Late Afternoon

The afternoon was quiet as he walked the tree-lined street. Quiet, but for the tinnitus—that eighth octave C note constantly in his ears, every second, every minute, every hour, every day. After hearing it for so many years, he seldom noticed it unless he thought about it. He didn’t think about it now.

He turned a corner onto another street and came upon a tree with clusters of bright red blossoms. Many of the oldest blossoms had turned a deeper shade, had fallen to the walkway below, creating a purple stain on the cement that would be washed away by the next rainy day. In the east, a white cumulus cloud boiled into the sky. Ten miles away, rain might be falling. But overhead, his sky was blue.

He encountered oases of sounds along his walk. In one spot, children’s voices drifted on the air. In another spot, birds twittered. Between the oases was a silence broken only by his own gritty footsteps.

Sometimes, on such a summer eve, he wished he could capture a moment like this. He wished he could distill its essence into words so that anyone reading those words could feel this moment as he felt it. But he knew that kind of writing was far above him. It didn’t matter. His writing was what it was. It served to pass the time.

For that is what life is: passing time while we wait for the end. If, while passing time, you do something that helps your fellow humans pass time, then your life surely must count for something, whether or not the world knows.