He drove one of those big Mercedes vans, the ones with no windows, the ones that unless you’re a basketball player you can stand up in. No handicapped plates but he parked in a handicapped space nonetheless. He parked in front of Shelter #6, appeared to bathe in the faucet there. Big fat Canadian Geese used this spot as well, crapping every third step and as he approached each day he would scream, “Get out of here, you don’t belong here!” in a scratchy voice that somehow had an Eastern European quality. I wondered whether he thought they “didn’t belong here” because they were from Canada or because geese, in general, should not be allowed to use the park shelters.

He appeared to be in his seventies with gray hair that was somehow braided and hanging around the front, under his chin like the drooping cord that hangs down from a wide-brimmed beach hat. He was disheveled but not filthy, moving slowly like an old guy, yet he seemed fit, in corduroys a long-sleeved jacket and hiking boots. On the homeless scale, he was a step above the panhandling street bum.

He had a bed laid out in his van and cases of water and packages of the types of organic food you might expect to find at a hippie commune. The tall vehicle was stuffed with odds and ends – one man’s junk being another man’s treasure – and while it gave the initial feel of a disaster area, belongings seemed to be stacked in a kind of controlled chaos that reflected pride of place. Some days the door to the van would be wide open and the old dude would be sound asleep, other days he seemed to be doing domestic chores at Shelter #6 going about his business as if this were a perfectly normal living arrangement.

♦

“Hello sir, welcome to the park.”
“Thanks, it’s a nice day … you know, I’ve noticed this dude in the Mercedes van over here. It seems like he is essentially living in the park, what’s the deal?”
“The guy had a stroke, trying to get back on his feet, he’s harmless.”
“Seems sketchy … so there are no plans to have him removed?”
“He’s not really doing anything wrong and he leaves when the park closes and comes back when it opens. Do you want to lodge a formal complaint?”
“No, just seems sketchy … ”

I’ve seen this guy almost every day for a long time now. I park next to his van because, well, that’s where I always park. Sometimes the area smells like incense which is groovy, but I wonder what else he’s burning in that van. He seems to mind his own business and to be in possession of a cognitive faculty or two. I often think about how this whole thing works. How does he get money? It costs five bucks a day just to get into the park. How does bathing work? Where does he go at night when he has to leave the park?

Maybe the joke’s on me. When I was a kid there was an old man that used to ride a rickety old bike around town with a big basket in front. He was a trash digger, searching for soda bottles and whatever else trash diggers look for. Anyway, more than one person told me that he was really a millionaire with a mansion and a yacht and that he just liked riding his bike around and being dirty. Maybe the old guy at the park just likes to be outside, to live off the land … maybe he has tons of dough, I mean he does have a pretty nice van?

Whatever the story, I consider him a demented loser and I’m always uneasy he will say something to me.

♦

There are maybe a half dozen classifications of park goers … Exercisers, dog walkers, play on the playgrounders, artificial lake fishers, bird watchers and, well, sketchy freaks on the fringe of society. While you may think I fit into multiple categories here, I’m mostly a dog walker. When we get to the park I change the dog’s collar and we walk and when we’re done, I change the collar back and brush her. Then we leave. We don’t seek out conversation with other people or pooches and the best days are when we come and go completely undetected.

This is a near-daily ritual, and one day, just as we’re about to leave, a voice, scratchy and foreign stammers, “That dog sure has a shiny coat.” The voice is coming from the Mercedes homeless vehicle and the old-man-in-the-park has the sliding door open and has noticed us we prepare to leave. Without turning around I say, “Yep, she gets brushed every day.” He urges me to come over to his van and asks me, “Have you ever use Dinovite, that stuff works great?”

I thought, Oh shit, here it comes, this nut wants to talk to me about doggie supplements and is gonna try to sell me something he whipped by hand in the “bum-mobile”, and it will poison my dog, and she will drop dead right here in the park parking lot and …

I went over anyway. He was sitting on the bum bed, he had on those kind of semi-circle reading glasses, flat across the top and worn down on the tip of the nose, Ben Franklin wore the same kind. He tells me he’s reading a book about fungus and I see that it’s a textbook with a Dewey Decimal-like library tag on it. In fact, the van is filled with these kinds of books. The man in the van speaks in a stop-and-start manner, like a person with a really bad speech impediment. He tells me he had a stroke but what he really wants to tell me is the things he knows about fungus. He’s marked dozens of pages with yellow sticky notes and after about ten minutes it becomes clear that despite his halting delivery he has, in fact, memorized a great portion of the book.

I tell him that the largest living organism on earth is a fungus growing in Oregon. He takes that as a sign that we are kindred spirits and that earns me fifteen more minutes of incredibly nerdy discourse about fungus … all this because Angie has a nice coat.

It turns out that the homeless park invader is actually a savant. I feel bad about thinking of him as a half-witted bum, a library book stealer, a nut case that yells at birds from Canada. And I wonder how many geniuses are trapped by circumstances, by socioeconomic conditions, by the cruel misfortune of being born at the wrong time or in the wrong body. I wonder about shining intellect that gets bypassed, disregarded, misunderstood because it comes in a human package we mislabel.

After that day me and Mr. Tall Mercedes exchanged occasional greetings. I always considered myself the smartest guy in the park, now I know I’m just a judgmental dumbass who has a dog with a shiny coat.

♦

It was a Sunday morning, a little after 8AM, just after church and we had a pleasant walk. Unlike Saturday, when even the ugliest dogs and the pudgiest owners are out and about, the park is mostly empty on Sundays unless of course, you’re living out of your car.

“Boy, she, she … she r-r-real, r-r-r-really likes that b-b-brushing doesn’t sh-sh-sh-she?” The old man is sitting upright on the narrow bed in the Mercedes Hotel. The sliding door is open. I’m startled at the voice but I respond, “She’s a bit tired after a walk, I think she just tolerates it.”

He asks me to come over to the van. It smells like incense and I see a plastic tube that seems to be a carrier for some sort inhaler or maybe a joint. Suspicions aside, I’ve never seen him under the influence and I’ve never seen him idle … he’s always engaged, reading, studying something.

He says he wants to read me something, “I wrote it last night,” he says. He pulls out a leather-bound book. It’s not a bible. It’s well-worn and small, like the size of a standard index card. The book is about two inches thick and there are literally hundreds of his yellow Post-Its sticking out, seemingly on every page. He tells me that he’s had a stroke, his mechanism for telling the world that he’s smarter than he’s gonna sound and he starts thumbing through this little book. He has a hard time finding the page he wants and when he finally does he puts the book down on the bed and reaches out with both hands, “I want you to pray with me.”

I take his hands. They are dry, rough, warm. They transmit a story, a vibration, like the way certain seashells transmit the songs of the ocean. I bow my head, I watch him. “I am slow,” he begins. “I move slow, my body cannot keep up with my mind. I am slow to take up the ways of the one I must follow, slow to release the things of this life and ready myself for the next one. I am slow the way the clouds are on a windless day but though I plod under the burden of existence, He is patient, He waits for me.”

He doesn’t read from the little book, rather he reads from a million Post-It notes turning their little pages deliberately, his mind darting around, sort of rediscovering the words he scratched out with a blue ballpoint pen. The words were part prayer, part confession, part intellectual poetry. Inspiring, beautiful, unexpected … an oracle speaking outside a public restroom.

I just landed here, I think he might have been sent.

If this is all just a quest for some form of enlightenment, maybe the way to find it is to live out of your car and spend most of your waking hours in a park.

Photo credit: simplyalex on Visualhunt /CC BY-ND