Eerie

A potentially very strange thing happened to me when I was walking in to work last Friday. I was walking behind an oldish man on the sidewalk who was having an animated conversation with himself. I checked for Bluetooth. Negative. This in itself wasn't all that weird since I work in a hospital complex that includes a mental hospital. But it got weird after I passed him. He stopped the flow of his conversation and three times repeated something that sounded an awful lot like "Rick," which happens to be my name. I wasn't wearing my Rick jacket or Rick pants so there's no way he could have known my name. I turned off the sidewalk to enter my building before the potential implications of what I thought I heard had fully sunken in, but for the rest of the day I was kicking myself for not stopping and asking him if he was, in fact, saying my name. He was probably just saying something that sounded like Rick, or I may have missed my one opportunity to have had a magic friend. Oh well.

My dad used to tell me about how his dad used to enjoy giving away the last of his money since then he didn't have anything to worry about (freedom just being another word for nothing left to lose, etc). So on my way home, probably due to some guilt over not stopping to talk to the magic and/or crazy man earlier, I gave a panhandler my last dollar. It wasn't, strictly speaking, my last dollar on earth, but it was all I had left on my person after eating sushi for lunch. Anyways, it still felt sort of good, if for no other reason than the look on the guy's face when I told him it was my last dollar. He looked a little taken aback and maybe he didn't spend it on booze out of guilt. Maybe he started a savings account and turned his life around. I gave another guy a buck the next day to get a bus ride to Worcester, increasing my total Boston charitable contributions by a factor of approximately infinity.