Mr. Rogers was walking along, lost in reflection, when he came across a photograph lying face down on the charcoal-colored pavement. He paused, eying the thing. Here was something that had never before appeared on his well-trodden path, and that, he intuited, called for a certain degree of reticence. On one hand, he knew that such a simple instance of variance would probably not result in any very interesting departure from the usual. On the other, he sensed that this moment was precious for its ambiguity — for the raw, untarnished possibility that lay just on the other side of its conclusion. And so, for a moment, Mr. Rogers stood, gazed down and relished in the latent potential.
Soon, however, his well-practiced impatience got the better of his sentiment and he stooped low, whisking the photo from the ground and getting the matter over with.
Now there is, perhaps, a Mr. Rogers in some other universe, who, on flipping the thing over, experienced an epiphany; some irreversible shift of the norm that found its origin on that very point of his life’s timeline. That Mr. Rogers, however, is not the one of our concern. The he that we may follow experienced upon his own flipping only a familiar metamorphosis of expectation to disappointment.
Staring up from the photograph was a stock image of a boy of soft smile, slight frame and naïve youth. His frozen, superficial composure was generic, uninteresting … a far cry from any feature that might have delivered the sort of intervention Mr. Rogers longed for. This outcome deflated him. Here was yet another failure of the world to roughen the smooth surface of the spinning sphere of his existence in a way that might redirect it from its straight, unerring track into darkness.
But, alas, it was, it seemed, destined to continue rolling in just so a fashion. After a few more moments of stubborn regard, Mr. Rogers folded the image abruptly in half and slipped it into his front pocket, reproachful of what now seemed quixotic anticipation. C’est la vie, he thought, and continued on his way.
As he went, he noticed for the first time that it was a beautiful fall morning. The trees, large and dignified along the edges of the winding road ahead, were full with a remarkable spectrum of color. A light, crisp breeze touched gently on his skin, delivering earthy, musky-sweet scents of damp leaves that squished pleasantly under each step. Through this gamut of brown peeked a partially obscured landscape of coarse and fractured asphalt; a vast desert of miniature, unmalleable black dunes rising imposingly over small insects scurrying from peak to valley. Above it all, just discernible through the arching boughs of the trees was a bright and blue sky, but for a few white clouds drifting lazily about a clean and inviting canvas stretching in all directions.
Mr. Rogers was startled. It was early November and he had been marching up and down this path for months without hardly noticing the change of the leaves. He was reminded of days of his departed youth, where he had delighted in the discovery that he could shift his eyes in and out of focus, blurring objects around him and then sending them again into satisfying lucidity. It seemed now as though he had forgotten the bipartite essence of the trick and had instead been wandering around unfocused for months on end, relegating the world to one long, hazy backdrop to a bedlam of concern and distraction.
This wouldn’t do, he decided. Looking around with a newfound appreciation of his surroundings, he admired how rays of sun, funneled by the leaves, reached gently down towards the earth and cast the trunks of the trees into a handsome mural of light and shadow. A squirrel zipping out from the underbrush caught his attention, and he watched as it scurried up one of broad trunks and disappeared into the maze of branches. A silly creature, he chuckled to himself, amused at the contrast of its urgency to the unimportance of its ends. He wondered briefly what the creature’s experience must be like; whether it ever stopped its frantic darting about to stop and consider the unique character of the bark of a tree or the shape of a walnut. Almost certainly not, he decided, and his amusement turned to pity. Hands tucked behind his back, he proceeded, glancing from tree to tree and trying to catch some other betrayal of an otherwise unified inactivity.
The squirrel soon returned to his mind. He wondered now about its story. Was it male, or female? How old might it be? Had it, perhaps, been scurrying to a secret place in the knobbed limbs that concealed a lumpy drey of kittens, a loving and wholesome family? And then he wondered again at its perception; is there anything other than a mindless urge that drives a squirrel to bring food to its offspring? Is a cuddling in the dark, cozy indent of a clump of twigs and leaves simply a blind compulsion aimed at collective warmth? Or could something like tenderness or affection be there, however faint, amongst the dim, swirling hum of its percepts?
Or perhaps affection in all cases was simply a matter of instinct — a hormonal mechanism that fools sentient life into self-sacrifice. Is it possible to have a rational affection? He thought now on Mrs. Rogers. Was their bond not only more complex, but also more existent than that of squirrels?
His attention now drawn to his wife, he realized suddenly that, despite her asking him twice, he had forgotten to pick up flour from the store. Surely, though, he reasoned, the store would be there tomorrow. Ah, but was there time tomorrow? His thoughts stretched ahead to the coming day and were promptly cast back to the disappointment of the photograph. Tomorrow, as today, would be unexciting.
And suddenly, it seemed as though he could feel the monotony, oppressive like a weighted blanket draped over his body and pinned closely at the joints so that fluid movement was possible, if hindered. Why was his life, of all lives, bound to a gray sameness, an unrelenting tedium?
And this glum consideration led to another, and that to another, and soon he was wandering along again, head down and brow knitted tightly into dense lines of deliberation. He went on like this for a time, battling the problems of the universe.
*****
An irregular beat of footsteps on the pavement behind him stirred Mr. Rogers from his rumination. He turned to identify the source of the interruption.
A young, thin boy was skipping down the path. He wore baggy, khaki-colored shorts, a gray t-shirt and a pair of ankle-high black socks sticking out of shoes that appeared to have, at one point, been some shade of white. He carried with him only a small backpack sporting an impressive collection of pins and stickered slogans and in his ears were two earbuds connected to slim, white wires which met to form a V at his chest and then continued down as a single cable that terminated in his right pocket. He had a narrow, sharp face, a gapped set of teeth displayed now in a careless grin, and light brown hair which looked as though it had, with his help, escaped from the insistence of a comb (or any other such tyrannizing force) that morning.
As the boy skipped around him, nodding briefly in polite acknowledgement, something about his countenance irritated the older man. He wasn’t sure why, but the boy’s gayness was vaguely offensive; and Mr. Rogers, a committed chastiser, had always been quick to heed the whispers of his offense.
“Hey, you there!” he called out, raising his voice in competition with the white wires.
The boy froze mid-skip. His first thought was that he must have dropped something. He turned, pulling out his left earbud with his right hand while patting his back pocket, which held his wallet, with his left. Reassured on feeling the expected protrusion there, he met Mr. Rogers stare with an unassuming grin that faltered as he read the indignance on the man’s wrinkled face. That expression, he had learned, was rarely a harbinger of pleasant experience.
“Just what are you doing dashing around like that?”
“I’m headin’ home, from Jack’s place,” the boy responded uncertainly, “I gotta’ be back soon, or I won’t have time to set the table, and then I won’t get dessert.” he added more confidently, as if that settled the matter.
“Dessert!” cried Mr. Rogers, gleeful with validation, “It’s only ten past ten, what can you mean by dessert?”
This objection was quite confusing.
“Well, I have to set the table, and then eat the greens and the tomatoes, and then I can have a waffle with ice cream.”
“My boy, that’s brunch. A waffle and ice cream for brunch is not dessert, dessert comes after dinner. What a silly way to call it. And that’s why you’re dashing around, not minding anyone else?”
The challenge, repeated for emphasis, left the boy now thoroughly bemused. He had given Mr. Rogers a wide berth as he went by, so he thought.
“I didn’t mean anything by it… I was just goin’ around.”
“And what if you had slipped, and hit me in the back of the legs? Then we would both be in bad shape, out here all alone. Did you think of that?”
The boy hadn’t thought of it; in fact, he had thought of nothing at all but the fun of skipping in tune with the music still humming softly from the ends of the wires. This hypothetical, now a universe that seemed only narrowly to have been avoided, left him sheepish.
“Sorry, mister. I’m gonna be more careful.” And with that he reached down for the hanging earbud, intending to be on his way.
Mr. Rogers, noticing this, changed tactics.
“Another thing. Why haven’t you got a jacket? You’ll catch a cold, especially with all that skipping. Didn’t your mother send you off with something warmer to wear?”
The boy shrugged, glancing down at his thin clothing. His mother had, in fact, sent him off with a jacket that was still hanging on a peg at Jack’s house. As he had set out earlier that morning, he had been too excited for his walk on the trail and the promised ice cream at the end of it to worry about a cold. But what should that bother this man? The line of questioning was in general wearisome and the insipidness of the interaction was already weighing heavy. His verve for the day began to tug insistently at the back of his mind so that he unconsciously took a small step backwards, distancing himself from the beady reprimand of Mr. Roger’s eyes.
“I’m not cold, and it’s not much farther, really. I have to go. I have to set the table, or I won’t get dessert!”
And before the old man could muster another response the boy turned, swept up the earbud in one smooth movement and took off, skipping all the more light-heartedly with the newfound freedom from the exchange.
Mr. Rogers was left fuming on the spot where he had staked his righteous stand. What a rascal! No sense, no respect! The boy would probably rot out his teeth with all that ice cream, if he didn’t catch a sickness or a fall first. A tragedy, how these kids were being raised — not a worry in the world! Such ingenuousness, he was sure, would produce a shallow, unprepared society, and order, hard won from the jaws of chaos, would fray like a worn shawl on the shoulders of a shivering human condition.
Grumbling to himself, the old man went on his way again, the resolve to enjoy the day entirely forgotten. As he went, the bitterness that had been seeded in his breast since the flipping over of the photograph bourgeoned, and, sensing its liberation, began to snake tendril-like vines across his torso. Wincing at the pressure, he brought the cursed thing out of his pocket and stared at it, demanding some break in its steadfast insignificance. He felt a sudden sadness – a sort of quiet desperation – open like a sinkhole in his chest. And then this was displaced by a great wave of anger and he crumpled the photograph, squeezing that dumb, naïve boy it depicted into meaninglessness, and hurled it away into the solemn, indifferent trees.
And Mr. Rogers, alone again on the trail, howled like a madman into the wood.