Minute of silence (homeless)

[word_eyes]

He asked me if I could spare some change. I stood silently aboev him as he straddled the ground with his "wounded in Vietnam" poster. There was a tattered straw hat with 2 wrinkled dollars and about 46 dingy pennies inside of it. He held his guitar with his black veins pulstaing as he strummed down the G note. There were scabbing holes riding up his bicep, and I began to wonder if the wounds were really from the war in Asia, or the personal battles of America. I assumed that he had never left this corner; let alone this continent. I almost tossed in the three quarters that I had to buy my reduced school lunch and chocolate chip cookies, but I walked away thinking; I have the change you want, but not the change you need. The further away I got from him, the more he crossed my mind. My thoughts became black and white flashes of his life; black, a torn sleeve tightly knotted above his elbow. White, a used branch of poisons being forced into his upper arm. Black, his blood boiling as it rushes from his heart. White, the sheet police used the next week to cover his decaying cadaver. Every step I took, his life flashed before my eyes. I didn't have to walk away from him, I just walked through the cemetary. A lot of people are intimidated by the thought of death, but not me. I am a child who dared not gasp watching my father's lungs splatter across the glass of our peep hole. There, my father shot down on our porch, the bullet now lodged in our door, as drops of red rain tangled in the squares of our screen. Why fear the inevitable? That's like fearing a thought provoked by a question. YOu're bound to think about what someone asks you, even if you don't respond. THe only thing about walking through a cemetary at 6:46 at the piss of dawn, is that, though there are hundreds of people below you, there is no one beside you, but as unsettling as silence is, and as uncomforting as the thought of feeling alone in a crowd is, I was not nervous nor tempted to turn back. This was the first time that I had actually walked through the graveyard, but I walk passed it every morning on my way to school. The entrance to the resting place had always facinated me; it was like a wooden alter, as if these people were married to eternity. I entered and stood underneath it for a while, circling it with my hand on one of the beams. I stopped and picked the flowers from some random ghosts' stone, and I dropped it over the ground of that nameless homeless guy. Rest in peace, God knows you didn't live in it. I ran my finger over the engraving; it just said "Unknown." That saddened me, knowing that someone lived with nothing to live, or die for. I realized that I was going to be late for school, but I didn't care. I kept my head down and reached into my pockets. I found exactly three quarters and I put them on top of his tombstone in a perfect line, with all of the heasds facing up. I finally understood the minute of silence.

[Two]

Until I was ten years old we lived in Montana. We would go to the cemetery to place flowers on the graves of family members. One grave was unmarked and it was hard to find exactly where it was. I always tried to walk around the graves. I never stepped on the place I thought the heads would be below.

 

We moved to Idaho. When I would walk to school I had to walk through a large cemetery. I was apprehensive at first. I stuck to the road. But it was not long until I felt as comfortable in the cemetery as in a park. I would run all over the place not caring where I would step, looking at names, dates and epitaphs on head stones. I am still comfortable in that cemetery even more so since one of my family members is now buried there.

 

“there are hundreds of people below you, there is no one beside you” As many times as I had walked alone through the cemetery that thought never occurred to me though it is very true. I like that description. It is very fresh.