by Andrew Moran

Created on: May 09, 2011

It’s amazing the amount of people that you see in your life.  Think about it.  You walk by hundreds of people per day, assuming you live in a metropolitan area.  You share an elevator with at least one person.  You go to the picture house and sit with a few dozen co-inhabitants of this planet.  You go to a grocery store and see a fellow carnivore.  It’s simply astounding to see such an astronomical amount of people.  However, most of the time these people don’t intrigue you because they’re all the same, except for one person.

When I was a child, I would see this one gentleman every single day at the exact same time of the day with a stern, deep-thought expression on his face.  It would appear he had a lot on his mind such as the meaning of life or the solution to a mathematical equation.  Who knows?  The only thing I knew is that I was dying to talk to the gentleman but I didn’t.  I never knew why exactly.  Was it intimidation?  Was it because I feared that he hated children?  Was it because I had no idea what to say?  Possibly.  I must’ve been ten-years-old, so what could I say that would diverge his attention away from whatever he was thinking about?

My parents never questioned the gentleman’s motive for constantly sitting there.  I remember I once asked my father why the desolate man was there all the time.  My father told me it was none of our business.  I asked my mother once and she replied that he could’ve been on his break from work.  I was not satisfied with the answers.  My parents were apathetic to the lives of others or to the important questions.  As long as they had the latest vacuum cleaner, the most expensive vehicle or the newest dress, they were content.  I grew up the exact opposite of them and I became the didactic one as opposed to the hebetudinous individual.

Throughout my classes, I had thought about the douse gentleman.  I had a clear picture of his personality, voice, humor, intellect and even his apartment.  I envisioned a voice similar to Walter Pidgeon, a personality close to Humphrey Bogart, an intellect matching that of those economists from the Austrian School of Economics, Woody Allen’s humor and an apartment that glorified the Parisian bohemian.

During those treacherous times of writing essays, school papers and short stories, I would try to incorporate

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