A Sculpture Garden for the Nation

After leaving the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History today I walked back toward where I had parked my truck. It was waiting for my return on 7th Street, two and a half blocks from the SMNH. At the edge of the block upon which the SMNH sits is a butterfly garden/walk that skirts 9th street, and a short granite wall defines the edge of the property line.

It was still drizzling the frigid mist--the kind of precipitation that fell all day long. There were lots of people on the sidewalk, most approaching the museum. Well before I encountered him, I saw an youngish black man in dingy clothing sitting on the granite wall at the edge of the barren garden. I also saw how he attempted to speak to those who passing by and how innocuously they all managed to avoid any contact.

(Before I continue, I want to make one thing perfectly clear. I am not a particularly good person. I have been those self-same self-absorbed people on more occasions than not. This is just a snap-shot of one moment in time. Nothing more and nothing else.)

I was very near to him, when he turned and looked at me. He said something full of gibberish that included "I thought you had to work today. But this isn't a work day is it?" His face was hard-lived and sweet. His mannerisms gentle and guileless. And I smiled at him and replied, "No, this isn't a work day, friend." His face brightened and we chatted briefly about nothing that made even an ounce of sense. He never asked me for a dime, but I opened my wallet and to my shame only gave him a dollar.

He thanked me and clasped it between his gloved hands--at first, when he saw what I was about to do, he struggle to free his left hand from its glove, but I set the folded bill in the mound of it (his tightly curled fingers were nestled in the palm of the glove with the finger slips dangling empty), and he stopped struggling with the glove and then caught it in the clamp of his right hand with fingers extended into the fullness of that glove. I don't know what compelled me to, but at that moment I reached out a touched his capped head and said, "God bless you." It was all I could do to maintain my gaze as his eyes swelled, and he said, "Thank you...thank you...."

When I turned from him, I saw across 9th street the entrance to the National Gallery of Art's Sculpture Garden.

The newest physical extension of the National Gallery of Art, on this drizzly cold day, it gave me the space to find myself again.








I came to my truck in the end wondering what it means to be human.