“What’s Your Story?”

Yesterday it snowed in the Northeast, our first true snowstorm of the winter. Boston got whacked with about a foot or more of snow — light, powdery stuff for the most part. At about 4:00 in the afternoon, after pressing Daughters Number 1 and 2 into duty as snow shovel operators, we three went out and moved snow from one spot to another. My daughters had the comparatively easier task of clearing the front walk and steps and the portion of sidewalk that borders our property. My job was to dig out the back walk and driveway. Ours is not an ordinary driveway. It’s extremely wide and is reputed to hold five cars abreast — at least that’s what the realtor told us. It really fits four cars comfortably, which still means it’s pretty wide. Also, as the driveway happens to be on a one-way street with parking allowed on only one side, the snow plow, when it makes its run down our street, only clears a single swath on that part which is free of parked cars. So the gap in front of our driveway, where the queue of parked cars is interrupted, doesn’t get plowed — the snow plow just sails right on by, taking care, naturally, to deposit dirty, wet snow in its wake. I have to shovel that as well.

There are two physical chores I can honestly say I don’t mind doing: shoveling snow and raking leaves. I think the monotony of both tasks give them a meditative quality which acts as a balm to me. There is something almost restful or soothing about repeating the same action over and over. Often I listen to an audio book, as I did yesterday, and my absorption in the story is always complete as I, automaton-like, scoop up snow here and throw it over there. I have keys handy for all the cars and I juggle them around so every square foot of the driveway feels the scrape of my shovel. I invariably do a very thorough job.

When I was finishing up yesterday, putting the last touches on the back walk to make sure every centimeter of asphalt was once again clear to be trodden upon, I heard a ghastly, hacking cough coming from an apartment building that neighbors our backyard. It was the sort of cough a bad actor might do on stage, overdone to the point where the effect of pitiable sickness never quite gets achieved; instead, the result is unintentional comedy. It was a loud cough with an extra baritone groan thrown in there to give it good carrying power. You would think, if the cough were genuine, whoever it was must be in the last extremity. There should be an oxygen tank present, and a priest nearby to administer last rites.

I placidly finished up and put the shovels away, completely untroubled because the cough didn’t faze me in the least. Why? For the simple reason that I’m totally used to it. That cough has become as commonplace to us as a rooster’s crow is on a farm. We moved into the house to the accompaniment of that cough. It is the tune we listen to when we work in the yard, regardless of the season. Our visitors who enter using the back way are serenaded by it. That cough is to us what Old Faithful is the Yellowstone.

You see, there is a man living across from our backyard who is patiently and systematically smoking himself to death. His apartment has a little, covered balcony that might measure roughly four feet by nine feet and can be gained through a sliding glass door. There he keeps a small patio table and chair and, in good weather and foul, he sits on his white plastic chair and smokes and smokes and smokes. Sometimes, as I wait in the car for my wife to come out of the house (I spend half my life waiting), I watch him. He likes to sit slightly leaned over with his left hand on his lap and arm akimbo, while with the other hand he nervously works his cigarette, taking a drag, inhaling, tapping the ash into the ashtray, then cigarette back up to his lips for the next drag, never once pausing a moment to allow himself one breath of clean air. It’s nerve-wracking to watch him. And always the cough. If not a cough, then a mighty, mucous-tossed throat clearing.

Witty as I am, I came up with the name “Smoky” for him. Clever, right? I knew you’d think so. Believe it or not, it didn’t take me long to think that one up. Smoky is about my age, perhaps a year or two older, and is never seen without a battered, floppy hat on his head. He wears biggish, round, black-framed spectacles and has a shaggy, salt-and-pepper beard. His clothing is always drab. If you met him out on the sidewalk, you would assume he was homeless.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to fight down the urge to advise him that there are quicker, less costly and more efficient means available nowadays to kill yourself. But a stronger impulse than that is to ask him point-blank, “What’s your story?”

Haven’t you met odd, curious people that captivate your attention like that? Maybe they dress in a certain funny way or have habits that verge on the socially unacceptable. Wouldn’t you like to break through the barrier of conventional politeness, to thumb your nose at the rule of everyone minding their own business, and ask them, “What’s your story? What makes you like this? Everybody can see this makes no sense, so why do you it?”

Like that guy I saw in Kenmore Square one time, a normal enough looking fellow, walking along in clean, pressed, casual clothes and carrying a briefcase, who, suddenly incensed by a driver parked by the curb honking her horn to alert a friend in a nearby building of her presence, irrationally took to punching himself in the face, telling her he wouldn’t stop this self-abuse until she quit honking her horn. The sound of his fist hitting his face was sickening. How much I wanted to ask him, “What’s your story? What is it about you that makes you react this way?” And nearly every homeless person I see on the street, I want to ask, “What’s your story?” They started off as children just like everyone else, free of addiction and the base, wicked impulses that the weak have such a hard time resisting later on in life. What put them down the wrong road? Could they explain it? I would be very interested to hear their life’s story.

Who have you met that arouses this kind of curiosity in you? Do you feel compassion for them? In the case of Smoky, I have to confess I don’t really. Deep down, I feel it’s within his power to reverse this idiotic path he’s chosen. How about a co-worker? Or a relative? Someone who you can’t avoid seeing everyday? Who is it you’d like to ask, “What’s your story?”