Hal - Deliberately Basic

While I wasn’t paying attention

I didn’t know the guy of course, but he left an impression on me as I watched him dance with his wife, or whatever she was to him at the time. He was a big man, late forties, his tee shirt ballooned out from the weight of his belly, and a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He towered over his wife, or whatever she was, pulled her in close, and I wondered if his scruffy beard bothered her, but she didn’t seem to mind at all, smiling, obviously relishing the closeness they enjoyed. They closed their eyes and shuffled to the music of “Only You” by The Platters, and I imagined this must have been exactly what they did at the high school dance, perhaps thirty years earlier. What had they learned in thirty years, besides the obvious lessons of life, the hard times, the good times, the spectrum of human life that everyone learns?

I was at least close in age to this man, yet I didn’t feel a connection, a generational collective that joins people of the same genesis. This couple, except for their apparent age, seemed to have been arrested in time somewhere back around 1959, never having moved forward with the rest of the world, never seeing what was going on around them, and even worse, not giving a damned. This was blissful ignorance incarnate, and I had the good fortune to be there and see it happening.

What had I done that was so great, so much better, that I could have the temerity to see myself as a notch up the old chain of evolution from them? How could I sit there and judge them, look down my nose at them, as if they had not done much to improve the world, or earned the right to be silly for a short time? I wondered about that and why I felt different, saw things different than I did when I was their age thirty years earlier.

Obviously, I felt nothing in common with these people because there was nothing to feel. I am neither better or worse for having made the world better or worse, and neither are they. I do not believe it is cynical to say that nearly everyone in the world will ultimately fade into nothingness, and in the future someone may look at our picture with a fleeting glance. This is reality.

Hal Brown

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