Leopold

7 | September 15th

7 | September 15th

"The language of friendship is not words but meanings." - Henry David Thoreau

A school guidance officer once warned me against becoming a teacher. “Your voice,” she said, sliding her outdated glasses up her nose, “puts people to sleep.” Normally, this might have been a thinly veiled insult, but I took it as a compliment. My voice was my favorite attribute – smooth and strong, like sleep syrup. It was the perfect pitch to read aloud, to lull people into a false sense of security, or apparently, soothe a thirty-eight-year-old bookshop owner right out of his emotional rut.

“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and the superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.”

Waldo, hunched over my kitchen table, stirred his tea in slow, methodical circles.

“Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that.” I turned the page, taking the opportunity to study his face. It didn’t take a sculptor to notice that his features were chiseled with dread. “Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market.”

Waldo stopped, sighed, and started to stir his half-finished tea in the other direction.

Cautiously, like I was approaching a baby deer, I placed the book on the table. The scritch-scratch of bare pages against wood made him look up, bracing his spoon on the edge of his mug.

“You stopped?” he commented, looking bewildered. I could have been reading to him in Russian, and I doubt he would have noticed.

“No shit, Sherlock.”

Waldo winced. “My ears are in a sensitive state right now.”

“I didn’t know our ‘do not mention list’ had expanded to include swears,” I remarked. Plenty of other words had made the list in the past twenty –four hours – including, but not limited to, evicted, apartment, money, homeless, sleeping, sofa.

I rested my head in the nook of my palm, and Waldo did the same. We were eye to eye, even though my new copy of Walden and a cold mug of tea stood between us. “How do you feel?”

He shrugged. “Okay. Not okay. Bad. Pretty bad, very bad. Terrible.”

I didn’t have an answer; at least, not an answer that would heal his sagging posture. Waldo appeared on our front step just as my mother took her casserole out of the oven, still in a state of paralyzing shock. In lieu of an explanation, he handed my parents his three-day eviction warning – dating to the week before – and the suitcase he had managed to drag out of his beat-up Volkswagen, most of his furniture nowhere to be seen.

My mother had made him a bed on our timeworn couch, making sure he had enough pillows and blankets to last him through any sudden cold flashes. My dad had given him all the financial advice he needed, slipping Waldo one of his employee’s business cards. Now it was my turn – to distract him, to make him tea, and mostly to read him excerpts from Henry David Thoreau.