Paper Rags

I cannot recall the year, but well over sixty years ago, I stood on the cracking concrete driveway of the old house on a narrow lot that felt like a slice of something not cake-like. An early June morning, and facing east, I could see the sky bright with yellow-white summer sunlight not yet heated to the passion of noon reflected in heat from the pavements. Five, maybe only four, I was not allowed out of the yard—the street brought the dangers of cars, trucks, and toughs in small gangs. But it was still the place of commerce, of peddlers who sold fruits and vegetables from the backs of small, rusting panel trucks. 

Also, occasionally, came the artifact of an earlier time, the Paper Rags Man, who had a wagon and a horse—an old, creaking wooden wagon with the side slats warped, bent, and cracked, pushed out from daily loads. And the horse, though I knew little of horses, was probably just as old, just as creaking, making barely a sound in the harness, with a resigned step that seemed so slow that movement was almost unseen. 

I had been staring at the light powering through the narrow gaps between houses on the opposite side of the street, light that seemed more motion than illumination. The steady sound of the dough mixer in the small bakery next door, a whirring, grinding sound, made other noises fade, and though sparrows darted and starlings made their raw starling sounds, and breezes moved the branches and leaves of the linden tree out front, the mixer mixed them all away to silence with its steady cyclic beat.

That’s why I did not hear him as he, horse, and wagon proceeded slowly down the hill of 69th Street, did not hear the shod hooves slowly clacking on the old bricks that lined this old street. The whole assemblage—horse, cart, and old man together—appeared in my line of sight, as if shadow figures from a magic show, all in silhouette from the bright sunlight behind them. When opposite me, they stopped, only for a few moments but seemingly stopped not only in space but in time. The word “frozen” belies the warm air that day, so if something can pause because it is caught in a moment of light, caught in the bright yellow of the sun like a creature preserved in the inner-lit moment of an amber amulet, so be it, paused in light.

And the mixer may have stopped, or its sound fell away from my awareness, as I was image-shocked by the man-horse-wagon before me, a collective relic from decades earlier, before this city street had mostly cars and trucks. It’s not that I had not seen him before—on a number of occasions—but that was from the inside of the house, obliquely through the kitchen window or blocked by the front porch posts. Even outside I had seen him a few times, but never alone, never without the calmly indifferent voice of a watchful adult who provided comment: “Look, there’s the Paper Rags Man.” 

Yes, the Paper Rags Man, always seen from a distance, or through windows, and always through my yet-to-be-diagnosed nearsighted eyes, so that I could believe he was a man actually composed of paper and rags, like some aging Italian version of the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, or some inevitable mythic figure, a presence moving through time and light.

Now I saw him clearly defined in silhouette against the moment of sunlight, in the stillness of his age and aura of fatigue that permeated man, horse, and wagon. What I saw I knew and knew not at once, a vision that I had no word for, not even the word “vision,” as this ordinary figure of neighborhood life, who appeared only occasionally in those days of cars and trucks, was present once again. Yes, a vision of a past so vague in my knowledge that I could know it only as silhouette against the prevailing light of that bright season, know it only as image, as figure more than as man and burdened beast, burdened man and creaking wagon, creaking life that I could not know or even imagine then. 

With adults present came context and explanation—he collects paper and rags—old newspapers, cloth from clothes no longer good for further patching, old bits and pieces of the woven world that had unraveled enough to be undone. He was the final motion in the life of things, the final moment and last resort—Charon in the boat ferrying the once-desired object to a final rest in some Plutonian darkness, he was the messenger to what was next and final for all objects, the penultimate transport to the ultimate moment, when all is reduced to the simplest essence—paper and rags.

So I stood, not so much transfixed, a word I did not know, but stood still, in ways that elders had urged me to stand when I, suffused with energy, could not sit calmly for a meal or a Mass or a visit from some aging great aunt from two blocks away. Stood still without being ordered to stillness, rather called to stillness by the light and by the silhouette of man-horse-wagon in the moment of light, the assemblage waiting to collect the unneeded, the unwanted, to take into and beyond the unknown. I stood knowing nothing of meanings or interpretations, nothing of the moment but the moment itself—light-silence-image—all entering my still-emergent brain, my still-unformed mind that could take in the whole without understanding any of the parts, preserving the whole for future moments of thought and reflection. 

But then motion returned, light fluttered its wavelengths, air moved the leaves, the mixer rotated again, and the man, the man lifted his head and called out the call, eternal and final, like the plagued medieval call to bring out the dead, “Paper Rags, Paper Rags.”