The young blond woman is crowding the plodding man like a swollen prostrate.
Impatience slung over her shoulders, cardboard tray in hand, she is hurrying him through the door and into the street.
The old man is aware but his gait is staid—like he’s walked this way all his life.
He is wishing himself quicker for the sake of the woman—he has no quarrel—but he is bound to nothing more urgent than the earth’s rotation.
He has the walk of the ungoverned—slow enough for any one to catch on.
He has learned not to pile his hair high and worry its descent.
He is quizzical but not fascinated by technique. He is unmoved by Apple.
His domain is boulevards with begonias and parks with birdbaths and coffee shops with patios and pubs with dark ale on tap.
He is comfortable with pickers and panhandlers but he could easily fledge among the heeled without the preening self-consciousness of the Birkin possessed.
Neither habit-hobbled nor entirely untethered, he is a friend of the magpie, but slightly jealous of the bird of Juno.
