I WAS walking the other day when I saw, up ahead, an old, thin man. He had the kind of thinness that makes you worry for him. He had thin legs and thin shanks and thin shoulders. Underneath his clothes I imagine he looks like a length of driftwood that has taken its beating in the ocean for 50 years and then washed up on a distant beach and been worn for another decade or so by wind and salt and sand and then finished off by the sun. He was a piece of wood once strong but the world has worn it down, and the world isn‘t done with him yet.He wore a suit that once fitted him better, the kind of suits that old men wear to visit the bank and the post office and that make my heart ache with love for old people.He looked as though he might have headed out that morning wearing a hat, but any hat was long gone in the wind. He wouldn‘t have had a spare hand to keep it on his head, because he was using both to hold very tightly to the stone pillar outside the bank.The wind doesn‘t blow very o...
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