By the Podium

This morning, the homeless-est homeless man in this area rode past me on his bicycle. He said "hey" and nodded his head.

I said, "mornin."

He comes here every day and plays the same game on the same computer. The game is to plant flowers in rows. Every time I walk by, I wonder if he's hungry.

I have never been hungry. Not really.

Somehow I envy his hungriness, his homelessness, his flower game.

When I was younger, I heard a story of a professor who walked out of his classroom. He never went home. He never went to his office. He left his briefcase by the podium. The story was that he walked to the park a few blocks away and never left it. He was pointed out to me once when I walked past this park.

His face was dirty but shining. He was watching a chess game. Something one of the men said made him laugh. He looked toward the sky.