A New Christmas Story

Chapter Two

One day last week, before Saturday, but after Thursday, I went out to the grocery store to pick up a few things for the weekend.  The store was busy with shoppers.

As I turned to go down one of the aisles, I detected a foul odor - similar to a garbage dumpster, I looked at a customer as he passed by, to see if he showed any reaction to the smell, but he seemed not to pay attention.  I looked ahead of me and saw the source of the odor.

An old man with a beat up fedora type hat, a tattered overcoat, ragged, filthy clothes, pulling an old wire shopping cart, duck taped together, with a much used black garbage bag containing his 'stuff'.  In a sort of wire-basket attachment, I noticed some groceries, yet only a bag of Frito's stood out.

As I moved closer, the stench was more intense. Almost like moss and earth with a pronounced odor of organic decay.  I glanced to see his face but it was dirty, unshaven, his glasses so smudged I was unable to see his eyes.  I moved quickly to pass by, the odor was revolting.  At the end of the aisle, I stopped to look back, and saw him pass by other customers who seemed to be oblivious to the man, not even a reaction to the odor, which seemed to fill the aisle, much less the bizarre specter of his appearance.

I stood there for a moment, wondering what sort of apparition I had just seen.  Save for the fact I had seen the same man at the same store in the exact same circumstance last summer, I might have thought the man was a Dickensian ghost, whose appearance was some sort of warning to me.  His appearance reminded me of a character I sometimes pastiche from the work of George Tooker, into my own compositions.  That said, his visage was more frightening to me than it was repulsive.

I can't forget him, and have speculated upon his reality.  Did I alone see him, was I the only person to perceive the decayed effluvia which surrounded him?  Was he a hallucination?  An apparition?  Or was he real?  Could he be a sort of hermit dwelling in the reeds across the playing field opposite the store, along the shore of the lake?  Perhaps he's a sort of iuródivyi, or fool for Christ?  The holy fools, pilgrims and mendicants, were not sweet smelling and finely dressed - their poverty was real.  The poor today are real... was he real?

I am now ashamed I was repulsed by him, wondering if he needed help, or money?  I reasoned he must be known to the store employees, since no one seems to react to his eccentric demeanor.  By the time I got to the register, the man was gone, leaving no tell-tale scent behind.  I was unwilling to ask the cashier if he had seen him, not knowing how to describe him with an appropriate empathy, and without expressing any sense of dread.

It still haunts me, perhaps he is my personal ghost of Christmas future?  What if he be a portent of what is soon to come?  Is there more to it?  Or did I just imagine it?

Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing
To what I shall unfold. - Hamlet, Act 1,5,740