Rising Sun

I am touched to find that he has left a lollypop for me at my desk. "I bring you chocolate next time," he promises. I tell him I have yet to finish the bag of Hershey nuggets he brought to me last week but he insists that I need a proper stash. He visits me once a week, singing my name with his heavy Italian-German-Russian mixed accent: "Jennifer... No need to fear-ear! She is nea-ear." He counts to me in German as we exercise (or at least I think it is German) and the way he says seven like "Sea-Ben" plays in my head like a tune or jingle for the rest of the day. 

He tells me that he was "sea-ben" years old during World War Two. His family lived in Italy during that time and he recalls playing tag in the fields with his friends when a glistening silver bullet crossed the sky above their heads. Only it wasn't a bullet- it was an airplane. He and his friends lined up and shaded their eyes from the sun so they could gaze upward. Another silver bullet followed behind the initial glimmer and they were witnesses to a dog fight. And then another during the next day. And then another. The emotions varied from terror to awe as the glistening silver magnificence zoomed passed their small bodies again and again. "They were the most beautiful and terrifying things in the sky." 

Now, in his eighties, he goes hunting in the northern woods of Illinois for mushrooms before coming to see me. "You ever eat fresh mushrooms from the woods? They are delicious. I make them well." He tells me he goes hunting with groups of friends. I imagine four or more older gentlemen parking their Cadillacs and Buicks on a gravel road early on a fall morning. The men are all slightly stooped forward and holding walking sticks (some of which were hand whittled from washed up beach wood or found treasures from a past walk). There is minimal chatting at that hour- an understood unsaid rule. I can see them now, one figure at a time with a vulnerable gait pattern similar to a newborn giraffe, disappear into the gray-brown background of decidous trees and plantlife. Their gazes turn downward to scan the floor of the forest, the trees provide shade from the rising sun.