should I start all this again? Like the lady who drank a fifth, took a bottle of pills, and layed down to die—but later woke up—I ask, "What do I do now."
There is an old man in Boston who is walking to Mecca. It doesn't matter that he is frail, homeless, and usually hungry—except when the state cops find him walking on the Southeast Expressway and bring him back to the Pine Street Inn. It doesn't matter that he has no money, and no means to get there except for the desire to go. It doesn't matter that he has no socks. He gets up and he goes.
No one knows how old he is; he looks like about a hundred and twenty. And he drinks a bit. That, I suppose, diminishes the nobility of his quest, though he is never drunk when they stop him. Nonetheless, they terminate his journey and, against his tearful protestations, turn him back. They justify their interference in his pilgrimage by saying, "He's a drunk," or, more kindly, "..an alcoholic." Their need to justify reveals their uneasiness; they have a vague feeling that maybe this old man is on to something on his way to Mecca.
He had a daughter in Dorchester, but they say she died years ago. When asked about family, he says he's alone in this world, and says no more. They've tried to put him in a nursing home, but all of the social workers who really care know the confinement would kill him, so they don't try too hard or too often, and when he goes AWOL and shows up back at Pine Street, they say, welcome.
He was a sailor. He started as a merchant marine just before the end of the war—World War II. He worked on freighters, and big ocean-going cargo ships, the ones they used to load and unload with giant nets hanging from gigantic cranes. A third of his days have been spent with no sight of land, and he has seen the Southern Cross a dozen times. He worked for a bit on a couple of the big container vessels that came later, but those didn't require as much muscle as the older ships. He was never replaced, he just wasn't needed anymore.
He struggled with his retirement from the sea, and held countless, spiritless, numbing jobs through most of the eighties. At first he had an apartment, but something about keeping a home disagreed with him, so he gave it up and for a while stayed in various rooming houses. And one day he walked out. Only he can know for sure, but it may be that he could not tolerate the loss of his former unanchored life on the sea. Maybe in his nostalgia, he longed for the places on this earth he will never see again. Or maybe it was his nostalgia for the places he could have seen but didn't, choosing instead to stay near his ship in port, rather than explore whatever exotic part of the world he happened to be in.
He went through the Suez Canal twice before they closed it in 1967. Both passages were bound for the port of Jiddah, less than a hundred miles from Mecca. And both times it seemed to him that there would always be another chance to visit Mecca—in the future.
At Pine Street Inn, the staff have not seen him for over a week. That's longer than usual they say, and it has been very cold in Boston. Their faces betray the worry that they may never see him again, and they may never know what happened. Everyone is quiet for a moment, and then a man who has been a volunteer at the homeless shelter for over ten years, says, "Maybe he made it home." Others turn to him, and with some urgency—thinking he might know something they don't—ask, "Home where?" "To Mecca," he answers sheepishly, embarassed for having mistakenly raised hopes. The group acknowledges this with solemn nods and knowing glances, and everyone sighs heavily before going back to the work at hand.
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