Cosmopolitanism

The aging homeless man whose home is under the bridge with the purple graffiti does this thing every morning. He opens a plastic, translucent umbrella and crouches underneath it as though he is waiting for rain. But rain does not come. Instead, pigeons come. They are all dirty like he is and so there is a natural affinity between the two. They come and sit on his umbrella as he crouches under it, and they make their various pigeon noises and stuff and he smiles. Eventually the day presses on, and as passersby increase in number compared to the relative calm of the morning hours the pigeons disperse and go back to wherever they had been before. Then the homeless man closes his umbrella and stacks it on a big pile of useless crap he has amassed over many homeless years because homeless men like him amass big piles of crap like that over many homeless years. Then he frowns. The passersby don’t want to be his friends, which, I would like to believe though I am wrong, the pigeons are. If he dies of legionnaire’s disease, however, it will be a betrayal of friendship—the worst kind of betrayal there is.