El Vasco

Yesterday I met "El Vasco" at the Quarter on my way home. With a clean, white shirt, he politely asked me how my day was in Spanish. I replied good and we started a conversation. He was selling his art on the street. He told me of how he was born in San Sebastián, Spain and his glorious yet short football soccer career in his prime years. 

Sitting on his bench he told me how he lost his wife, of how Katrina took everything away and how he gets lonely, alcohol being the only thing that helps him to go to sleep every night. A green plastic bottle of alcohol hit the floor as he tried to show it to me. His small paintings were scattered on the ground, I chased them as some flew away, it seemed to me they were like pieces of a puzzle that could be lost, of meaning that could disappear without any recognition.

"Bring your bike back and I will cover it with flowers" he said. I smiled first because I had missed to understand what he meant, he meant paint flowers in it. Then I said, "But of course" and with a possible rain check on this matter I bought one of his paintings and left after someone else came by to sit down and talk to him.