The Fallen

One blustery morning not long ago, I was walking to work with a spring in my step, feeling delightfully attuned to the follies and foibles of the modern urban morning.

I noticed, for example, that the spring winds had taken their toll on this sidewalk display of winter coats, priced to clear:


I thought it made an amusing moment, as if a gaggle of schoolgirls had been hit by a sudden gust, and gone down in a giggling sprawl together.

Just a moment later, I saw this character:


a cracked cartoon robot, it seemed to me, a likable plastic pageboy whose job it had been to hand out leaflets. He, too, was a victim of the wind; he lay, comically fallen and broken, like a little Humpty Dumpty who could never be put back together again.

I got a big kick out of taking these pictures. I found them whimsical, even beautiful. But truth trumps beauty, as I discovered when I loped along a little further.

There at the corner of King and Bay, just out of the frame of the previous picture, lay a disheveled woman, wrapped in filthy blankets on a soggy bed of cardboard, pathetically trying to snatch some sleep. A mailbox knocked on its side was her only shelter. The din of the city rose and ricocheted among the towers of finance. Pedestrians simply walked by.

This was not a cartoon; this was no clever joke played by the spring wind. There lay dignity, fallen awkwardly to the sidewalk like last season's parkas; cracked and irrevocably broken as the constant stream of life flowed all around.

There's no third picture to make a trilogy. I didn't take one. Comedy becomes tragedy when the fallen are just like us.