He's probably watching me now, those beady little eyes trained on me like heat-seeking missiles. It wasn't always that case, as when I first met him he was was the nearly blind newsagent around the corner from my apartment complex – the one just down from the smelly drain.
Pushing 70 he sat perched on his stool, surrounded by his magazines and newspapers arranged Herbie Hancock keyboard style around the musician. Everything within reach and most likely in the same arrangement since the chairman (version 1.0) was a boy.
Curiously, one of my first thoughts when seeing locals of such seniority is to wonder just how much they have gone through. What they would have seen and experienced, even the amount of things they would and wouldn't want to remember would boggle my relatively sedately experienced mind.
So there he would perch, unaware I'm picturing him doing his Herbie Hancock impersonation 40 years in the past, staring at a printed page an inch from his face. Now there was a man who had over partaken in his wares and caused his eyes to shut down with one too many printed letters.
If only I possessed a vocabulary superior to the intellectually challenged infant's one I have. I imagined he could tell me every news article ever published since they invented the printing press – if not paper itself. Or perhaps he was more of a trash man and the comings and goings of China's Paris Hilton was his subject of choice. Then I would remember the tendencies of the older generation to rabbit on and my tendency to nod, smile and listen; so I thought it best for me that language barrier remained.
This of course is a perfectly reasonable excuse not to learn a language – "Thanks but no thanks, old people will want to speak with me and I don't know how to say no to them."
So instead, he would great me with a, "Hello, have you eaten?" This would usually be proceeded by him looking up from his close reading and concentrate on my approaching figure, with eyes taking a while to focus. Then a big, almost toothless smile and a chubby fingered wave – the type that if you only added a cloth to his hand you would sparkle up a surface. Each time I would slow my arrival and begin the smiling and waving earlier in order to compensate.
But then things changed. He began sporting shades – oversized ones no less – and thought that was the end of his eyesight as he had become more Stevie Wonder than Herbie Hancock. So of course I found it a little odd he would begin his toothless smile, cleaning wave combo when I was half way down the street.
This then escalated to recognising me in the scant light of dusk and even when I was on the other side of the road. He was beginning to freak me out with his blind man with super eyesight deal so I obviously decided to experiment with just how bionic his eyesight was. Across the road, amongst a crowd, while he was distracted – he'd stop me every time.
Then the dark glasses went but the ability remained. Granted, it was less disconcerting than being spotted half way down the street, across the road and in he dark by a man in his 70s sporting thick, dark glasses. There was only one logical explanation for this and that was happened to be in possession of cyborg eyes as part of a secret government project to have elderly newsagents around the city clock the comings and goings of foreigners.
Also, he may or may not have gained the ability to see into my mind as you just never know what they can devise nowadays. Well as they say: it's better to be safe and paranoid rather than exposed for being a bourgeois intruder and thrown into jail for minding your own own business.
Anyway, now we have returned to our routine of smiling, waving and asking if we have eaten. However, I also pepper good thoughts into the mix as you just never know.
