Dawn Ritch, Contributor
I DON'T know his name, I've never asked. We meet only at the traffic light, me in my vehicle, he on the side of the road.
All I know is that many, many months ago my composure at the wheels was not what it should have been. I couldn't help noticing as I approached the traffic lights, however, that the beggar up ahead was a new one. He wasn't yet ragged and dirty.
He looked at me directly in the eye and asked: "Bad day at work huh? It will all be better if not tonight, tomorrow morning." This youngish-looking man was better than any bartender I could have hoped for, and I didn't even have to find a stool.
I sheepishly agreed, told him it was odd counsel coming from someone in his position, and gave him $100. He accepted it with thanks, and smiled as though he knew much more than I.
I saw him again many months later, still relatively clean and not ragged yet, at another set of traffic lights. I said hello, and gave him some money, looking at him I suppose with more than a little interest.
"You remember me?" he asked.
It was clear he didn't remember me. I said yes and he wanted to know from where. So I told him Lady Musgrave Road and he asked how I remembered him.
"Because you're not rough," I said.
He thanked me very much, and moved on.
The next time I saw him his clothes had become thin and bleached out. Rags were now not far away. He asked whether or not my husband knew about him. And I said most definitely because I'd talked a lot about him. Satisfied, he took my money and went away.
Compliments
Eventually he started calling me "Beautiful", and by then I was calling him "Good Looking" which he is. One day I asked him if he was a "Deportee", without any family in Jamaica. He asked if my question had to do with his manners. I told him not his manners but his accent, which although Jamaican, can sound naturally American at times.
He never answered. No good bartender would, only the customer's problems are up for discussion. He got bailed from further interrogation because the traffic light changed.
Then one day he stopped me and asked how many sides a thrupence had, as though it were a quiz. I didn't know, and he said I should find out because then I would know the secret of life. He didn't appear mad, just excited, but I forgot about it anyway.
To my surprise he asked the same question next time we met, and was most disappointed that I hadn't thought it important enough to find out. He told me eight, but without much interest.
I however have taken to discussing my day with him, and looking forward to a red light.
One day when it had been raining on and off, I had my bearer, a tall, young, handsome man in the seat beside me. I knew the beggar would be jealous, because he'd never seen me with anyone before.
I told him who my passenger was, pointed to his bicycle in the back of the van, and said that I was giving him a lift to New Kingston. Somewhat mollified, the beggar began an only half-hearted conversation because there was now a third party present.
Last time I saw him he asked whether I'd been avoiding him. The truth was I had been a bit, because I don't always have money. So he asked me for $1,000. I told him he was crazy, and I just hoped I would not have to go broke myself, which is a refrain that might well be the basis of our relationship.
He said even if I did go broke, and had to go on the street and start begging, he would still talk to me. And that I didn't have to give him money every time, a cigarette would do. So I gave him two.
It worries me a little though, that he could be begging somebody else instead of talking to me. But no matter how far off he is I've never been able to avoid him, unless the traffic lights decide.
Last Thursday morning I finally called the Bank of Jamaica and asked how many sides a thrupence had. The thrupence, an alloy of nickle and brass, was a 12-sided coin. Christ had 12-disciples, and the twelfth tribe of Israel is the Rastafarians. The distinguished medievalist, Charles Homer Kaskin wrote of the 12th century as "the epoch of the Crusades, of the rise of towns and of the earliest bureaucratic states of the West, it saw the culmination of Romanesque art and the beginnings of Gothic; the emergence of the vernacular literatures; the revival of the Latin classics and of Latin poetry and Roman law; the recovery of Greek science, with its Arabic additions, and of much of Greek philosophy; and the origin of the first European universities".
The historian was describing a medieval revival of culture after the conclusion of the long period of barbarian invasions.
The traffic lights will not permit a full discussion. The environment there is not unlike a cocktail party, all comings and goings and intense brevities.
I think he's trying to tell me, however, that in the middle of these Dark Ages in Jamaica, there is the start of a great impulse to light and beauty. Philosophers are always eager to find renaissances.
