The Man I Walked Past 400 Times

Notes from a time traveler

I can time travel. Maybe this is something I’ve always known, but it wasn’t until this week that I understood it. You don’t believe me, but you will.

There have been long stretches of my life where I couldn’t distinguish one day from the next. Each day stacked upon the one before it, anchored in place by the pins of a routine that pierced the stack of weeks, months, and years. Wake up in darkness, turn off the alarm, dress and run three miles in the park. Take a seven-minute shower and towel off with the precision of a choreographed dance. Walk the dog the same loop around the block where he pees on the same mailbox. Get in the car and join the string of sleepy commuters, pulled on a conveyor into the city for work. I could go on, but you get the idea. This is not an original script. It’s Groundhog Day.

This stacking of days started when I became a proper adult and began to accumulate responsibilities — a real job, a wife, a dog, a child. I’m sure people create their own looping rituals without these guideposts. We humans love the safety of routine. We’re hypnotized by it even when we might inwardly rage against it. I’ve spent much of my life feeling like a prisoner of routine. I saw it as an obstacle to a life of meaning, the repetition a tranquilizer that allows people to sleepwalk through their lives.

Now, I see it differently.

The furrows I’ve plowed and plodded through over and over again at various stages of my life serve a purpose. They allow me to encounter something enough times to actually see it, understand my connection to it, and finally respond in the way I should have the first time. I’m a slow learner, so these loops give me time to catch up.

“If it weren’t for second chances, we’d all be alone.”
— Gregory Alan Isakov

How many times did I have to pass the same unhoused man on my daily morning walk in the park before I actually offered some meaningful help? By my rough calculation, approximately 400 times. The first time I saw him, shambling down the slope into the trees with his cart, my heart hurt. The second time it hurt less. After a couple of weeks, he all but disappeared into the landscape unless there was a glitch disrupting the continuity of my loop. Maybe I started my walk a few minutes earlier and saw him rising from where he slept on a cold slab of concrete under the bridge. Eventually, he took up rent in my head, and I began to think about him as I was making dinner or falling asleep in the comfort of my bed.

I made a study of him, creating a mosaic of the details I could glean in the few seconds I saw him each day. It was an unconscious way to soothe my inflamed conscience. On sunny mornings in spring, he sat with a tattered, coverless paperback novel, reading. He stashed his cart in the woods down by the culvert. He sometimes hums to himself when he’s walking. It’s common to see a person in his position shouting and raging at an antagonist who is no one and everyone, but until a few days ago, I’d never even heard him speak. Maybe any passionate feeling he had in his youth has been bludgeoned out of him by the relentless days of sleeping outside, eating from trash cans, and being completely invisible. But that isn’t the whole story. There’s something gentle about him and steady, even methodical. He’s about my height and build, and we’re roughly the same age. What were the circumstances that led him to be alone and abandoned by society? What was he reading? How did he manage to get enough nutrition to stay alive? I wondered about all this and more, and still I never spoke to him. I never acknowledged him and certainly never offered him any help. He never once asked.

He found his way into my writing as a series of fictional characters. I began to tell my partner, Paradis, about him. Unlike me, she doesn’t require remedial repetition to take action. It’s one of the things I love most about her. If she sees someone suffering, she offers help right away. She doesn’t tune it out or overthink it. Unprompted, she set up an activity for our seven-year-old daughter and her friends to assemble some kits we could give out to the many unhoused people who live among us here in Midtown Atlanta. The kids stuffed socks, soap, toothpaste, lip balm, and granola bars into ziplock bags. They colored notes with the message “you are loved” and tucked them into the bags. After an hour, we had sixty kits.

I had no more excuse to ignore the man in the park and, more importantly, I had a reason to reach out to him. I had something to offer.

Yesterday I called out to him, but he didn’t hear me. His focus was on trying to keep his heavy cart from getting away from him on the steep incline. I caught up to him, and he turned to me with a look of bewilderment. As our eyes met, I wondered if he had actually ever seen me in all those times we had passed one another. I offered him the bag. He looked confused but accepted it. I introduced myself and offered my hand. He shook it, but the wary look on his face remained. He made a phlegmy cough, struggling to find his voice. He said his name was Darren. I asked him what he had been reading. He said something about Waltzes and Devils. I asked if that was a novel. “Yes, a story,” he said. “I like stories.”

This morning when I saw him, I stopped and asked how he was doing. He nodded and smiled. I asked him what I could do to help. What did he actually need? Did he need a sleeping bag? He said that would be great, but then, as I was putting my earbuds back in, he said, “Shoes, would shoes be okay? Don’t need the sleeping bag.” “Yeah,” I said. “I think we’re the same size.” He looked skeptical. “13?” I asked. He smiled and nodded. “Okay, I’ll bring some tomorrow,” I said.

I made my way back home to begin the next sequence in my loop, the one where I harness my brain to the plow that works someone else’s field. The golden autumnal light filtering through the trees invited a trance-like peace, and my mind wandered. A metaphor surfaced, as they often do when I’m walking.

A person’s life is the daily work of stitching the delicate, gossamer fabric of our dreams to the heavy, unyielding canvas of reality. The needle is purpose, and the thread persistence. In good years, we leave behind a seam of meaning with stitches so tight the two fabrics become one. In bad years, we leave gaping holes.

We are, all of us, time travelers. We don’t need a machine. We don’t need a DeLorean or hadron collider. We can’t travel back to the signing of the Declaration of Independence or the birth of Hitler. We can only travel along the spiral of stitches, the small routines and rituals that hold our lives together each day, and maybe, if we’re paying attention, notice something we missed before — something we can do over and do better this time around.

Tomorrow I will take Darren a pair of tennis shoes and hopefully tighten one small stitch.

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