Someone saw him on the street and took his picture.
I do not know why.
He was, and is, a complete stranger to me. Not a family member at all.
He does not stand out from the crowd, in fact he embodies it. But not in a way that makes him exemplary either. He is just some guy walking by. A Perry maybe or, even better…a Jerry. I have no idea where he was going, where he went, or what happened before or after the photo. I imagine that he vanished into the street as quickly as he had emerged.
Gone just like that.
But I keep thinking about him.
Not what his story was, no challenge there. I could easily imagine him on the subway home reading the paper, the financial section with the charts and numbers. I could see him stepping out into a slight drizzle, holding the paper over his head. Maybe he called his wife to see if they needed wine for dinner. They didn’t; they still had the bottle from the birthday party. Over dinner he tries again to interest her in interest rates but it falls flat again. They watch something on TV that night, but neither of them can remember what it was the next day.
And so on.
No, the story was easy.
What I kept wondering was whether there was something else. Something – how can I put it? – too wonderful to be true. Like a Victorian photographer in the woods on just the right night, perhaps this photo caught something unexpected in camera. Something fabulous like a sprite or an aura. I had seen those old images, so carefully doctored to charm and amaze that people were too amazed and charmed to even question their lies. Ordinary sights of unordinary creatures. They were quite the rage in the early days of photography because maybe, just maybe, something untouchable had been snagged.
Had this snapshot accidentally caught something similar?
But how?
This was probably just some stranger who happened to walk by someone with camera in hand. Testing the shutter maybe. An accident of film and fate. What could possibly be so special or wonderful about that?
In the evening, with the lights on low and the TV off and the refrigerator humming and the neighbors having a loud row, he walks gently into his daughter’s room and closes the door behind him. She is still awake, as he knew she would be, waiting for him with eyes wide. He reaches into the closet and what he takes out brings a smile to her face. His too. He sits down on the bed next to her and clears his throat.
Ah.
Here was an idea.
Perhaps this ordinary man, this very familiar but unknown man – this no one in particular man whose photo I happened to have in my album – perhaps he could be one of the Lamed Vav. One of the 36. It is not impossible.
I mean the Lamed Vav Tzaddikim, the concealed ones, the unannounced. One of the 36 special people who hold the world together, who haul it back from the brink of disaster. That 36.
It is somewhere in the Talmud, I guess, or maybe only in the tall mud of old lore. In every generation, 36 righteous people come to our aid. They do not know each other, they do not know who the others are, they do not even know they themselves are special in any way. They are the X-men without the egos.
On the contrary, they embody the very idea of anavah or humility and even if they accidentally find out who they themselves are, they never proclaim it. They are special in the way that they are too humble to believe that they could possibly be special in any way.
And yet every so often, when the world needs them, they come forth and with the mystic powers they have not known they possess, they save it from utter calamity. Secretly, unwittingly, without fanfare or fans or fairs of any kind, no PR agent in sight, they do what they do – we never even know they did it! - then return to quiet anonymity.
There in the soft light, at the edge of the bed, he takes hold of the banjo – of all things – and sings to his daughter. The girl is autistic; she will never be the one he envisioned. She struggles with everything, but she finds music soothing and so her father has taken out the old banjo and learned it. He is not good at it, he has no talent to speak of, he does not dream of being on TV. He works in cost accounting on the third floor and never takes a long lunch, but he has taught himself to be a singer because his daughter needs him to be that.
And this in its small way is heroism of the highest order.
Not the comic book kind that he used to read but the kind that works in this tragicomic world. Because what brings the world back from the brink, the special power that holds back evil, is the tiniest act of selfless giving. In this way, we triumph bit by bit by bit.
Secretly, unwittingly, without fanfare or fans or fairs of any kind, no PR agent in sight, he does what he does – no one else even knows he did it! - then returns to quiet anonymity.
But I have his photo.
Shhh…don’t tell anyone.
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