Early One Morning...

Early one morning, while walking down Brookline Ave in Boston, I came across a man laying at the end of the sidewalk where Ralph’s Way begins. He was an older looking man, probably in his late forties or early fifties, wearing grey pants and a matching sports jacket. He was clean-shaven, but I could see a shadowy patch of salt and pepper whiskers where the right corner of his jaw and neck met. He was crumpled up on the sidewalk with his head slumped against the corner of the brick building’s concrete foundation.

Upon first observation, the man appeared to be sleeping. However, from where he was laying and by the angle at which his head and body were positioned, I knew this was no sleeping man. No bum, wino, junkie, whore, transient, or tramp in their right mind would have chosen to sleep on this sidewalk. Brookline Ave was too busy of a street for a bum to hang out. A sleeping bum would be woken up by either the sheer noise of the street or the foot-traffic of passersby. Plus, the area was heavily patrolled by security and other law enforcement, so any bum found sleeping on the street would be told to move along. On top of these facts, the man was too well-dressed to be a bum, although he may have passed in some circles for your typical Wall Street cokehead. He could not have been laying there for a long time; otherwise someone surely would have noticed him.

Not sensing any immediate danger, I drew closer to where the man laid like a lifeless ragdoll. Walking up from behind the body, I circled around to the man’s front, then again to the back after realizing I could not get a straight look at his face. Placing my hand on his right shoulder, I turned his body so that the man was facing me. I gathered that the man was unconscious because of the way I was forced to catch him from toppling over onto his side. Making some adjustments, I propped the man’s frame against the building and checked to see if he was breathing. He was. Before reaching into my purse for my cellphone so I could dial 911, I glanced at the man laying before me and got my first good look of his face. I was utterly dumbfounded by the face I saw. The closed eyes, the nose, the lips, the scraped forehead, all these features rested on the face belonging to my boss, Peter Kendall.

*

Later on at the hospital, I found out how Peter had ended up where I had found him. After wallowing back into consciousness, Peter told his doctor that the last thing he remembered was walking down the street. By his own account, he had gone into the office that morning to get an early start on a project he had left unfinished the day before. After working for about an hour, he went outside to have a smoke. Before he could light up, however, he passed out. I must have stumbled upon him about five minutes later. And it’s a good thing I did, too. The doctor told Peter that he had apparently suffered a mini stroke. The doctor said I was very lucky to find him when I did. Although the doctor has advised Peter to lay off the cigarettes in the future, he also said it was very lucky that he had gone for a smoke at that particular time. If he had passed out in the office where no one would have seen him for at least an hour, things could have been much worse. The doctor also told me to expect a pay increase later this month. He was joking, of course.