Cleansing Motion

Sitting at a traffic light this morning, I saw something I did not expect to see, something I realized that I have not seen in a long season.

It was a man sweeping the sidewalk in front of his shop.

I can remember as a high-schooler, working after school and on Saturdays at a small haberdasher’s in my hometown. One of my tasks was the sweeping of the entrance-way and sidewalk out front, a task I actually enjoyed immensely. Sweeping outside gave me the opportunity to get out from beneath the high banks of humming florescent lights and the drone of my boss’s conversations with his ossified friends who were forever stopping by for a chat about the quorum court or the town council or the church’s board of deacons. It was the chance for a few minutes of fresh air, live sounds, and passers-by who might even call out a greeting to a rail-thin boy with Peter Frampton hair and an awkwardly-knotted necktie as wide as a cricket bat and a knot the size of a cow’s heart.

I would use the wide push-broom with measured strokes, sending to the sidewalk the tiny bit of dust that might be on the brown and tan tiles, making sure to clean carefully around the tall scale in the middle of the entrance-way, where for a penny a fellow might receive his Wate & Fate on a bit of cardboard. Once this area was done, I would then sweep the sidewalk all the way to the curb, from the Sterling’s five-and-dime on the left and the Kinney’s Shoestore on the right. Done with this, I would lean on the broom and watch people walking by with packages and thoughts of commerce and transactions in their hearts. Guilt would eventually prod me back inside, and I would take the broom and return to the shop, where Mr. Lea would still be holding forth in his basso pofundo voice, sloshing coffee as he gestured to one of his cronies.

And for years after I graduated and went out to seek my fortune, I would see shopkeepers sweeping the fronts of their stores, and I would smile at them, and I would smile to myself, and my heart would smile at the memory of the comfort that can be provided by the mundane, if only we allow it. I consider the sweeping of a storefront sidewalk to be one of the lovelier images of life in my time. And how sad that the image is now almost completely gone from my world.

The fellow I saw this morning is a rarity, and I wonder if he knows this? He has been almost completely replaced by professional custodians hired by the management companies who oversee shopping centers and strip malls, often run by young, super-efficient females who carry their own yoga mats around and who, when they offer the rare, brittle smile, make their acquaintances want to cry out in sympathy for their apparent great physical pain.

What a lovely thing, to stand in front of one’s secure place in the workaday world, pushing dust into the street, watching the lives of fellow souls stroll past, listening to their conversations, inhaling the exhaust fumes and a little of the stirred dust, feeling the pressure of the good sun on the skin, feeling the muscles flow with the cleansing motion of mundane tasks, and humming to one’s self, humming with all the time in the world, all the time anyone would want.

~ S.K. Orr