NicoleUnice
by Nicole Unice
This was not a usual morning. I don’t normally go to the grocery store on Monday morning. I don’t normally buy doughnuts and sit in the grocery cafe for a few minutes before preschool drop-off. And I certainly don’t usually notice a man like this.
He sat alone, perched on the edge of his chair, uncomfortable, perhaps. His glasses were grimy and his clothes were dirty. I glance over at him and saw a tentative blink, almost a half-sleep before he opened his eyes slowly again. His eyes looked at no one and no where; perhaps he preferred to stay dazed then to be all the way alive in his reality.
Something about his posture and position as he sat two tables away from me and my preschool son was grippingly sad to my heart. He looked like a lonely and beaten man; perhaps homeless. But more than his dirty clothes or swollen hands, what squeezed my heart was the abject facial expression. The empty gaze. The way he sat and drank his water as if he hoped no one would notice his presence. The way he appeared to want to be invisible.
On my left sat a group of retired men; busy huffing and puffing about a sports score or business deal. Never did any of those ten eyes look toward the man who sat alone. A man quickly sat down at the table next to me. Unwrapped his sandwich intensely and began to pound on his phone. For all I knew, he was playing Angry Birds, but his expression said “busy, preoccupied, don’t talk to me.” He never looked up.
I guess it was the lack-of-usual in that morning that made me notice. That made me sad. That made me wish I could do something for the maybe-homeless man sitting in front of me in the grocery cafe. I guess the lack-of-usual made me pray, too; that God would tell me what to do. That God would give me a specific instruction if He wanted. So I ate my doughnut and got my son a napkin and kept saying, “God, anything? God, anything?” And I sipped my coffee and from two tables away I noticed his thumb.
It was bloody, a little. With some black cracked skin around it. It was raised and swollen and it looked like it probably hurt at one time. It was an old wound that still bled.
My son has a bloody thumb too, the result of eczema and handwashing and the crazy weather patterns of Richmond in the fall.
Go buy him some antibiotic cream. said my head. Or God. Or the mother in me.
That’s crazy. I said back. But I finished my doughnut and got up and went to the pharmacy aisle. The closer I got, the more the I complained.
He’ll think I’m so weird.
He’ll be offended.
He’s probably not homeless, or broken or beaten and certainly doesn’t need a mom giving him cream for his thumb.
But then I had a smaller, stronger voice inside that told me that yes, he did need a mother. And that we all need a mother sometimes, and there is no shame in that.
So I picked up the cream and the liquid bandage I used on Desmond. I paid for it and walked over and I pointed at his thumb and showed him my son’s. I smelled smoke and dirt and I saw that he was missing some teeth. He told me that it was a blister but it wouldn’t heal. I showed him the cream and told him how I used it on Desmond.
And he said, God bless you.
And I turned away, back to my normal Monday, and thought, He just did.
Nicole Unice is a Richmond mom, a doughnut-eater and a word-lover. You can find out information about her writing and speaking at www.nicoleunice.com
