Gert has been cleaning out her house next door before she moves in two weeks. She’s lived in the house for 60-plus years and now she’s moving in with one of her daughters. For the first time, and with the help of both surviving daughters, she has gone through the closet of her beloved husband, Pete, who died three years ago, and bagged up his belongings and added them to the piles in the alley. 

As I sip my morning coffee, I look out the back window and watch as two rough-looking scavengers come down the alley. One pulls a squeaking caravan of shopping carts full of junk and stops at the back gate of the neighbor across the alley. The other one stops at Gert’s garbage cans. He’s tired-looking and disheveled with a cigarette lolling from his mouth. He rips into the neatly packaged bags. The sound tears my heart. Then, in an act that smacks of defilement, he produces old Pete’s spotless, dress gray fedora from one of the bags and puts it triumphantly on his greasy head. 

I remember seeing Pete wear that hat and a matching gray suit to his 70th wedding anniversary mass, walking tall with a sparking joy as he stepped down the aisle with his still-radiant bride; after which, at the reception, he and Gert danced like it was 1940 and there was no more Depression and not yet a World War II or a house full of four small children. 

As the man in the alley prances. I feel revulsion. Real pearls before swine. I feel my blood pressure rise and I feel like shouting out to him. But he’s off to catch up with his compatriot and show him his good fortune.

The other fellow arches his back and leans on his heels with both hands up and open in a gesture that indicates ‘don’t you look fine’ in any language. He claps his friend on the back with lusty congratulations. 

Their actions seem over the top, done larger than life, like actors on a stage reaching to the back rows. I feel as if this is all done just to personally piss me off. I move in the window and swish the curtain—an act of empty menace. But they don’t react to me. They don’t see me at all.

Suddenly I realize they don’t know I’m watching them, and they don’t know or care if anyone sees them. The moment, I realize, is not milked for dramatic effect—for me or anyone else. 

I see then that it doesn’t matter. The apparent indignity of it only matters to me: it matters to no one else in this grand indifferent universe. And it has to be enough that at least this man recognizes that finding that hat is his extreme good fortune. Like a child who is drawn to an object without knowledge of its value, this man has no idea of what that hat represents to me. And I haven’t any right to expect him to comprehend what it means to me. 

It only matters now what it means to him. And that today’s his very lucky day.