Jordan sat down next to him and an inexplicable wave of
sorrow engulfed him completely. The man looked down at his intertwined hands
and didn’t seem to notice that a young man had entered from left stage.
Jordan’s sadness focused on a few scenes happening that day
in the distance. A man his age in full army uniform hugging his new wife
goodbye. Jordan thought of the pile of rejection letters under his pillow and
sighed, wondering if the man in the green hat was a veteran or a college
graduate, or both.
On the opposite side of the baseball field, a man in his
early forties carried half a cardboard box with the petty belongings of a long
and stagnant office job. Everything was becoming automatic, everyone replaced
by machines. Not the man in the green hat—he winded his watch every day. But
not lately, not lately.
Jordan rubbed his eyes and stared at the old man’s grey
eyes, attempting to discover what hid behind his two pearly eyes like Uranus.
The man averted his eyes and dug into his breast pocket for a pipe made of
briarwood. He took his time, filling the pipe with tobacco, never blinking eyes
behind his round spectacles. As the man lit up, the sweet smell of pipe smoke
settled pleasantly inside of Jordan’s nostrils.
And then, Jordan understood—a lonely park without sunsets, a hopeless
summer with no news, a smoking man without his wife.
“Martha passed away today.”
Jordan turned his head to the old man who had just spoken,
impeccably and unsuitably dressed with a gray suit and green hat.
“Forty years ago today,” he said.
By: Laura Moreno Saraga
