There is a poor soul who barely subsists on the banks of the river beneath the Boston University Bridge, sharing his makeshift bivouac with wild geese and water rats like some picaresque village idiot, or a modern-day Saint Francis preaching to his feathered and sadly uncomprehending congregation. Maybe he's a method actor preparing for his role as Troll in a theatrical production of Three Billy Goats Gruff, or an obsessive author researching a dystopian rewrite of The Wind In The Willows: the Piper at the Gates of Dawn become a police siren in the middle of a freezing night.
But he is none of these things, of course; just another have-not sleeping in the mud a short walk away from where well-heeled students pay upwards of seventy thousand dollars per annum to learn about the liberal arts. Their derelict neighbor, this keeper of the collegiate geese, must be praying he won't flunk out of Survival 101.
Walking over the bridge, I always look down to check that his camp is still extant. It always is. Life repeatedly renews his lease on the riverbank. The geese come and go, those students graduate to be replaced by another flock of freshmen, that shopping cart crammed with who knows what may even get swapped out for a less rusty model, but the homeless man remains with us as surely as the river keeps flowing. Yet somehow I forget all about him once I reach the other side of the bridge where the busy rat race traffic suddenly demands my attention.
