Hey "Bob"

In our neighborhood, there was an old house—a gray, sad bungalow. During the summer, as I walked by, I would sometimes see a thin old man sitting on a chair on the balcony facing the street, his dim eyes gazing into the distance. You could call him "Bob." I never saw a woman around him, and he was very frail, small in stature, dressed in white, and leaning on a cane. I saw him a few times. If I greeted him, he might not have heard, or perhaps he didn't have the strength to respond.

I never noticed when he left our alley, but one day, a realtor hammered a "For Sale" sign into the ground, right in front of that plane tree in his yard. Oh, how that sign seemed to stab right into my heart with its crooked picture and fake smile. My heart sank when I realized his chair was no longer there, bathed in the slanted light of the late afternoon. My mind wandered to his house, his bed, his stash of medicines, and his final moments.

People came and went, and eventually, someone bought the house. Now it’s fall, and as the leaves began to turn yellow, the "Sold" sign went up. Every day as I pass by, I can’t bring myself to look at the house.

I didn’t know him, but it’s as if a sense of sorrow lingers around that place, for someone who must have lived there for sixty or seventy years, breathing the same air. Yesterday, with the ground covered in leaves, his grown children came to pack up his life into cars and trucks, sending some things off to the junkyard. My dog, stubborn as always, tried to get close to the things left by the curb. Maybe he was looking for the old man, but I couldn’t bear to look.

The old man is still present in the alley somehow, sitting among the maples on that wooden chair in the grass, watching as people take his belongings away. His bedroom lamp was now lying crooked on the sidewalk, his wall clock, his coffee table, a few pieces of exercise equipment—oh, it felt like they were throwing out the old man along with everything he owned.

His sons, or maybe they were his sons-in-law, had lined up their cars and were loading them up. I pulled my dog firmly in the opposite direction, trying not to cry, trying not to let my heart break over all that absence after a lifetime of presence.

For couple of days , I wrestled with myself, telling myself not to write these sad words, but I had to write something to find a bit of peace. The old man in the alley surely knows that my dog and I think of him every day as we pass by that concrete balcony facing the west... Hey "Bob," you're still in the heart of this neighborhood.