i met him again yesterday morning, going home from work after a nightshift. he struck me as... aged. this morning, i met him again... he barely walked, and held a hand on his back, near the hips, as if he was aching.i have no idea what his name is. i don't know where he lives either, but i know it's somewhere around me. i've known him since i was a kid, by no other name than "mr. duck" (no, not 'drake' as wiki.answers claims a male duck is
called). i made fun of him by that name with my brother then. it was because of his walk. his whole body moves from side to side when he walks. actually, more like that of a penguin, but i didn't know of penguins when i was little. that's for how long i've known him. since before i knew of penguins.i always met him along the same way, coming from the opposite direction in his duck-walk. i always said 'hello', because i thought it was someone i knew - after all he lived somewhere around and i saw him every day and my parents said it was polite to say hello to people you knew. he would always raise his left hand in a salute and say "hello, dollie" to me.
that's how he has always said it since then. i saw him now and again even recently. i gave no further thought to when i did, usually in the mornings coming home. he was part of what should be there, part of the familiar landscape. like the buildings i keep passing for twenty years. because the path i go is largely the same ever since late kindergarden.
as said, no further thought. i always said hello, he always raised his left hand and i could read it on his lips that he always said "hello, dollie". i haven't really walked much around without headphones on ever since highschool and that is a LOT of time ago. i never turned the music off when we crossed paths. that's how little consideration i gave this man who has no name known to me other than "mr. duck" and who has been part of the landscape for nearly twenty years. he hasn't even changed much - he always looked exactly the same... or so i thought.
yesterday i was really struck. i saw he had some difficulty walking and i looked closer at his face. he has aged. a lot. twenty years. and he was probably sick. if yesterday i was stunned to suddenly discover how time has passed over this anonymous duck-dude, yesterday i felt a pang of pity. he definitely found walking a taxing activity. and he was obviously in pain when doing so. he even stopped to talk to me, a thing he had never done. he never said more than hi except maybe on one or two occasions when our dialogue consisted of "school's out?" "yep, for today" or "back from school?" "no, work" "my, you've grown"and then it was while we were passing each other by, not really stopping.
what he told me, as i took off my earphones (yes, i did in my surprise) was along the lines of "look at this, can you believe it, i can barely walk". and my reply was very stupid and very out of line "eh... the joys of 'youth' ". he laughed and said it was true before we each went our way. the next moment i only thought of that as a very, very stupid joke. though it was the very obvious truth. i guess it was just not one of those truths that should be flung in people's faces. and i was the last one to do it, after all i've been calling him "mr. duck" all my life. it just came out of me on the spot.
and i went home wondering in what shape i'll see him next... and struck by the thought that there will come a day when i will never see him again. he will vanish from the landscape, like a tree cut down, or a facade painted over. only much, much less noticeable. see, he is so peripheral and insignificant to 'my world', even though he's always been there in some sort of way, that if it hadn't been for this two days and the way his appearance struck me, i probably wouldn't even have realised that he has disappeared from it.
yet, this morning his presumed future disappearance at some point seemed like a little tragedy. a little selfish tragedy. it was not him as a person i cared about or would have mourned, but my childhood world losing an apparently totally insignificant piece of the puzzle. but it is one of
many. like the piece that disappeared when they leveled the 'hill' we used to sleigh down in winter, or the rose-beds around which my dog ran, or the moving out of a neighbour i kinda liked though never spoke to, or a loved t-shirt i've grown out of. somehow, pieces of the puzzle seem to get lost along the way and i never even give them conscious thought as such... i just some days wonder what has gone amiss and what exactly this diffuse feeling of loss is. probably the feeling one gets when looking at a puzzle full of gaps, i'd guess...
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