The blessings man

There is a tall, slender man – somewhat like a cross between a ballerina and a moko jumbie – who wanders between Crown Point and Bon Accord. His scraggly grey beard, unkempt hair and dirty clothing give him the look of "a vagrant."

He mumbles in an almost prayerful way, while drawing invisible symbols in the air, like a priest making the sign of the cross. I often see him looking at people, mumbling, smiling and drawing the symbols. He has often "blessed" me with these ritualistic movements and mutterings when I have ridden past him on my bike. Whenever he does, I establish eye contact and nod, and he nods in return.

Early on Wednesday morning I drove to the bakery across the road from the airport. The man was outside, not begging, just muttering and drawing symbols in the air. A woman emerged from the bakery and walked past him without acknowledgement. As she waited to cross the road, he stood behind her muttering and making hand movements – extending a blessing, I thought, to someone who had not even glanced at him.

As I washed my hands, he came towards me, smiling and muttering. I nodded, acknowledging the "blessings," while at the same time considering that someone might say something about him like “You ent know he? He was a teacher before drugs send him crazy. Dem ent no blessings.”

As I left the bakery, he was outside, looking at me, smiling.

“Do you want breakfast?” I asked him.

He smiled, bowed and said far more clearly than his usual unintelligible mumblings: "Yes, thank you, ma'am."

He was respectful and polite. Yet in a world where so many people are rude and hoggish, he is the one who would be scorned and ignored.

When I asked him if he wanted water, he smiled, connected his hands as if in prayer, bowed and said: "A mauby please, ma’am."

A few minutes later as I handed him the mauby, a potato pie and napkin, he smiled, bowed, mumbled blessings and then, to my surprise said (almost unintelligibly, yet I understood him): "There is a brown puppy with a fish hook in its mouth by Pelican Pub."

I was amazed. How on earth did he know to say this to me – an animal rescuer?

He then mumbled what I heard as: "Tell them to meet me later and I will help. If I had a razor blade I would cut the lip and take the hook out now."

The gentle manner in which he mentioned the razor blade was akin to the way I imagine an experienced surgeon might have said it.

"Tell who to meet you?" I asked.

"Them at Bagatelle."

Thinking that he was trying to say "Bacolet," the location of the TTSPCA, I asked him if he meant the animal shelter. He nodded. Did he really know about them? Then again...why not?

Not expecting him to have a fixed address, I asked anyway: “Where do you live?”

"Birds have nests, fox have holes, but a man like me have nowhere to go. Birds have nests, fox have holes, but a man like me have nowhere to go.”

The hypnotic rhythm of his incantation fascinated me. Was it an old saying? A poem, a song? (I discovered later that it is from the Bible – Luke 9:58)

I asked him his name and he said something eloquent-sounding, like “Charles Anthony Smith.”

I wondered where Pelican Pub was. Did it even exist? Maybe he was originally from Trinidad and, possibly stuck in time, was referring to the once popular, no-longer-existing Cascade pub of that name. I told him that I would keep my eyes open for the pup with the hook in its lip.

He pointed to the front right tyre of my vehicle: “Please be careful of the plastics.”

“Okay,” I said, settling into the driver’s seat, closing the door and waving goodbye.

Around the corner, I stopped a female pedestrian (just in case) to ask if she knew of a "Pelican Pub" nearby.

“It sounding familiar but I can’t tell you where it is.”

She called out, asking a woman working at the roadside.

“I never hear of it,” the woman responded.

As "mad" as some people might say that man is, his politeness, respect, gratitude, compassion for animals and apparent awareness that I am an animal rescuer, had touched me deeply and fed my personal theory – that he could indeed be walking around blessing us all.