A Little Man on the Street Carving Carrots

Last year I wandered alone in a far city, thinking lots of little thoughts, mostly about being alone. I liked being alone and I hated being alone. I liked that I could go left and right and stop and go and not have to talk or negotiate or even think about it, I could just do it. I stopped for food on a whim and browsed a bookstore and took a zillion pictures of an old brick castle and had no need to make it fun for someone else or engage in witty repartee or speed up or slow down or anything. It was great. I hated it. I was in Milan, and I was all alone.


Lots of attractive people there. Lots of pretty women, and I was all by myself. This is what you think about under such circumstances. There they are –- here you are. Forever divided, a little by language, perhaps by culture or at least social instinct –- meeting people in a foreign city is not the same as at a neighborhood barbecue –- somewhat by age, certainly by wedding ring … But largely by the division I have always had between myself and the rest of humanity. I know there are people who make friends wherever they go. I’m not one of them. I wish I was. I may yet learn.

So I walked for miles and miles and miles. African men in the Piazza del Duomo tried to sell me stuff. Young people from Forza Nuova handed out flyers with demands to blocco immigrazione while the Hare Krishna clanged by. A well-dressed man stood in front of a store empty but for racks and racks of full-length fur coats. Crowds flowed this way and that, doing all the things the Milanese do between work and supper, mostly shopping by the look of it. I wore my anonymity suit and observed, eyes wide and darting. Sometimes other eyes would look back, and there’d be a moment. A moment, gone. I always forget to smile. Fat lot of good it would do anyway.


I wandered away from the tourist and shopping zone, out to the real streets. There was a wonderful time after dark fell. People bustled about doing their marketing, walking purposefully from shop to shop, trains rattling by between hurrying cars and motorcycles. I hadn't eaten for hours and the rain began to fall and I only had a light fleece jacket, my feet hurt, my back hurt, it was after dark, I had no idea where I was and wouldn’t have been anywhere else for anything.

You can really think at times like that. When far from any person or place you know, everything that is your life is placed into perspective. Important stuff –- my marriage, my career -– things too big to see up close, they became strangely clear to me then. I knew that what I was doing was mostly good, and what wasn’t good could be changed. I even had ideas on how to make those changes. I thought of writing projects, too, and of creative endeavors generally -– snippets of musical arrangement, of fictional dialog. For a short while the evening coalesced into a unified sphere -– an outer shell made up of faces passing by in the trolley cars and restaurant windows, heels on the sidewalk, a Moto Guzzi sliding expertly on wet pavement, a little man on the street carving carrots; and an inner core where everything that was my life found ways to fit together and finally make sense.


That didn’t last long. By the time I realized my innate sense of direction was not leading me back to Stazione Cadorna, I had to urinate like a race horse. The few signs pointing towards public toilets contradicted one another. The geography became all confusion and my lower back whispered of forgotten baseball bats. More walking and a desperate duck into a small hotel to ask the concierge for directions sorted all that out but by then, the unity and the sense achieved earlier was medieval history.

Well, my thoughts are ephemeral, and most of my ideas too. Better I suppose to have thought and lost, than never to have thought at all. I really am just a little man on the street carving carrots, and really, it doesn’t matter.