Roy McCartney

Life through a Vagabond’s Eyes

The world is full of people who have everything in the palm of their hands, who are usually complaining, and there are people who have almost nothing. But everyday on my way back home after classes, when I was in high school, I used to see one man on Zaragoza Avenue who made me think about how despite a terrible situation you can enjoy and appreciate life.

This man was an aged vagabond often seen wandering in the center of town, carrying a lot of plastic bags. First time I saw him was six months ago; I used to take my friend Anthony to the bus stop in Alameda park, so I had to drive on Zaragoza. It was not a long distance, but it could be terrible because of sun’s heat, as hot as hell we thought, the slow movement of that sea of cars, and the fact that my old Topaz ’92 had no air conditioner. Although it was like a trip into an oven, Anthony had always something funny to say to make it easy.

One day, at the busy Pasteur-Zaragoza’s corner we saw this old man out of a drugstore sitting on an old wooden chair: thin silver threads were growing on his head, with a wrinkled brown skin covered with messed clothes, and it’s color implied that the smog of the city had been covering it for many decades; the injuries of his skeletal hands could have been the result of a severe arthritis combined with the everyday bag-carrying. His little legs made him no taller than five feet. In general, I felt his whole body was not stronger than the glass of the drugstore window behind him. With his eyes focused on his dreams, I was not able to see their color, but even so, I could feel the peacefulness they emitted in that comfortable rest.

With nothing else to see but a red light over the cars and boring rows of cars, we stared at him for a while until the stop light turned green. Yes, that was the first time I saw him; we did not know his name, so Anthony called him “Engineer”, making fun of my professional studies.

 Since then I have met him several times in the same area. After a couple of these meetings, I could notice (without having exchanged a single word with him) that he was a friendly person. As he walks down the streets he says hello to quite a few people, and they return the greeting to the smiling wanderer. When he arrives at his usual location, outside the drugstore and he leaves his load (one day I discovered that he had crushed cans inside the bags). The smile never disappears from his face. But what really drew my attention was the fact that he was not a criminal, because it is not surprising that someone without a formal job incurs in robbery or illegal activities to earn “easy money”. I knew this after making a few questions to a friendly butcher who also greeted our man. He said that the vagabond takes all those crushed cans to recycling centers, and gets enough money to buy food. In fact, he enjoys doing it.

I’m convinced that if we could learn to live like “The Engineer” does, always smiling, always in a happy mood and staying away from all that material things, such like money, that make us unable to see how beautiful life is, we would achieve the happiness we’re always looking for in our daily complaining.