There is a man I’ve been watching over the past five years or more.  He walks in Laurelhurst Park where I walk.  He is around 6 feet tall.  His hair is full and dark.  His skin is olive.  Maybe his ancestors were from the Mediterranean.  He is handsome.

I see this man often, especially in milder weather.  With maybe one exception, he has been holding hands with a quite elderly woman.  As they walk he leans slightly toward her.  Often his lips are moving as if he is speaking.  I imagine she is his mother, but who can know for certain.

Within the first few times that I saw this man walking with this woman, I began to notice that, as he leaned toward his companion, the man was singing.  Softly.  Old tunes.  Carolina Moon.  She’ll be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain.  The woman, for the most part, gazed vacantly forward.  Occasionally I would see her smile.

Today I saw the man for the first time in a good while, what with my travels and all.  He was again with the older woman, but they were not walking.  Instead they sat on a bench together.  He leaned toward her holding her left hand in both of his.  He was singing, his voice just above a whisper, “It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry.”  The woman sat still, her slight form stooped a bit.  She looked straight ahead at nothing in particular.

I walked around the park’s perimeter path and when I passed again 15 minutes later, the twosome still sat on the bench, the man’s full attention on the woman, his song too soft for me to hear over the laughter of children chasing a balloon across a wide stretch of lawn.

When I first saw these two today, I wondered if she were no longer able to walk, if he perhaps had carried her to the bench.  Again, I can’t know.  Whatever the actual story though, the words that jumped to mind most certainly apply.  They are words of the 14^th century Persian poet and visionary, Hafiz.

The Sun Never Says

Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe Me.”

Look what happens with
A love like that,
It lights the Whole Sky.

Surely this is a love worth noticing any day, but today especially, as the country and the state of Colorado, the ones who loved and were loved by the 12 people killed in the Aurora movie theatre and the survivors of that horror who draw breath after breath as they and we all make new meaning of these precious and fragile lives.  Each of us capable of singing soft songs, each of us worthy of being sung to.