The Fountain

The fountain with its majestic jut of water grabs me each time I pass now. It’s been active for 10 years or more, but it has held my sovereign interest for only a portion of that time; that time that has passed since the drowning.

Was it a friend? That’s a tough one for me. I have people I care a great deal about and who care for me. But, I hear people talk about friends they’ve had for years and years. How they have groups of friends they often see and travel with and play cards with. We were none of these things to each other.

I surely knew of him for 5 or 6 years. He was a clerk at the local grocery. With the tight job market, it became common for the store management to hire some of the community’s disabled residents. It was the first integration of the kind I had personally experienced. I watched as the initial group arrived on board. The personalities were so varied; some loud and large while others stayed small and quiet and, of course, there were a couple right smack in the middle. Certainly not unlike the rest of the world except that they may have fallen a little farther to the left or right. Patrons were occasionally annoyed. (Yes, including me.) But all and all we adjusted to each other just fine.

There were 3 or 4 other pleasurable characters who have since faded in my ever fading memoirs. One will never fade. Tall, lanky, extremely quiet; I may have seen him smile once or twice in all of our brief encounters. He never seemed to recognize me and words rarely escaped him, but he worked diligently and efficiently and was a stable presence in this world of chaos.

One cold February day, I ran to the store for some “fill in the gap” dinner items. Copies of flyers were pasted all over the walls and windows of the store. My frequent encounters with this gentleman had come to an end. It was his picture and he was missing. I asked after him and was informed that he lived close and failed to come home one night. He was a loner and the concern was that he was mugged by someone taking advantage of his station in life. I feared for him, fretted over him. Each return visit to the store renewed my concern as the flyers continued to inquire if anyone had seen this man. After a few weeks though I succumbed to the fact he was gone; not necessarily dead, just gone.

Spring came around and one day in late May I realized the flyers had come down. Another clerk was approached and asked if they had just given up. They had not. They had found him as the warming sun melted the ice that had formed over the fountain. He had loved the water and it was thought in his enjoyment, he had fallen in or through ice that couldn’t hold him.

The fountain has held my attention ever since; not necessarily with grief. Even though I was horrified that he drowned while playing, it would have been much worse to hear he had been maimed or attacked and left to die. He wasn’t really a friend…he was barely an acquaintance, but his death impacted me, held me and formed a relationship with my soul. I continue to honor my brief and shallow knowledge of this simple man with each renewed siting of this fountain.

Written by Teri Lee
April, 2004