MacSorely’s greatest fear was ending up as an old man on the streets. Most days on his walk, he saw the same thin old guy, with his begging cap on the sidewalk in front of him, sitting by the bank at Bloor and Bathurst.
Without fail, MacSorely would dig into his pocket for whatever change he had, and add it to the few coins – if there were any – in the hat. It wasn’t just that the man, with his dirty grey hair and grizzled chin, obviously had no relations. It wasn’t so much the shabby clothes that the man wore that frightened him, with his jeans that once might have been blue, and the oily mark that covered most of one leg, or the scruffy hand-me-down running shoes. It was not so much how he hunched his shoulders on the cold days, in the pitiless Toronto wind or cruel rain, trying to keep warm under the thin and frayed jacket that partly covered his stained hoodie. It was not that the black cap he used to collect his meager coins was filthy, nor that the man never acknowledged him.
Rather, what frightened MacSorely most was how he sat: head down, resigned, silent. A penitent.
– From MacSorley’s Great Adventure, copyright © PSC, 2020.