Most every Sunday the man is here, sipping from a ceramic coffee mug and playing himself in rock paper scissors. He has hair like an angry wind; each gray strand disagrees with the one next to it. Today his tie is green, but usually it is a shade of red. The mug, too, is red— scarlet, the color of my pleated skirt for middle-school graduation—and it says Warning: Child-Spoiling Grandpa with the same graphics as a sign on a chain-link fence warning of hazardous waste. I watch from my own spot on the long bench diagonally across the walking path. I make bets about the rock paper scissor game. His right hand always wins, at least four out of five times, but I’m always naive in my bets, and hold too much optimism for the underdog left hand.
Today is Easter Sunday, and the sky has opened to a sunlit plain of sapphire that tastes like spring water to my parched mouth after winter. I don’t know if the world is joyfully proclaiming Jesus’ resurrection, or if it woke up and decided to be lovely, or if I woke up and remembered to see beauty. It is not the sort of thing you can aspire to calculate. I tilt my head and feel its softness, wiggling my toes in their boots. Diagonally across from me the old man doesn’t look up, or even breathe more fully than usually. He stares at his hands, curling and striking with such unpredictable deliberateness, and then at his mug, which I can see steaming from across the way.
Asking about his grandchildren seems the only reasonable way to start a conversation; I realized this weeks ago, but since then have made no advancement. Although he is so concentrated, his back so straight and unflinching, I worry about wounds: I worry about the hot coffee, and the pressed tie, and the affectionate label on the mug. Where is his wife, his grandchild? Why don’t the pigeons gather at his feet, like they do all the other old men who sit and ponder on their separate benches?
A band of young Christian men appear coming down the pathway, one with a banjo, two with silver bells they chime in time with the string melody. They are singing a country-Christian song, no doubt written in their old family basement together, and they seem not to notice the stares from other people, whether hostile or simply curious, but continue parading in celebration, their blushed faces lifted towards the horizon. When they pass by me, and one of their feet steps on the lace of my left boot, I try to focus on the words. And golden Jesus was arisen, and the people all a-singin’, and the sinners gone a-hidden…
Only seconds later, they pass the old man, and as though he is only now hearing the music, he looks up abruptly and reaches to grab the arm of the banjo-player. He says something I cannot hear, and the banjo-player looks to his brothers briefly, and then shrugs in easy resignation. The three musicians squeeze onto the bench with him and cease their song, gently laying their instruments on the blacktop. The man offers them a sip from his mug, and they politely decline with a quick gesture of a waving hand. And then the four men straighten their collars, and begin to play one another in rock paper scissors.
I seem to be the only one who can observe the scene, and the only one who misses the music. In its absence, the agitating buzz of human movement clouds my thoughts, and I find it difficult to regain the rhythm of my breathing. The old man is beating the banjo-player time and time again. With the other two, it is always a draw.
I tell myself that these four know each other from church, and that they thought paying one another cordial company on a holy day was only proper and Christian. I tell myself that during the week, they see each other around the neighborhood and say good-afternoon as any good acquaintances do. I comfort myself: the rock paper scissor game is a special tradition from years ago, when the brothers were young and the old man was like a revered uncle: the kind of rare child-adult relationship where there are no conditions, no rules, and no materialistic gifts of baseball cards or candy. It’s all in good fun, I assure myself. There is more to it than what I am seeing.
And yet never before on this bench on a Sunday have I felt so antsy, so afraid. I have the sense, watching the four men, of impending chaos; the same feeling as knowing that somewhere far away a child is unraveling the scarf you’ve spent a lifetime knitting. If that is it— just three brothers and a strange old man, just coffee and a banjo, just rock and paper and scissors—if that is it, then I could have gone to sit with him months ago. Worse: if that’s all there is, I can retie my loose laces and walk diagonally across the path right now, beneath the unfolded sky, and squeeze onto one end of the bench. If that is it, then nobody would notice, and none of us would be changed.