A Band of Travelers

There’s a regular panhandler on Mass. Street I refer to as Don Quixote. He has long, shaggy hair and a reddish mustache and long beard. He wears a kind of leather armor on his forearms and lower legs – the leather pieces are laced on. He wears a chain-mail vest and a ragged leather skirt, and sometimes a black cape or poncho even in the summer. Sometimes in the winter he is hooded.

Of late he has been sitting in the doorway of the former Central Bank. He has strummed on a guitar in the past, but now he rings a tiny, tinkling bell. A royal purple cloth bowl sits at his feet.

A woman, also younger than me, often sits on the short curb by the parked cars and faces the bare wall of the Antique Mall. She plays the maracas. She has medium-length light brown hair - straight, flat - not lustrous, like on the TV commercials. She often wears very dark, wraparound sunglasses – even when it’s cloudy, and stares straight ahead, a tight, maybe-smile on her lips as she shakes her soft rhythm. There is a can for donations at her feet. When she takes a break, she often reads a book, although I’ve never noticed the titles. Never having been introduced, I think of her as Maraca Girl.

Maraca Girl and Don Quixote appear to be together, although they always work a block or two apart and not always on the same day and not every day. But I see them walking together on occasion, determined, rarely speaking, as if on a quest. Maraca Girl is several heads shorter than Don Quixote and usually leads the way.

I do not know what they think or why they live the lives they live. I do not wish to romanticize them in any way.

I have been gripped by visions of my own in the past, and except for several strokes of good fortune, I might well be part of their misfit band of travelers.

And I see others whom I do not fully understand, not on the streets of Lawrence, but on TV, microphones thrust in their faces for their comment. Several talk with apparent fear of the possibility that providing access to health care for all will doom our country to socialism. One envisions colonizing the moon before we have even begun to sustainably inhabit this very habitable world we are already living on, with its plentiful air and water and the ability to produce food and shelter with relative ease.

But I do not wish to evaluate the relative craziness of the differing visions of the world suggested by the lives and words of these people I see. People get by with what they know. Some are malicious and selfish. Some have their paths heavily constrained. Some mean well and things turn out. Some mean well - and they don’t. And most of us are a mix of all of the above.

I do not know what would be gained by understanding my fellow travelers better. I would like more people to articulate a vision whereby we might live together with more generosity and harmony – a vision where we, in fact, thought more of one another as fellow travelers.

All right – that’s nuts, I know. 

And so I continue to hide my particular form of unlikely visions among the cluster of travelers who are mostly comfortable and well fed. I’m following the one in front of me, and they are doing the same. Hopefully, someone near the front has a map.

In the mean time, I tinkle my tiny bell in my own way from time to time. Almost no one pays any attention. That’s normal.