The Bag Lady

She sat outside the coffee shop elbows propped up on a small circular blue metal table with a frosted glass top, starring intently at morning traffic and passersby. A partially eaten pastry on a paper napkin like an island in a sea of blue. I had seen her face before, in the park the winter last. It was her, the bag lady. She had emerged like an insect from dead leaves into the new light of spring, except the wheeled cart that held the big black plastic bag of packed-down clothes that always followed her like a big black dog, had been replaced by a smaller plastic bag no bigger than a well-fed cat. It was spring, she was traveling light. Her streaked gray hair radiated wildly about her head for who knows how long. Two wrinkled jowls sagged on either side of her face. Her small, fiercely blue eyes had lost nothing of their feral brightness or penetration as she sipped coffee and blew cigarette smoke into the air, mixing with car exhaust fumes. There was this one exception about her and markedly so. Her countenance: it had been freed, perhaps only temporarily, of the remoteness it had worn that winter day when I had first seen her. It now expressed a sense of well-being, newly acquired, as though her life had changed, and its weight had lightened, perhaps by the kindness or generosity of a friend or a softhearted stranger. It didn’t matter. She seemed almost to be experiencing a rare windfall of happiness, summed up in coffee, pastry, and cigarettes. All this went through my mind as I walked by her and entered the coffee shop for my usual regular, extra lite, no sugar. As I left, coffee in hand, I turned briefly for a final look. An elderly man had joined her. I held back from speculating, yet in a strangely remote way I was happy for her. She would have wanted it that way, I wanted to believe.