Eccentric Flower:199901/i met a man who wasnt there

five january (two)

i met a man who wasn't there

I was waiting for the subway this morning, with my coffee. A man approached me. He had a simple face, that Mojo Nixon face that screams "hick" (but it ain't necessarily so). He'd gone hippie with it, though, long hair under a watch cap, full beard. Dirty hands. Several layers of thin coats, most of them fairly battered. Okay shoes.

He said he wanted to ask me a question. He was trying to accumulate some change for coffee. I fished out some coins, handed them to him. He closed his hand over them without looking.

"I bet I can tell you when you were born," he said. He named a date in the early seventies. I told him I had been born in 1968. He couldn't believe it. He said he had been born in 1959.

He pulled out a crumpled cigarette. Smoking in the subway is illegal. I wasn't going to say anything. It took him several tries to light it.

"I want you to think about the seventies," he said. "Remember the Seventies? Remember McGovern? Remember George Wallace?" I told him that those were history to me - that I certainly knew who they were, but everything I knew about them, I knew from books.

"You're kidding!" He really didn't believe me. "You don't remember McGovern running for President? Wallace getting shot in the stomach?" Nope. "I'm only a little older than you are, and I remember them like they were yesterday!"

My train arrived and I never did try to tell him that he was nearly a decade older than me, that he was existing in the sort of personal time warp that we all have a tendency to create.

And all the way to work, I couldn't stop thinking: Why those particular questions? Why those two people?

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