a scolding finger at the woman but she paid him no mind.
“Tsk, tsk! Such a hurry! As if you’ll ever get this moment back. Ah well …” and he continued singing softly.
“Nights along the beach,
Our hearts just out of reach
Afraid to dare, afraid to love, afraid to fall.
“I’m right back where I started from, aren’t I, Rosie?” he said. “There’s your Blondin—and then there’s the guy who talks to himself on a park bench, living more vicariously with each passing day.” He took a final drag on his leftover stump of a cigarette then dropped it onto the damp grass beneath his feet and stomped it out. A moment later, he shook his head sadly. “Aw Rosie, Rosie … where did the time fly? Why did you leave me?”
Frozen in a bent-over posture that let me feel inconspicuous, I continued sneaking glances that, in my mind’s eye, had already captured the essence of his ever unfolding story as I needed it to be.
“Aw Rosie … I fear I’m turning into an old has-been,” he finally said.
Down the way, another young couple was playing badminton with their two little children who were too small to make regular contact with the birdie. They erupted in laughter with each miss, catching Mr. Blondin’s attention.
“Hoop-la!” their father boomed on each occasion, taking a fencing lunge in their direction and making a funny face.
“It sure wasn’t in the cards for us, eh Rosie? But we had the right to hope too,” he said with a couple more empty nods.
“Ball please!” A group of teenagers a year or two younger than me were playing baseball and their ball had trickled to Mr. Blondin’s feet. One of the players, a tall, lanky, blonde-haired kid was calling out to him. Mr. Blondin’s eyes came suddenly to life. “Those kids see a man, Rosie, not a geezer behind a shopping cart.”
With a bit of a groan, he leaned over and snatched the ball, smoothed his palms around it several times, perhaps caressing the stitches like my father had taught me to do. Whoosh! He flung the ball back to the baseball players with a vigor that must have crossed a thirty year old time barrier.
The boys burst into applause, cheered and whistled. Mr. Blondin responded with a broad smile and a half-bow worthy of a musketeer, sending the long, scraggly, graying hair on the sides of his head cascading down his face.
“We need a pitcher,” yelled the lanky, blonde-haired boy with a grin. “Are ya inarested?”
Mr. Blondin returned the grin, gave him a fictitious tip of the hat and reclaimed the comfort of his bench. He seemed to know exactly how he wanted his life to unfold. Yet his one-sided conversation with Rosie suggested unfinished business that still needed to be reconciled.
He leaned over to gather some acorns from the grass and maneuvered them on the palm of his hand. After straightening back up, he clutched at the area below his collarbone. “Oh—” His breath caught, sending the new morsel of cigarette between his lips to the ground.
“Sir! Sir! Are you okay?” Finally I was able to break free from my emotional prison.
“Huh?” Mr. Blondin glanced around several times and I thought he might have become disoriented.
“Are you feeling okay, sir?” I repeated. “Here, have a coffee.”
Without looking at me, Mr. Blondin reached over and relieved me of the now cold drink.
“May I take you to the hospital?”
“No, I’m okay. This happens to me every so often. Maybe one day it will kill me but for now I’ll be fine.”
“Can I walk you home or something?” I asked, not certain as to the appropriateness of such a question but conscious of my mother’s insistence that I treat everyone equally.
“Home is where the heart is, son. I’ll sit here a while longer.” Mr. Blondin
opened his hand to reveal the acorns. “These always remind me of my wife, you know. She died.”
“Oh I’m sorry to hear that. I’m sure she’d want me to see that you’re all right.”
“I’m okay ... really.” When he looked up at me, Mr. Blondin’s eyes softened for the first time. “And so are you.” The validation conveyed by those words instantly washed away any feelings of ambivalence I had associated with my desire to connect with this man.
I gave his shoulder a squeeze. “I guess I’ll leave you then—if you’re sure you’re okay.”
“I am. Thank you.”
As I turned to go, I experienced a strange sadness. My world had overlapped with that of this down but not out stranger and, instead of chaos, trepidation or regret, I was walking away with a sense of loss. I glanced back and saw him staring at me. Our eyes met and he waved me back over to him.
“It’s called the hole in the soul, son.”
“Pardon me?”
“I saw you looking at those two tennis ladies yesterday. But they didn’t bother me, you know. To be honest with you, there was a time when I, too, was disgusted by the sight of someone sifting through a garbage can for a scrap of food. And I certainly never thought it could ever be me.” He shrugged regretfully. “But things happen.”
I moved a sheet of his newspapers aside and sat down next to him on the bench. “If you ask me, you’re just like every body else.”
“Each one of us is like everybody else, son, until circumstances dictate otherwise. That’s when you have to watch out.”
“For what?”
“For anything that preys on the vulnerable.”
“I don’t see you as vulnerable at all. If anything, you seem to be very assertive.”
“Look, a guy needs something good to happen to him every now and then, that’s all I’m saying. And it’s been so damn long since anything good happened to me—” He cast his hand into the air and let the remainder of his thought drift away.
I told him of my mother’s conviction that if we keep telling ourselves something long enough then we start to believe it. “You know, if she were here, she’d say it’s self-defeating.”
“No disrespect, son, but I prefer to call it survival. Looking at life the way I do keeps me out of denial.”
His logic was as raw as his existence on that bench and nothing my parents could have said from the comfort of their ivory tower would have made as much sense to me. “Even so, you have every right to hope,” I said, regurgitating his own words.
He smiled the way my grandfather does when he humors me. “You get tired of hoping, son. The time comes when you accept things. Something as simple as a compliment coming my way these days is like a scrap of food being thrown to a starving man. He wants it so bad that it clouds his judgment—and that’s what makes him vulnerable. Fantasy merges with reality and then every word, every promise, and every hope becomes a potential predator. If that is an ugly thought to you, my advice is never let yourself get to that stage.”
Then he grabbed my shoulder hard and turned me towards him. “You hear me good, son. Things can always be worse than they are—never forget that. Even guys like me have plenty to be thankful for; that’s why people like those tennis ladies don’t bother me. The hole is in their soul, not mine.”
I turned away and threw my weight against the back of the bench. I knew his phrase could apply just as easily to me.
“When people stop believing they have something to be thankful for, that’s precisely when they’re no longer in control of their destiny. Their reality is so ugly to them that they deny what everybody else can plainly see.”
While I pondered his words, wondering how a guy like him lost control of his destiny, his very next remark exposed the magnitude of the growing up I still needed to do.
“The hole in the soul isn’t pretty but it sometimes is the only route to better days.”
My grandfather likes to say that human beings see life unfold from eye level but only God sees the Big Picture. Well, I guess this man was allowing me a glimpse into the Big Picture—something that my parents had never been able to do.
“It’s a lonely world, son. You were born alone and you’re gonna die alone. You gotta look after yourself alone too. That’s all I’m saying. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve gotta move on.”
He got up, gathered his newspapers off the bench and folded them neatly into his shopping cart.
“Will I see you tomorrow?” I asked.
He tapped at his breast a couple of times and looked me squarely in the eye. “You can see me anytime you need to.”
He winked at me and pushed his shopping cart slowly up the path, through the East Gates and out of sight.
I never saw him in the park after that.