Wrinkled Gift

Most people pass right by - unaware of their presence.

Tonight is no different. The sidewalk is crackling with the cat-calls and whines of students, most of them waving their green, and quickly disappearing “Tsingtao” beer bottles around. It seems they’re too busy chasing a midnight relief from endless, endless textbooks to notice.
But I have been looking for a long time. And as I slice a path through the cold fog and rowdy youth, I barely recognize that the greyed lump on the path is in fact, her.

There is no red on this street like one would picture for a Christmas Eve or for an oriental China. There is only perpetual grey - and dust.
Now this dust seems to hide the old lady; she exhales white smoke as if she is the fog’s answer to pollution. In her hands, a wooden stick, cute, like a character - while her eyes fade into the recesses of a permanently smiling face - even the wrinkles seem like a clay to hold her visage in its gummed smile. A rusty paper-soft skin, and a paper-rough jacket so laced with mud that it is difficult to tell where the jacket ends and she begins. Or where she is and the footpath is not.

Drawing nearer, I rummage quietly through the frozen pockets of my own jacket - nothing.
She hadn’t accepted my gloves as charity during our first encounter. So tonight, I find myself sitting beside her with nothing to offer but a silly smile. “Merry Christmas Eve,” I burst out with my new favorite foreign phrase, then the classic, “Ni hao ma?”
She softens suddenly in recognition, then rocks back and forth against the cold stone below. This tells me she is happy to see me, but I can understand little else of the excited speech that follows - she’s been waiting to recite this show-and-tell story to me for weeks, like a tiny child animated and alive in an earthy wrinkled suit. All the while her rounded frame rocks back and forth, back and forth.
I recognize few words: God. Hometown. 11:58pm. Church. Songs. And I say no more. Desperately, I rack my brain for something, anything that I can give her but everything falls short and there is barely one minute left and as I help her to her feet now, she gathers two tiny coins which are almost invisible in her metal begging bowl, and smiles. Content.
She embraces me. Then she pulls an apple out, only to place it in my hand. “Christmas has arrived.”
This is something I understand.

Most people pass right by - unaware of their presence,
perhaps it’s because people expect wings.