Commoners (Trade & Craft)

He was old, proof enough he’d once been young. Far back in human history, decades or so, some woman had carried him to term and birthed him. Curtis Walford. Some man far back in a different kind of human history, last name Walford, had sent sperm on expedition into the uterus of his mother—a child that would live to outgrow his very father. Might be hard to describe his face—he aspired to facelessness. A name without a face…why would he prefer that? We’re making him up as we go, describing who he was and wasn’t. He’d never existed before we began describing him. But he was a decent person. His name plain and throwaway enough we might take his passage from oblivion into communal history for granted. We were now talking of Curtis Walford, having just now come into his acquaintance. Eighty-two years old but born just this past hour, as we dream him up and talk of him. 

What wisdom could he impart? What advice or warnings or dirty jokes? We’d have to make that up for him as well, empty as his head was, free of his own thoughts and forever absorbent of who we were and weren’t. Old man on a bench near a river. In Trondheim or Cincinnati. Watching teenagers play frisbee golf in a nearby park or seagulls warring over scraps of bread. Did we invent this so we wouldn’t have to live it? Cast the curse of aging and aloneness into some homely golem, escape through the rear exit doors of our fictions? Here he is, right leg crossing over left. Shamelessly a hand lifts to pick its choice of nostril, wipes the mortal refuse on the back of the bench. No one’s watching, so how could shame fall upon him? We’re watching though. Doesn’t he know that? The aversions we’ve packed him with, like cheap furniture in storage, block his view of his many makers standing off across the field, the road, the river, pretending to be mere figures in a distance. If we raised a hand to wave, he’d find his own raising of its own accord. Waving without anything to be gained from the greeting. He’d yawn. Pull at a sock. Strain eyes to see what he’d erased with his hello. Back and forth, back and forth, see? A hand can clean the air without meaning to.