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The summer sun was high as I stirred among the rocks down at the creek by my house. Under the bridge I noticed a great heap of a gray and green blur. Upon closer inspection, I realized that it was an old man in a green coat. He had long, gray-brown hair matted to his scalp. A gray beard jutted from his chin like a flattened, bent sword. He was holding a severely dented can of soup, running a rusty knife through the tin, then slurping the contents straight from the can. When he noticed me watching him, he quickly hid the soup behind his back and mumbled something unintelligible at me.

I crawled up the ivy-laden embankment and rushed into my house, locking the door behind me. I didn't know who he was or what he was doing, for I was only a ten-year-old boy, but I knew that I was afraid of him. He didn't jibe with my understanding of the way things were supposed to be. It frightened me to see someone hungry enough to sip soup through a dangerously jagged edge. I didn't realize it then of course, but I would grow to be just like him.

The funny thing is that I only recently realized this, which is really too bad. Here I sit, forty-five years old and I've finally had one of those revelations' in my mind where everything finally comes together.

There was something that I'd never figured out, one of those things that stays hidden in the back of your mind and comes back to show it's shadow every so often. I never figured out why that man under the bridge never came up to my house and helped himself to my mom's kitchen. He had to know I was home alone, because I saw him staring into my huge living room window which laid the whole house open in one glimpse. There was no car in our driveway, I was peering out all bug eyed and trembling. I know for a fact that he knew. What young boy's lack in wits, they make up for with intuition.

I just figured it out, after all this time; it is so simple and so obvious that I hate to admit that it took thirty-five years to come to me. He simply wasn't a criminal. According to modern thinking, it only stands to reason that he should break the law in order to gain his food and necessities, but obviously he didn't. He just ate garbage from who knows where and trudged along. You see that's why I'm like him. I have lived my life by the same basic principles as him; abide by the law. The only difference is that I made better career choices and never had to eat garbage, in the literal sense.

My court hearing is still coming up, so I can't say too

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