Daily Archive

I heard someone from a block away singing the blues, playing on the electrified one string of his guitar. The song belonged to itself, a feeling more than words or notes. When it stopped, it left behind a blind man with a “got Jesus?” hat sitting on a box where a moment before there had been some kind of total rapture.

“How ya doin’ man?” he asked. There were others on the street, but he knew by my steps that I was the one walking toward him. “I’m okay,” I replied, “now.”

He smiled and waited, as if it had been me that started the conversation. But I didn’t have anything more to say. He heard my fingers drop two dollars in the bucket; not enough to pay for the kind of blues he sang, blues that circle the whole world, sung only by the most passionate of souls.

“God bless you.” he said gently, as if that was maybe the first and last time I’d ever hear those words. There was an other-worldly, in-slow-motion feeling abut the moment, as if I had died in my sleep and needed someone to point my spirit toward home, and that’s exactly when he’d shown up, in that part of the dream.

“Thank you,” I replied as I slowly passed by. He nodded, smiled.

~Dan~