The Security Guard Who Blessed Me Daily
Every morning for six years, one raised hand made me braver.
For six years, a man I never spoke to blessed me every single morning, and I built a life on it without ever learning his name. He was the night guard at the bank building on my road, and my 7:10 walk to the bus stop crossed the end of his shift the way two trains cross, daily, reliably, at speed.
It started on my first day at my first real job. New shoes eating my heels, shirt ironed so hard it could stand trial, stomach doing the thing stomachs do when you are twenty-three and certain you are about to be exposed as a fraud by lunchtime. I passed the bank building and the guard, an older man with a grey moustache and a cap sitting slightly crooked, looked at me from his plastic chair, read my entire condition in one glance, and raised his right hand.
Not a wave. A blessing.
Palm out, fingers loose, the hand lifted and lowered once, the gesture grandfathers make over the heads of children touching their feet at weddings. Then he went back to watching the road.
I have no explanation for what that did to me except to say that I walked the remaining four hundred metres like a man who had been knighted.
I assumed it was a one-off. The next morning, 7:10, there it was again. Palm out, lift, lower. By the second week it was ours, a fixed ceremony between strangers. I never stopped, he never stood. We never exchanged a word. Words would have been a demotion.
Six Years of Mornings
You would be amazed what a person can carry out the door if he knows a blessing is waiting at the end of the road. I got that hand on the morning of my first presentation, when I had rehearsed in the mirror until my own reflection got bored. I got it the morning after my father's bypass surgery, when I had slept ninety minutes in a hospital chair and gone home only to change. I got it the morning I resigned from that first job, and the morning I started the second one, and the rainy Tuesday I walked to the bus stop to go sign the registry at my own wedding, in a garland, trailed by two laughing cousins.
That day he stood up.
Palm out, lift, lower, and something that might have been a smile under the moustache.
My wife heard about him within a month of knowing me. My mother asked after him like a relative. "And your guard? He is well?" He had become infrastructure, as load-bearing as the bridge or the water supply. On mornings he was on leave, replaced by a young man absorbed in his phone, I felt the day tilt slightly, a table with a matchbook missing from under one leg.
I used to wonder why he did it. I invented theories at the bus stop. He was a retired teacher who missed sending children off. He had decided I looked chronically underfed of courage. He blessed everyone and I was vain. I tested that last one, watching discreetly. He nodded at some people, saluted the milk van. The hand, the full hand, I saw him give to almost no one else.
Six years. Roughly fifteen hundred mornings... And then one Monday the plastic chair held the young man with the phone, and the Tuesday after that, and the whole week.
The Chair
I did something I had never done in six years.
I stopped and spoke.
"The older guard," I asked the young man. "Moustache. Where is he?"
"Iqbal chacha? Retired. His knees." The young man shrugged. "He went back to his village. Left last Sunday."
Iqbal... Six years, and I learned his name eight days too late, from a stranger with one earbud in.
I asked if there was an address, a phone number. There was a supervisor who might know, who was never there when I was. I went back four times. On the fourth visit the supervisor, a tired man behind a ledger, found me a number written on the back of a duty roster, and I stood outside the bank building at 7:10, where else, and called it.
He picked up on the sixth ring. I introduced myself as the fellow from the road, the 7:10 one, and then had to spend a full minute explaining which of the hundreds of morning strangers I was. The pause that followed was so long... I checked if the call had dropped.
"The boy with the new shoes," he said finally. "First day of work. You looked like you were walking to your own hanging."
He remembered.
Fifteen hundred mornings and he remembered the first one better than I did. And then, because I had six years of a question saved up, I asked him why. Why the hand, why me, why every day.
He was quiet for a moment... Then he told me that he had a son, and that the boy had gone off to a city job himself many years ago, in another town, and there had been an accident at a construction site in the second month, and that was that. His son had called him the night before the first day, nervous, and Iqbal had said all the useless brave things fathers say, and the one thing he regretted was that he had not been there in the morning to see him off properly. With the hand. The way his own father had seen him off.
"Then one day a boy walks past my chair in new shoes with that same face," he said. "What was I supposed to do, nothing?"
He had a blessing left over with no one to spend it on, and he spent it on me, every morning, for six years.
I did not say anything intelligent in reply. I think I thanked him four times in three sentences. Before hanging up he told me his knees were bad but the village air was good, and that I should eat properly, which is how I learned that a blessing can be delivered by phone.
For weeks afterward I did not know where to put the weight of it, this discovery that my six years of borrowed courage had been the interest on another man's grief. Eventually I did the only thing I know to do with weight, which is write under it. There was a prompt that started it all, five words: write about a daily stranger. I wrote about the hand. Palm out, lift, lower. The poem turned out to be less about him than about hope, and how it is passed between people like a bucket in a fire line, from the ones who have lost the most to the ones who have not lost yet.
Here is the ending I did not expect. There is a girl on my road now, sixteen or seventeen, who leaves for her coaching classes at the same hour I leave for work. I watched her one morning in June, first day of something, new bag, shoulders up around her ears, face like a court summons. She passed my gate as I was wheeling out my scooter.
I did not think. My hand went up by itself.
Palm out, lift, lower.
She blinked... and then her shoulders came down from her ears, and she walked on taller, and I stood there at my gate holding a hand that has known all along what it was for.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.