Noise

Today, I saw a man walking down a street in my neighborhood with a murderous look ill-concealed by a pair of rather large, ostentatious sunglasses. He gripped an also rather large pair of vine cutters in his hand. In fact, everything about this man was large. Except for himself.

His ill-fitting, rather washed-out yellow polo shirt hung past his elbows and flapped sadly with the violence of his motion, shaking their heads in resignation. His cargo shorts swished around his knees in a sort of counter-motion to the polo sleeves so there became an opposing balance to this man's hardly contained fury. Sleeves flap forward, shorts flap back, sleeves forward, shorts back, forward, back, forward, back.

Then his tired shoelaces joined in the chorus, plastic ends slapping against the synthetic uppers of shoes that had terribly scuffed heels, though not from any sort of physical activity. Socks drooped still lower.

Where was he going? Where had he been? Was he going to return the pliers to some erstwhile neighbor as my mother, naive in so many ways, believed? Or was he out to perpetrate the grisly murder of some former friend who had wronged him dreadfully? Perhaps there was a scandal involved. Perhaps the woman running an intersection behind him was his wife, frantically seeking forgiveness and an end to this madness.

But maybe he was just a guy in a big shirt who was really unhappy about having to carry a large vine cutter around on a Sunday morning. I can't say that I blame him.