A new bit of writing

Believe in Samaria – Don Hayward
 
“Do you believe in God?” He asked.
I turned on the bench and examined my inquisitor who had plunked, uninvited, beside me on the bench.
Damn, I thought, I can’t catch a quiet lunch hour anymore.
I had hoped to think through a plot problem in the quiet shade of a maple and in sight of the bastardized architecture of Victoria College.
The man reeked of the street: unkempt, mismatched clothes that had all fallen off a rag cart, shoes that barely deserved the term, and all that emphasized bony hands and a beard like a riparian hazel bush that had captured white, aspen fluff.
Beyond the man, and his status as such might be a bold assumption on my part, traffic flowed on Queen’s Park Circle, East. University students hurried along the angular pathways between Vic and the main campus with faces reflecting ideas, subjects, tests, failures, victories, love, hate, him or her.
Before I considered my new friend’s challenge, I pondered the unity between the hurried young and the flow of cars beyond. They both reflected individual cares, the young to make their way in the world and those in the cars who hurried to make money, for themselves or others.
Make way, make way here I come, no time for rubbys.
I examined the interloper, ready to discount what might seem to be a crazy person with his own version of talking about the weather, chitchat, as if our discussing God or Environment Canada might do for meaningless conviviality. His eyes, the only feature that spoke of worth, said he wanted a real answer, no idle chatter here.
He deserved that answer, and I had become his latest hoped for source. It was my fault, appearing to be thoughtful while munching sliced beef on sourdough, an easy mark for anyone with a question, an empty gut and a desperate need for an answer.
“We all need hope,” I said. It was a life-long quest that I had yet to fulfill, the search for hope’s reward. I saw little in the man that suggested he had any hope, but then his eyes asked, hopeful. He wanted me to be that hope.
“Where do I find hope?” He asked, and shivered despite the mid-day Toronto heat.
I offered the uneaten half of my sandwich. He snatched it as if a feral cat had missed a few days kibble.
“Luck or invention,” I said as I sadly slipped into pontification.
Arrogant bastard, I described myself.
He deserved more. He had created this serendipitous role-playing where we might be Socrates and Plato on a bench, or drunks in a bar. In the end, perhaps both pairs might make equal sense, the ancients with incomplete information and the latter with disrupted brains. No doubt, our pairing of a want-to-be writer and a denizen of the street fit the group. Perhaps we represented middle ground between philosophical and drunken bullshit. My new friend appeared to be sober, and I did not drink.
“If we don’t have hope,” I said, “we need to invent it.”
“I hope to be warm and fed,” he said, between bites of beef and carbs. “We don’t invent hunger.”
He licked the mayonnaise from a finger. “Down at the mission, they tell me if I believe in God, I will be fed, here, here and here.”
He slapped is gut, his head, his heart.
“Does that give you hope?” I asked. My eye fell to the large oatmeal cookie in my bag. We still hungered. He finished the sandwich. I broke the cookie in half.
“No,” he said. “Maybe I don’t pray enough. They pray all the time. Is that the trick, how to find hope? I feel warm and they feed me, so I guess it helps.”
“Hope comes from the need for a reward,” I said. “Being fed and warm is a reward. To get there we perform purposeful activity, actions that we think will fill our hope with the reward. For them, it’s praying and feeding you. If all you want is food, it seems to me that farming might be more useful for that, same hope, action and reward, or chatting to strangers in the park.”
I munched my half of the cookie and hoped to appear smart.
He noticed the cookie, but perhaps not my smarts. I gave him his half.
Maybe half my smarts too, oh, I’m so witty. I kept the thought to myself, but it might sneak into a story sometime.
“I get hungry quick when I leave there.” The cookie disappeared. “I guess there is a connection between them praying and me eating. Do they have hope?”
His laugh was honest.
“Their hope is eternal life,” I said. “I think feeding you is part of their purposeful activity to get there, their reward.”
“Is that the only reason they do it? Saving me seems to be a doubtful incentive. I’m just a bit of life’s road-kill.”
I considered my new friend. He had had an education, maybe more than me, and then something had broken; something that stole hope.
We all break, I thought. For some, the drugs are real, for others, I looked at my hands, a keyboard, a story is the medication.
“Everyone is worth saving,” I said, and hoped I did not patronize. “Even those dressed in Goodwill rejects with a grumbling gut.”
We shared a laugh.
Somewhere a bell tolled noon.
Suddenly I knew.
Screw you, Hemmingway, the bell tolls at birth too.
I stood.
“Come with me, friend.” I extended my hand. “I have a spare room, and I know where the Goodwill is.”