The old man waves at me as I pass, hesitantly at first - like he doesn’t quite remember me - and then tenaciously, swinging his arm back and forth with familiarity and zeal. Such is our daily routine: in driving home from work, I inevitably pass his modest gray stone house which rests only three plots down from my home. I always wave first, initiating the ritual, and taking great care when lifting my eyes from the road ahead and toward the old man at my left as he lounges under his awning, beyond the small poplars and crumbling porch steps. And he returns my wave, fervently but never smiling.
“He’s 80 years old,” my father tells me, beaming. “He still gets out there and works. Puts garage doors up. Been doing it for forty-something years.”
***
The day before yesterday, the old man shuffled across our paved suburban street, wheezing and cursing the humidity despite the dark, full coveralls he was wearing; and approached my father.
“I’ve got a complaint,” he grumbled.
My father, who had been fumbling with the lawn mower and fearing it was now somehow busted, stood up, alert. “Okay, sir.”
“Your boy,” the old man continued, “has got to be one of the nicest kids his age. Every day, he passes and waves. Never speeds. Never blares his radio.”
It didn’t take my father long to realize that the old man had absentmindedly used complaint, when he had obviously meant to say compliment. My father wiped the sweat from his forehead with his palm and smiled proudly, knowing the old man had shown his age.
“Well thank you, sir,” he replied, finally.
The old man wheezed, and said, “Aright.” He turned and shuffled back across the street.
***
I think about the old man sometimes, when my unfocused brain begins to stumble from subject to random subject with no consideration for reason - visiting but only staying awhile. I thought about him yesterday, while I stood behind the vending machines at an abandoned Winn-Dixie - my pants around my ankles - receiving a blowjob from a girl who works with me, and who had offered the service that very morning. The old man just sat on his porch in my head, smoking and wheezing and waiting for me to come along. I wanted to come along, too. If anything, I liked that there existed at least one constant I could look forward to each day. One pleasant moment among so many unpleasant ones. And it was just waving. That’s all it was.
I remembered quickly that the old man was 80 years old and dying, and that our waving ritual’s days were not constant, but instead quite numbered. I found myself wondering if his dying thoughts would be of me, his daily “hey” guy who - by the simple act of waving - convinced him that his worst fears were not entirely true, and that he’d soon be leaving behind at least some small measure of decency and good still living on this planet. Will I be invited to the funeral?, I asked myself. Will I be carrying his casket and reading his eulogy? Probably not.
I stopped the girl before I finished.
“What’s the matter?” she asked softly, running her fingers over her lips and blushing.
“Nothing,” I said as I pulled my trousers up and zipped; and then paused, looking off into the sky, which was cloudy and just beginning to darken.
“Everything.”
