Day 18: Talking tobacco

I’d seen him a lot during the past few weeks, walking slowly up and down the street in front of our office, scouring the ground for cigarettes. Partially smoked ones. I asked him about his effort this morning while I was walking into work.

The goal, he told me, was to clip off the portion that still had tobacco in it, and use that to roll his own cigarettes. He was diligent about it, always patient, picking the butts out from between the bricks of the street. He only needed enough tobacco to make four cigarettes per day. Once he found enough, he would go home. In particular, he was looking for cigarettes used by “puffers,” whom he described as people who only gently smoke their cigarettes and don’t pull all the nicotine out of them before throwing them into the street.

His name was Bill. He looked like an ordinary guy, about 50 years old, and friendly. He was out of work. “There aren’t any jobs,” he said. He once told a woman he’d work for her and all she had to pay him was enough to buy his cigarettes and coffee. But she said even that was too much. And so he appeared content in his morning search for cigarettes.

He wore a necklace with a cross on it. And he talked about how people sometimes worried about him. But there was nothing to worry about. We’re all much the same, he says. Everyone has a dark side that they know about but refuse to tell others. He told me I had one, too. I couldn’t disagree. And he said too many people are afraid to talk to each other, and so, essentially, hate grows from that.

When I asked if I could pray for him, he immediately agreed. I prayed that he would find what he was looking for and that God would come close to him. We shook hands then and went our separate ways.